Take your pick from the catalogue of tropes that many Pakistanis, tragically, continue to circulate among themselves:
“Don’t go to Pakistan, they will kidnap your children, steal your money, and rob your house.”
“They are all liars.”
“You will be scammed.”
“It is the most corrupt nation on earth.”
“Everyone there is doing shirk at graves.”
“You will never adjust to those backwards people.”
“Being an honest person, you can’t survive in Pakistan.”
“You will need armed guards.”
And the list goes on…..
These sweeping generalisations persist despite independent crime surveys—distinct from official police statistics—showing that crime rates in Pakistan’s major cities are often lower than those in cities across the United States or the United Kingdom.
Similarly, corruption metrics from Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) reveal that Pakistan fares better than many developing nations, including India. Yet, few Indians publicly disparage their homeland with the same fervour. Why, then, do so many Pakistanis engage in this self-defeating rhetoric?
A Misplaced Magnifying Glass
We continue to frame the challenges of the developing world as uniquely Pakistani. They are not. Issues such as weak rule of law, poverty, post-colonial trauma & ways of thinking are endemic across Africa, Asia, and South America. In many respects, Pakistan compares favourably. Visit Lahore or Islamabad and contrast them with similarly sized cities like Cairo or Casablanca—Pakistan often comes out ahead.
Many of these tropes are not only exaggerated but demonstrably false. When a people lose confidence in themselves, they lose the motivation to improve or strive for a better future. This erosion of morale leads to apathy, stagnation, and a breakdown in civic responsibility. It mirrors the collapse of troop morale in wartime—once belief is lost, discipline and unity follow. An economy without confidence will start to fail, and individuals who loath their own people will destroy the rule of law. You’ll often hear this mindset echoed in everyday driving infractions; “What law? There is no law in Pakistan” or “everyone does it”. But the reality is that laws do exist, and not everyone breaks them. It is precisely this demoralised subset of people that perpetuate lawlessness. This phenomenon is not random—it aligns with a known tactic in psychological warfare called “Demoralization Warfare.”
Manufactured Despair?
Have we considered that some of this relentless negativity may be deliberately engineered? This is not conjecture. The BBC, citing research from the EU Disinfo Lab, has reported on foreign disinformation campaigns targeting Pakistan. There is also evidence that foreign agencies have paid journalists within the country to disseminate false & demoralising narratives too.
Yet, external blame is only part of the picture, it’s easy to deflect blame. We must also examine our own information hygiene—how we verify, contextualise, and analyse what we hear. Take the infamous “donkey meat scandal,” which was later revealed to involve a Chinese businessman legally supplying meat for export to China, not for local consumption. The real violation? A missing license. The rest was fuelled by social media sensationalism and idle gossip—what Islamic tradition calls ‘nameemah’.
The Prophetic Standard
In light of this, it’s worth revisiting the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ:
“When a man says (about a people) ‘the people are ruined!’ he is the most ruined among them.”1
Despair is not the attitude of a believer. Hope is. If we feel the pain of the Ummah, Pakistan is undeniably part of it. By some estimates, it is now the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, and the only one with a nuclear program sustained by indigenous scientific and industrial capacity. When there are things wrong with it, it is ours to fix, it is our duty and our accountability. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said: “The simile of the believers is like a body: if one part of the body hurts, the rest of the body responds with sleeplessness and fever.” 2, so let’s respond!
Even in the face of impending doom, the believer remains proactive even “if the day of Judgment is about to be established and one of you has a sapling in his hand, let him plant it.”3
Due to this misplaced despair & hatred spread about Pakistan people are turning away from it, even though we have been told “Do not hate one another, and do not envy one another, and do not turn away from one another, but rather be servants of Allah as brothers.”4
Many people enjoy lambasting and ridiculing the country, even though Allah ﷻ told us “let not a people ridicule a people; perhaps they may be better than them.…” 5.
So let’s drop these unsubstantiated negative assumptions “…avoid [negative] assumptions. Indeed, some assumptions are a sin….” 6 and search out, verify & contextualise the facts for ourselves because “it is enough to be (called) a liar if one repeats/forwards everything he hears”7
The Wapistanis Community: A Community of Hope
In the Wapistanis community, we’ve observed a troubling pattern: under the guise of “balanced advice,” many who have never lived in Pakistan offer only fear, hearsay, and outdated anecdotes. Pakistan is a federation of six culturally distinct provinces, united by Islam. It is impossible to generalise from one province or village to another.
This community was built as a counterweight to the rumour mills and drama forums that masquerade as advisory spaces. Thousands of members have made the move, and one of the most consistent challenges they face is not Pakistan itself—but the exaggerated negativity from friends and family left behind in the West.
Propose moving to Pakistan and brace for backlash. Yet suggest relocating to cities with worse metrics—like Cairo or Casablanca—and you’ll face little resistance. This double standard reveals a deeper issue: internalised self-loathing.
We choose to remain hopeful. Our collective experiences of relocating to Pakistan have been overwhelmingly positive. This author left the UK years ago and has yet to meet anyone who regrets the move—except those who settled in remote ancestral villages. But that’s another story, with a simple solution: move to a well-developed urban area, not away from Pakistan. Let’s drop the unverified tropes. Let’s seek truth, context, and hope. Let’s rebuild Pakistan—not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally.
