A former military officer in the Pakistani army and now an assistant professor of postcolonial literature at an American university, Masood Ashraf Raja challenges the notion that the Pakistan Resolution passed by the All India Muslim League on 23 March 1940 was the initial point of Muslim/Pakistani nationalism, as the mainstream historiography on both sides of the border and even other cosmopolitan sites have advocated and perpetuated. Instead, Raja proposes that the partition of India and the foundation of Pakistan should be seen as symptomatic of Muslim exceptionalism which, he suggests emphatically, began in the years following the rebellion of 1857.