Naming a Missile After Abdali: A Historical Irony Pakistan Overlooks

The Maratha Empire 

at its peak in 1760

In an act that reveals a troubling disconnect from historical reality, Pakistan has named one of its short-range ballistic missiles Abdali-I, after Ahmad Shah Abdali (also known as Ahmad Shah Durrani), the eighteenth-century Afghan warlord who repeatedly invaded India. The symbolism may be intended to invoke martial valour and Islamic pride, but it is fraught with contradictions—because Abdali’s campaigns devastated precisely those Islamic regimes and cultural legacies that Pakistan claims to revere.

Ahmad Shah Abdali was no liberator of Indian Muslims; he was their destroyer. His military expeditions into India in the mid-eighteenth century culminated in widespread plunder, indiscriminate massacres, and the ruin of key Islamic power centres such as Lahore, Kashmir, and Delhi. In fact, his invasion delivered the final, crippling blow to the Mughal Empire—an empire that Pakistan often holds up as a golden age of Muslim rule in the subcontinent. The irony of commemorating Abdali with a missile is thus both painful and profound: it is akin to honouring a man who dismantled the very civilisational foundations Pakistan lays claim to.

The ideological backdrop to Abdali’s invasion is equally complex. Central to this story is Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, an influential Islamic scholar based in Delhi, who sought the restoration of Islamic authority in India at a time when the Mughal Empire was in steep decline and the Marathas were ascending. During his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1730, Waliullah spent time in the Hejaz, where he came into contact with the hardline teachings of the Hanbali theologian Ibn Taymiyyah. 

Notably, this was also the period when Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab—the founder of the austere Wahhabi movement—was himself immersed in Taymiyyah’s doctrines. While there is no record of direct interaction between Waliullah and Abd al-Wahhab, their concurrent presence in Medina and similar ideological trajectories suggest a shared intellectual lineage that favoured a puritanical vision of Islam.

Upon returning to India, Shah Waliullah became convinced that he had a divine mandate to revive Islamic supremacy. In his writings—particularly Fuyooz-ul-Haramain—he voiced an urgent call to action against the Marathas, whom he perceived as existential threats to Islamic power. In the early 1750s, he famously wrote to Ahmad Shah Abdali, urging him to invade India and "liberate" it from Hindu rule. Waliullah’s expectation was clear: Abdali would crush the Marathas and re-establish Islamic dominance, potentially under a more purist, Wahhabi-style regime.

The outcome, however, was starkly different. Abdali did defeat the Marathas at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761—a battle so ferocious that it ranks among the bloodiest in Indian history. But this Pyrrhic victory came at enormous cost. Abdali's forces suffered massive casualties, and the Marathas, though battered, soon rebounded to reassert control over large swathes of central India. Worse still, Abdali’s campaigns had left northern India devastated. His armies looted and ravaged Muslim-majority cities, desecrated cultural centres, and shattered the already-weakened Mughal apparatus. The Islamic regimes of North India, which Waliullah had hoped to revive, never recovered.

The aftermath of Abdali’s invasions created a vacuum that was quickly filled by rising powers: the Sikhs in Punjab, and the British in Bengal and beyond. Far from restoring a pan-Islamic order, Abdali had accelerated the disintegration of Muslim political influence in India. The consequences of his campaign were long-lasting and counterproductive to the theological and political vision that Shah Waliullah had championed.

That Pakistan today chooses to name a missile after Abdali is, therefore, a troubling act of historical amnesia. It is emblematic of a nation’s selective engagement with its past—a glorification of conquest that overlooks the devastation wrought upon fellow Muslims, the obliteration of cherished Islamic centres, and the ultimate failure of a misguided jihad. In celebrating Abdali, Pakistan venerates not a saviour of Islam in India, but an agent of its fragmentation.