Research question. A former pupil of Punjab schools (classes 6–10, 1989–94) reports that his textbooks led him to see pre-Islamic Arabia and pre-Islamic/Hindu India as morally equivalent states of barbarism, from which Muslim rule delivered rescue — the named parallel being the killing of girls: Meccan wa’d al-banat set against Indian female infanticide and sati. Do the current textbooks construct that equivalence — explicitly, by shared evaluative vocabulary, or by structural juxtaposition — and do they require pupils to reproduce it?
Corpus. extracted-text/{pctb-punjab,kptbb-kp,stbb-sindh,btbb-balochistan}/class-{6..10}/. All quotations are from English-medium files and have been re-verified by exact string match against the source (49/49 passed). Urdu-medium files are reported at structure/topic level only and are never quoted. Balochistan holds only class-6 material (English, General Science, Geography en+ur, History ur, Islamiyat); its class-10 file is zero bytes and its Islamiyat volume is an unreadable OCR failure (§8.4).
1. Answer
No board reaches Tier 1, and the specific parallel the informant names does not exist in this corpus at all. The decisive negative is blunt: sati is absent from all 112 books, in both media. In English the token appears twice and both are OCR corruptions — “Sutlej” in KP English 10 and “equation” in Punjab General Science 8. In Urdu, 187 raw substring hits reduce to nine whitespace-delimited tokens and, on individual inspection, to zero genuine occurrences — all nine are OCR word-splits of ordinary vocabulary. No book in any board or either medium mentions widow-burning, its abolition, or anyone who abolished it. Neither does any English-medium book attribute female infanticide, child marriage or any killing of girls to India, Hindus, Aryans or the pre-Islamic subcontinent. Every instance of “buried alive”, “bury their daughters alive”, “female infanticide” and “kill children and bury girls alive” in the corpus has Arabia as its subject — the sole exception being a storm metaphor in a Punjab English 10 narrative (“this storm is going to bury us alive!”, PAGE 13), which concerns nobody. The Arabian half of the alleged parallel is present, repeated, and heavily examined; the Indian half is not present at all. The parallel therefore cannot be being taught, because one of its two terms is missing.
What is present, and strongly, is the Arabian half — and it is examinable to the level of a board model paper. Punjab reaches the highest density. Pakistan Studies 9 gives the canonical passage — “In Arab society, in the age of ignorance before the advent of Islam, girls were buried alive at their birth… The dark age ritual of female infanticide came to an end” (PAGE 98) — and keys it to an MCQ nine pages later (PAGE 107). English 10 repeats it — “newborn girls were buried alive” (PAGE 6) — and puts “What was the social condition of women, orphans, and slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia?” both in the chapter exercise (PAGE 10) and in the printed Model Paper for the board examination (PAGE 123). Sindh installs the same content in Islamiyat at classes 6 and 9 with keyed MCQs and a short-answer question. This is a well-drilled, compulsory, assessed narrative — about Arabia.
Punjab reaches Tier 2, but weakly, and on caste rather than on girls. The one Punjab passage that applies a rescue frame to Hindu India is History 7, PAGE 32: “Many Buddhists and lower-caste Hindus converted to Islam who lived a miserable and socially segregated life in Sindh and Multan… They were rather impressed by the equality, caste-less system and social justice of Muslims.” That is a moral condemnation of the Hindu social order and a rescue-by-Islam claim. But it shares no vocabulary with the Arabian passages — no “ignorance”, no “dark age”, no “cruel customs”, no killing of girls — and it sits three school years before the class-9 and class-10 books that carry the Arabian frame. The evaluative terms are also different in kind: Arabia’s fault is cruelty to daughters, India’s is caste segregation. Punjab reaches Tier 2 on a structural rescue frame; it does not reach Tier 2 on the moral vocabulary the hypothesis specifies.
Sindh reaches Tier 2 more tightly, within one volume, but the frame it transfers is “ignorance”, not “killing girls”. Islamiyat 7 applies “days of ignorance” to pre-Islamic Arabia (PAGES 43, 45, including an MCQ) and, forty pages later in the same volume, applies the cognate register to subcontinental people: the Jat and Rajput tribes at Ajodhan “were very uncivilized and ignorant” until Farid-ud-Din Ganj Shakar’s preaching (PAGE 84). One volume, one school year, one evaluative register, two targets — one Arabian, one Indian. That is the tightest same-book transfer in the corpus. Islamiyat 8 then makes the frame explicitly contemporary and explicitly religious: “In the pre-Islamic period of ignorance and also today in other religions, a widow is not given her proper place” (PAGE 61) — the jahiliyya condition asserted to persist, now, in unnamed non-Muslim religions. That sentence comes closer to Tier 1 in form than anything else found, because the text itself extends the comparison across time to a present-day out-group; it stops short only because the out-group is not named.
But Sindh also supplies the corpus’s single sharpest piece of counter-evidence, and it is on exactly the disputed point. Sindh Social Studies 7, PAGE 11, describing Mauryan India, states: “A married woman had her own property in the form of bride-gift (stree-dhana). The widows had given respect in the society… Offences against women were severely dealt with.” The same board that tells class 8 that widows are dishonoured in other religions tells class 7 that pre-Islamic Indian widows were respected. And Sindh’s other application of the rescue-from-darkness template names a different target entirely: Islamiyat 6 PAGE 96 — “before the arrival of Muslims in Europe, the people of Europe were in darkness and ignorance” — with a keyed MCQ on PAGE 97. The portable template exists; its named beneficiary in Sindh’s Islamiyat is Europe.
KP is Tier 4 in English medium. Its English-medium books carry only a lexical trace of the Arabian side — the Farewell Sermon’s “days of ignorance (Jahiliyyat)” in English 7 (PAGE 10) with a glossary entry, and a pre-reading question in English 6 (PAGE 9), “Can you tell about the condition of Arabia before Islam?”, whose reading passage then never answers it. KP’s Indian-side material inverts the frame: Pakistan Studies 9 PAGE 9 groups “other minorities and low caste Hindus” with Muslims as fellow victims of colonial inequality. KP teaches Islamiyat and History only in Urdu, so the Tier-2 test cannot be run on KP to the standard applied to Punjab and Sindh.
Balochistan reaches Tier 3 — and it is the only board that carries both clusters inside one volume. Its English-medium class-6 books (English, Geography) contain neither cluster, but its Urdu-medium history-6-ur carries the Vedic caste and untouchability material at PP. 41–42 and the pre-Islamic Arabia section, including the burial of infant girls, at PP. 72–73 — about thirty pages apart in one class-6 book. The jahalat vocabulary stays confined to the Arabia chapter; the India chapter is descriptive-neutral. And the assessment runs the opposite way from every other board: the India chapter is examined (PAGE 53 asks about Aryan origins and the caste system) while the pre-Islamic Arabia section is not examined at all. See §8.1(b).
The most consequential single finding is an assessment finding, and it is not about India. Punjab English 9’s Unit 1 is titled “The Saviour of Mankind”; it frames the mission universally — “to lift humanity from ignorance into the light of faith” (PAGE 6) — and then asks, as comprehension question 4 (PAGE 10): “What parallels can you draw between the state of civilization described here and the other historical periods of decline and renewal?” That question does not name India. It does something structurally more permissive: it instructs the pupil to perform the transfer operation itself, on a target of the pupil’s own choosing, and marks them for doing it. Combined with question 8 on the same page — “How does the author view the pre-Islamic Arabs? Write down the examples and the evidences supporting your inferences” — repeated verbatim in Review 1 (PAGE 87), Punjab class 9 requires pupils both to reproduce the evaluative characterisation of pre-Islamic Arabia and to generalise it.
2. Tiered evidence table
Tier 1 — Explicit linkage
| Board | Class | Subject | Evidence | Cite | Conf. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | NOT ESTABLISHED. No English-medium text states that Muslim rule ended a named Indian social evil in the way Islam ended an Arabian one, or draws the Arabia↔India comparison in a sentence, caption, exercise or learning outcome. | corpus-wide | High |
| Sindh | 8 | Islamiyat | Nearest approach, falls short only on naming. “A woman whose husband has died is called a widow. In the pre-Islamic period of ignorance and also today in other religions, a widow is not given her proper place. However, Islam has defined widows’ rights and given them a place full of honour in society.” The jahiliyya condition is asserted to persist today, in other religions. The out-group is not named; India and Hindus are not mentioned. | stbbislamiyat-8-en · PAGE 61 | High |
Tier 2 — Shared evaluative vocabulary applied to both
| Board | Class | Subject | Evidence | Cite | Conf. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sindh | 7 | Islamiyat | The tightest same-volume transfer in the corpus. Arabian side: the Farewell Sermon — “All interest of ignorance stands wiped out” (PAGE 43); MCQ — “During the Farewell Sermon, the Holy Prophet declared a custom of days of ignorance invalid. It was:” (PAGE 45); fill-in-the-blank — “all of the days of ignorance stand wiped out” (PAGE 45). Indian side, same volume, 39 pages later: “The rebellious Jat and Rajput tribes were settled in Ajudhan. They were very uncivilized and ignorant. Due to his hard work, preaching, and training, they became Muslims and had good morals and character.” | stbbislamiyat-7-en · PAGES 43, 45, 84 | High |
| Punjab | 7 | History | Indian side, rescue frame, no shared wording. “Many Buddhists and lower-caste Hindus converted to Islam who lived a miserable and socially segregated life in Sindh and Multan. It is noted that Arabs did not force the locals to embrace Islam. They were rather impressed by the equality, caste-less system and social justice of Muslims.” Condemnation of Hindu social order + rescue by Islam. No “ignorance”, no killing of girls, no shared lexeme with Punjab’s Arabian passages. | pctbhistory-7-en · PAGE 32 | High |
| Punjab | 9 | Pakistan Studies | Arabian side, canonical. “In Arab society, in the age of ignorance before the advent of Islam, girls were buried alive at their birth. Islam made the girl a blessing and a symbol of peace for the home. When the era of Islam dawned, the woman was saved from the darkness of oppression. Islam rescued women from humiliation and treated them with dignity and honour. The dark age ritual of female infanticide came to an end.” Followed by: “It is Islam that gave women the rights equal to men and strengthened the status of the woman.” | pctbpakistan-studies-9-en · PAGE 98 | High |
| Punjab | 10 | English | Arabian side, second subject, second year. “Before the advent of Islam, Arabian society was marked by a strong tribal structure, patriarchal norms, and social inequality. Women were deprived of their basic human rights and even in some cases, newborn girls were buried alive.” | pctbenglish-10-en · PAGE 6 | High |
| Punjab | 9 | English | Arabian side, universalised by construction. Unit 1 is titled “The Saviour of Mankind”. “Allah raised a Rasool among themselves to lift humanity from ignorance into the light of faith” (PAGE 6); “He had a pressing urge to eradicate wrong beliefs, social evils, cruelty and injustice” (PAGE 7). The object is humanity, not Arabia — the frame is portable as written. | pctbenglish-9-en · PAGES 6, 7 | High |
| Sindh | 6 | Islamiyat | Arabian side, class 6. “In the pre-Islamic era, there were many cruel customs, one of them was to kill children and bury girls alive in graves. Parents used to slaughter their children to please their idols. Boys and girls were also killed for fear of hunger and poverty. Islam abolished all these wrong and cruel customs.” | stbbislamiyat-6-en · PAGE 71 | High |
| Sindh | 6 | Islamiyat | The template’s named target is Europe, not India. “Besides this, before the arrival of Muslims in Europe, the people of Europe were in darkness and ignorance. The Muslims spread a network of modern sciences…” Keyed MCQ on PAGE 97. Counts as Tier-2 evidence that the frame transfers to a named region — and as counter-evidence that the region is India. | stbbislamiyat-6-en · PAGES 96, 97 | High |
| Sindh | 9 | Islamiyat | Arabian side. “They felt proud to bury their daughters alive. Due to common ignorance, idolatry had become their religious motto.” (PAGE 95) And: “Humanity and the Age of Ignorance: The age before Islam is called ‘The age of Ignorance’. In this age, respect for humanity was almost lost. People used to respect stones, trees, rivers, oceans, sun, moon, stars and other powerful things.” (PAGE 146) | stbbislamiyat-9-10-en · PAGES 95, 146 | High |
| Sindh | 8 | Islamiyat | Arabian side, status-of-women formula. “Before the advent of the Holy Prophet, women were among the most oppressed segment of the society. She was hated and considered weak. She was treated inhumanely.” | stbbislamiyat-8-en · PAGE 8 | High |
| KP | 7 | English | Arabian side, lexical only. The Farewell Sermon text: “No murders committed during the days of ignorance (Jahiliyyat) are to be avenged.” Glossary on PAGE 11 defines “ignorance” as “a lack of knowledge or information about”. No condition-of-Arabia narrative; no Indian counterpart anywhere in KP’s English-medium books. | kptbbenglish-7-en · PAGES 10, 11 | High |
Tier 3 — Structural juxtaposition without shared wording
| Board | Class | Subject | Evidence | Cite | Conf. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sindh | 9 | Islamiyat | A latent adjacency worth flagging, on the content of the ignorance description. The class-9 account of the Age of Ignorance describes worship of “stones, trees, rivers, oceans, sun, moon, stars” — a list that maps onto Vedic practice at least as well as onto Meccan practice. Punjab History 6 independently describes the Aryans in almost the same terms: “Their famous gods were different gods like Sun, stars, fire, water, and Earth, etc.” and “They started worshipping anything as a god.” The lists coincide, but the two passages are in different boards’ books, so no pupil meets both. Within Sindh, no Social Studies volume describes Vedic worship in these terms. | stbbislamiyat-9-10-en · PAGE 146; pctbhistory-6-en · PAGE 65 | Mod |
| Balochistan | 6 | History (Ur) | The strongest structural juxtaposition in the study, and the only one inside a single volume. Chapter 4 (PP. 40–54) carries the Vedic four-varna order, Shudras, the untouchable category and the claim that those outside the hierarchy were treated as socially base, with Hinduism and the Vedas at PAGE 42 and a summary restating caste and untouchability at PAGE 38. Chapter 6 (PP. 70–105) carries an explicit “social life before Islam” sub-heading with jahalat at PAGE 72 and the burial of infant girls at PAGE 73. About thirty pages apart, one class-6 book. But no shared vocabulary — jahalat stays inside the Arabia chapter; the India chapter is descriptive-neutral. Structure only; Nastaliq OCR degraded; not quoted. | btbbhistory-6-ur · PAGES 38, 41–42, 53, 72–73, 103 | Low–Mod |
| Punjab | 6 | History | The class-6 juxtaposition that carried the iconoclasm thread does not carry this one. Chapter 3 (Aryans, from PAGE 59) and Chapter 4 (Rise of Islamic Civilization, from PAGE 81) sit consecutively in one volume — but Chapter 4 contains no condition-of-Arabia section at all: no jahiliyya, no infanticide, no cruel customs, no status of women. It opens directly on the Prophet’s biography. There is nothing on the Arabian side of this thread to juxtapose. | pctbhistory-6-en · PAGES 59–101 | High |
| Punjab | 7→9→10 | History → Pak. Studies → English | Cross-year sequencing only. The Indian-side rescue claim (History 7, PAGE 32) and the Arabian-side rescue claim (Pak. Studies 9 PAGE 98; English 10 PAGE 6) are two and three school years apart, in three different subjects, with no shared vocabulary and no cross-reference. | as cited above | High |
Tier 4 — Not established / absent (and counter-evidence)
| Board | Class | Subject | Finding | Cite | Conf. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | 6–10 | All (English) | SATI IS ABSENT FROM THE ENTIRE ENGLISH-MEDIUM CORPUS. Two raw hits, both OCR corruptions: “Sati | and Ravi to India” (= Sutlej) and “Write the unbalanced Sati os the number of atoms” (= equation). No occurrence of “suttee”, “widow burning”, “burnt alive”, “self-immolation” anywhere. No book mentions the abolition of sati, by the British or by anyone. | kptbbenglish-10-en · line 5461; pctbgeneral-science-8-en · line 3141 | High |
| All | 6–10 | All (English) | No Indian female infanticide, child marriage or killing of girls anywhere. Every instance of “buried alive” / “bury their daughters alive” / “female infanticide” / “kill children and bury girls alive” has Arabia as its subject. “Child marriage” appears once, in Punjab Pak. Studies 9 PAGE 106 — as a present-day Pakistani problem: “Child marriage is a common custom in Pakistan.” Dowry likewise appears only as a present-day Pakistani/Islamic-law topic (KP Pak. Studies 10, “The Curse of Dowry”). | corpus-wide grep | High |
| Sindh | 7 | Social Studies | Direct counter-evidence, on the exact disputed point. Of Mauryan India: “A married woman had her own property in the form of bride-gift (stree-dhana). The widows had given respect in the society. All stree-dhana (bride-gift and jewelry) belongs to her. Offences against women were severely dealt with.” Sindh’s Social Studies contradicts Sindh’s Islamiyat on the treatment of widows in pre-Islamic India. | stbbsocial-studies-7-en · PAGE 11 | High |
| Punjab | 6 | History | The Aryan/caste treatment is descriptive, not condemnatory. The caste system is introduced as “a system of social classes”; each varna is described functionally; the Shudra passage says only “they were the servants and labourers for the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas.” No “evil”, no “cruel”, no “ignorance”, no “barbarism”, no untouchability, no sati, no widow-burning, no infanticide. The Vedic religion passage is reductive (“They started worshipping anything as a god”) but carries no moral charge about the treatment of women or girls. | pctbhistory-6-en · PAGES 63–66 | High |
| Punjab | 9 | Pakistan Studies | Counter-evidence on the reformers. Raja Ram Mohan Roy — the historical abolisher of sati — appears only as an anti-Muslim polemicist: “Raja Ram Mohan Rai, the founder of Brahmo Samaj, also used to speak against Muslims out of Muslim hostility.” Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj are framed solely as movements “intended to propagate Hinduism and bring down Muslims”. Their social-reform programme, including the abolition of sati, is not mentioned. The book neither credits Hindu reformers nor uses their causes to indict Hindu society — it simply removes the topic. | pctbpakistan-studies-9-en · PAGE 4 | High |
| Punjab | 7 | History | “Social evils” is applied to Muslim society, not Hindu society. The single occurrence: Shah Waliullah “also tried to eradicate social evils from the society. Consequently, many reformist movements were started from Madrasah-i-Rahimiya” — and the object is Muslims’ own “un-Islamic customs”. “Superstition” appears twice, both times about the European Enlightenment. | pctbhistory-7-en · PAGES 87, 97, 104 | High |
| Sindh | 8 | Social Studies | Counter-evidence: respectful Muslim–Hindu intellectual exchange. Al-Beruni “learnt a lot about Hindu religion and philosophy from the pundits and in return taught them Arabic and Greek… mastered a difficult language like Sanskrit and translated Bhagwat Gita… Hindus were so much impressed by his learning that they call him ‘Vidya Sagar’.” Hindu scholars are the teachers, not the rescued. | stbbsocial-studies-8-en · PAGE 47 | Mod (OCR is two-column and scrambled; sense unambiguous) |
| KP | 9 | Pakistan Studies | Counter-evidence: the frame is inverted. Low-caste Hindus are grouped with Muslims as victims: “In those days, not just Muslims but other minorities and low caste Hindus were also treated unequally.” The chapter’s subject is “social justice and equality” as a Pakistani aim, and the deprived party throughout is the Muslims of South Asia under colonial rule. | kptbbpakistan-studies-9-en · PAGE 9 | High |
| Sindh | 8 | Social Studies | The contemporary-India node exists, but it is a hostility claim, not a barbarism claim. “The Hindu racists were not only against Muslims but were against all other minorities and even Christians became victims of their atrocities… the present behaviour of Indian Hindus is similar to that they has some on hundred and fifty years ago.” (OCR-garbled; sense unambiguous.) The charge is aggression against Muslims — Shuddhi, Sangathan, conversion — never cruelty to women, girls or widows. The moral-rescue frame is not attached to this node. | stbbsocial-studies-8-en · PAGE 52 | Mod |
| Punjab, KP, Sindh | 6–10 | Pak. Studies | “Caste” appears in these books almost exclusively inside a non-discrimination formula — “no discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, caste, colour and creed” (Sindh PS10 PAGE 7), “no discrimination… on the basis of caste, creed, colour, race” (KP PS9 PAGE 8) — and inside Jinnah’s 11 August speech. It is used to state Islam’s or Pakistan’s virtue, never to name Hindu caste as an evil requiring rescue. | corpus-wide | High |
| Balochistan | 6 | Geography, English (En) | Neither cluster appears in BTBB’s English-medium books. “Hindu” occurs only as Hindukush; the one substantive India reference is a neutral biography of Sir William Jones and his “Institutes of Hindu Law”. BTBB’s substantive material is Urdu-medium — see §8.1(b). chemistry-10-un is 0 bytes and islamiyat-6-un is an unreadable OCR failure. | extracted-text/btbb-balochistan/ | High |
| Balochistan | 6 | History (Ur) | The Indian-side chapter is examined and the Arabian-side chapter is not. PAGE 53 carries a short-answer item on the origin of the Aryans and the caste system, plus activities including one on the “golden age of the Hindus”; the Chapter 6 exercises (PP. 103–105) test prophets, the Kaaba and the caliphates, and never touch the pre-Islamic Arabia section named in the chapter’s own summary at PAGE 103. This is the inverse of every other board’s assessment pattern. Structure only; not quoted. | btbbhistory-6-ur · PAGES 53, 103–105 | Low–Mod |
| All | 6–10 | Urdu-medium | Zero same-page co-occurrence of jahiliyya/jahalat with Hindu / Hindustan / Bharat anywhere in the Urdu corpus. No volume extends the ignorance label to Hindus or India. | eleven-plus Urdu files | Low (on absence) |
| Punjab | 9, 10 | Islamiyat (Ur) | Punjab’s own Islamiyat omits the frame. The recurring “kind treatment of women” chapter (Islamiyat 9 PP. 77–79; Islamiyat 10 PP. 47–48, near-identical text) uses only a vague unlocated formula about women being deprived of rights in many civilisations — no jahiliyya, no Arabia, no live burial. The frame reaches Punjab pupils through Urdu 8 and Pakistan Studies 9 instead. Structure only; not quoted. | islamiyat-9-ur; islamiyat-10-ur | Low–Mod |
| Punjab | 6 | History | No condition-of-Arabia section exists in Punjab History 6. Chapter 4 opens on the Prophet’s genealogy and childhood. There is no jahiliyya passage, no infanticide, no status-of-women-before-Islam material anywhere in the volume. Punjab pupils do not meet the Arabian moral frame until class 9. | pctbhistory-6-en · PAGES 81–92 | High |
| KP | 6–9 | Islamiyat, History, Geography, Urdu | KP teaches all of these only in Urdu. There is no English-medium KP Islamiyat or History in the corpus, so the Tier-2 test cannot be run on KP to the evidentiary standard applied to Punjab and Sindh. | extracted-text/kptbb-kp/ | High |
3. Assessment demands — what pupils are required to produce
This is the strongest instrument in the study, because an examinable question compels production rather than merely offering a reading. Every assessment demand found on this thread has pre-Islamic Arabia as its object. Not one requires — or permits — the pupil to state anything about the social condition of pre-Islamic or Hindu India.
A. Board-examination level
| Board | Class | Subject | The demand | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab | 10 | English | Printed Model Paper, Paper-II Essay Type, Q.2 (answer any FIVE): “(i) What was the social condition of women, orphans, and slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia?” This is the frame appearing as a specimen board-exam question. | pctbenglish-10-en · PAGE 123 |
B. Questions requiring the pupil to generalise the frame
| Board | Class | Subject | The demand | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab | 9 | English | “What parallels can you draw between the state of civilization described here and the other historical periods of decline and renewal?” — comprehension Q4 on Unit 1, “The Saviour of Mankind”. The pupil is instructed to perform the transfer operation itself, onto a target of their own choosing. No target is named or suggested; India is not mentioned. This is the single most consequential assessment item found on this thread. | pctbenglish-9-en · PAGE 10 |
| Punjab | 9 | English | “How does the author view the pre-Islamic Arabs? Write down the examples and the evidences supporting your inferences.” — Q8 on PAGE 10, repeated verbatim as Q1 of Review 1 on PAGE 87. The pupil must reproduce the evaluative characterisation and marshal textual evidence for it. Twice. | pctbenglish-9-en · PAGES 10, 87 |
C. Keyed multiple-choice items
| Board | Class | Subject | The item | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab | 9 | Pakistan Studies | “In Arab society, before the advent of Islam, in the age of ignorance, girl was: (a) burnt (b) vani (given in marriage) (c) buried alive (d) respected”. Note distractor (a), burnt — the only appearance of anything resembling widow-burning anywhere in the corpus, and it appears as a wrong answer about Arabia. | pctbpakistan-studies-9-en · PAGE 107 |
| Sindh | 6 | Islamiyat | “Before the arrival of Muslims, the people of Europe were: (A) highly educated (B) in ignorance. (C) civilized (D) under developing”. The rescue-from-ignorance template, examined, with Europe as the named beneficiary. | stbbislamiyat-6-en · PAGE 97 |
| Sindh | 7 | Islamiyat | “During the Farewell Sermon, the Holy Prophet declared a custom of days of ignorance invalid. It was: (A) Loan (B) Interest…” — plus fill-in-the-blank: “The Holy Prophet said that all of the ___ days of ignorance stand wiped out.” | stbbislamiyat-7-en · PAGE 45 |
| Sindh | 9 | Islamiyat | “Before Islam, in the age of ignorance, the dignity of humanity was: a. more b. less c. lost d. better” | stbbislamiyat-9-10-en · PAGE 147 |
D. Short-answer and comprehension items
| Board | Class | Subject | The item | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sindh | 6 | Islamiyat | “Write any two customs of the pre-Islamic era, which Islam has Islam abolished.” (sic) — the pupil must reproduce “burying girls alive” / “killing children” from PAGE 71. Class 6. | stbbislamiyat-6-en · PAGE 72 |
| Punjab | 10 | English | “What was the social condition of women, orphans, and slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia?” — chapter exercise, Reading and Critical Thinking. | pctbenglish-10-en · PAGE 10 |
| Punjab | 10 | English | Marginal while-reading prompt printed beside the jahiliyya passage: “What social injustices existed in pre-Islamic Arabian society?” | pctbenglish-10-en · PAGE 6 |
| Punjab | 9 | English | Pre-reading prompts: “Mention the condition of Arabia before Islam.” / “How did Islam change the lives of the people?” | pctbenglish-9-en · PAGE 6 |
| KP | 6 | English | Pre-reading prompts: “Can you tell about the condition of Arabia before Islam?” / “How did Islam change the lives of the people?” — notable because the reading passage that follows never answers either question. It is a biographical sketch of the Prophet with no jahiliyya content. The question therefore requires the pupil to supply the condition-of-Arabia narrative from outside the book — in KP, from Urdu-medium Islamiyat. | kptbbenglish-6-en · PAGE 9 |
| Punjab | 9 | Pakistan Studies | Long-answer: “Explain the rights of women in Islam in the light of the Qur’an and Sunnah.” Short-answers: “Describe the rights of women in the light of an Ayah of the Holy Qur’an” / “…of one hadith”. Chapter activity: group discussion on “women protection against violence”. | pctbpakistan-studies-9-en · PAGE 109 |
| Sindh | 8 | Islamiyat | On the widow lesson containing the “also today in other religions” sentence: “What is meant by a widow?”; MCQ on the widow’s inheritance share; match-the-column item on the same; and a teacher instruction: “Arrange a debate on the rights of orphans, widows, disabled and travellers in the classroom among students” + “Ask students to write brief articles on… List the rights of widows.” | stbbislamiyat-8-en · PAGES 64, 65 |
| Sindh | 7 | Islamiyat | On the Ajodhan lesson: “Which tribes were converted to Islam by service of Hazrat Farid-ud-Deen Ganj Shakar?” — examinable, and it points at the “very uncivilized and ignorant” sentence, but does not itself demand the evaluative term. This is the closest the corpus comes to an examinable item on the Indian side, and it stops short. | stbbislamiyat-7-en · PAGE 85 |
E. Urdu-medium assessment demands (structure only; not quoted)
| Board | Class | Subject | The demand | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab | 8 | Urdu | The only examined jahiliyya lesson in the Urdu corpus, and it is Punjab’s. A four-page exercise block closing a lesson on the status of women: short- and long-answer items, two of which ask directly about the pre-Islamic condition of women and of daughters (PAGE 98); an MCQ plus fill-in-the-blanks whose blanks are the “women had no rights” and “birth of a daughter” propositions (PAGE 99); a vocabulary list including dargor, live burial (PP. 100–101); an essay task on the rights of men and women (PAGE 102). The narrative it examines is at PP. 96–97. | pctburdu-8-ur · PAGES 95–102 |
| KP | 7 | Islamiyat | Near-miss — do not miscount. Fill-in-the-blank, short-answer and true/false items on PAGE 35 carry the jahiliyya token twice, but they are Farewell-Sermon recall keyed to the narrative on PAGE 36, not a pre-Islamic social-conditions section. | kptbbislamiyat-7-ur · PAGES 35–36 |
| Balochistan | 6 | History | The one assessed item in the corpus that is on the Indian side — and it is descriptive. A short-answer item on the origin of the Aryans and the caste system, plus MCQs and activities including one comparing the Indus Valley people with the Aryans and one on the “golden age of the Hindus”. It requires the pupil to state the structure of caste; it does not require any moral evaluation, and it draws no comparison to Arabia. The volume’s own pre-Islamic Arabia section, thirty pages later, is not examined. | btbbhistory-6-ur · PAGE 53 |
Summary of the assessment instrument. Sixteen distinct assessed items were found on the Arabian side across four boards, including one printed board model paper, two questions repeated in review sections, and a four-page Urdu-medium exercise block at Punjab class 8. Zero assessed items anywhere in the corpus require a pupil to state that pre-Islamic or Hindu India was barbarous, that Indians killed girls, that widows were burned, or that Muslim rule ended any named Indian social evil. The single Indian-side assessed item, in Balochistan, asks for the structure of the caste system and nothing evaluative. The asymmetry is near-total, and where it is broken it is broken in the direction that weakens the hypothesis.
4. Per-board assessment
Punjab (PCTB) — highest tier reached: Tier 2, weak (structural rescue frame on caste; no shared moral vocabulary; sati and Indian infanticide absent)
Punjab carries the heaviest Arabian-side load in the corpus and the heaviest assessment load, including the only board model paper. Its Indian-side rescue claim exists but is confined to a single passage in class 7 about caste segregation, three years earlier and in a different subject. Punjab’s counter-evidence is substantial: the Aryan/caste treatment is descriptive; “social evils” is applied to Muslim society; Ram Mohan Roy appears only as an anti-Muslim polemicist with his reform work removed; class-6 History has no Arabian moral frame at all. Punjab’s own class-9 framing inverts the deprivation frame entirely — the chapter heading is “economic and social deprivation of Muslims of the subcontinent”.
Sindh (STBB) — highest tier reached: Tier 2, tight (within one volume, on “ignorance”; nearest approach to Tier 1 on widows, with the target unnamed)
Sindh is the only board that teaches Islamiyat in English, and consequently the only board where the same-volume test can be run properly. It passes it: Islamiyat 7 applies the ignorance register to both pre-Islamic Arabia and the Jat and Rajput tribes of the subcontinent. Islamiyat 8 extends the jahiliyya condition to “other religions” today. But Sindh’s own Social Studies 7 contradicts Sindh’s Islamiyat 8 on the treatment of Indian widows; Sindh’s Social Studies 8 presents Hindu pundits as Al-Beruni’s teachers; and Sindh’s Islamiyat 6 names Europe, not India, as the region rescued from “darkness and ignorance”, with a keyed MCQ.
KP (KPTBB) — highest tier reached: Tier 4 in English medium; Tier 2 not testable
KP’s English-medium books carry a lexical trace of jahiliyya (English 7 Farewell Sermon + glossary) and one unanswered pre-reading question (English 6). Its Indian-side material actively inverts the frame, grouping low-caste Hindus with Muslims as fellow victims. Islamiyat and History are Urdu-only, so the decisive test cannot be run.
Balochistan (BTBB) — highest tier reached: Tier 3 (both clusters in one volume, lexically unlinked; Indian side examined, Arabian side not)
Extracted text exists for six class-6 books only; class-10 is a zero-byte file. The English-medium pair (English, Geography) contains neither cluster. The finding is entirely in history-6-ur: a class-6 world history that carries Vedic caste and untouchability at PP. 41–42 and pre-Islamic Arabia including infant-girl burial at PP. 72–73, in one volume, unlinked in vocabulary — and that assesses the Indian chapter (PAGE 53) while leaving the Arabian section unassessed. Balochistan is therefore the board where the structural conditions for the parallel are most nearly met and the evaluative and assessment conditions are least met. Two caveats bound this: BTBB’s only Islamiyat volume is an unreadable OCR failure, and these are 2026 pilot-edition books on the National Curriculum 2022–23, so the board’s syllabus is not yet stable.
5. The class 6→10 sequence a pupil actually meets
Punjab
| Class | Book | What the pupil meets |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | History | Aryans, caste, Vedic gods — descriptive, no moral charge (PP. 63–66). Chapter 4 on Islam has no condition-of-Arabia section. Neither half of the frame is installed. |
| 7 | History | The only Indian-side rescue claim. Lower-caste Hindus “lived a miserable and socially segregated life” and were “impressed by the equality, caste-less system and social justice of Muslims” (PAGE 32). No exercise attaches to it. |
| 8 | History | Colonial and Pakistan-Movement material. Neither cluster. |
| 8 | Urdu | The Arabian frame arrives here, in the Urdu-language book, and it is examined. Lesson on the status of women, PP. 95–102: daur-e-jahalat, the live burial of daughters (PP. 96–97), then four pages of exercises — short and long answers on the pre-Islamic condition of women and daughters (PAGE 98), MCQ and fill-in-the-blanks on the same propositions (PAGE 99), dargor as a vocabulary item (PP. 100–101), an essay task (PAGE 102). Structure only; not quoted. |
| 9 | Pakistan Studies | The Arabian frame arrives in English, one year later. “Age of ignorance”, girls “buried alive”, “the darkness of oppression”, “The dark age ritual of female infanticide came to an end” (PAGE 98) — with a keyed MCQ (PAGE 107) and a long-answer question (PAGE 109). |
| 9 | English | Same year, second subject. “The Saviour of Mankind”; “lift humanity from ignorance into the light of faith”; “eradicate wrong beliefs, social evils, cruelty and injustice” (PP. 6–7). Q4 instructs the pupil to draw parallels to other historical periods of decline and renewal (PAGE 10). Q8 repeated in Review 1 (PAGE 87). |
| 10 | English | Reinforcement. “newborn girls were buried alive” (PAGE 6); marginal prompt; chapter question (PAGE 10); and the same question in the printed Model Paper (PAGE 123). |
The Indian-side claim reaches the pupil at 12 and is never assessed. The Arabian-side claim reaches them at 13 in Urdu with four pages of exercises, then again at 14–15 in two English-medium subjects at once, assessed four more times including at board-paper level. Nothing joins them. Note also that Punjab’s Islamiyat — the subject one would expect to carry it — omits the frame entirely at classes 9 and 10 (§8.3).
Sindh
| Class | Book | What the pupil meets |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | Islamiyat | Arabian frame installed early: “cruel customs… kill children and bury girls alive in graves” (PAGE 71), examined by short answer (PAGE 72). And the template applied to Europe — “darkness and ignorance” (PAGE 96), examined by MCQ (PAGE 97). |
| 7 | Islamiyat | The transfer, within one volume. “Days of ignorance” for Arabia (PP. 43, 45, with MCQ and fill-in-blank); “very uncivilized and ignorant” for the Jat and Rajput tribes of Ajodhan (PAGE 84), with a factual exercise question (PAGE 85). |
| 7 | Social Studies | Counter-evidence the same year. Mauryan India: widows respected, women’s property protected, “Offences against women were severely dealt with” (PAGE 11). |
| 8 | Islamiyat | Status of women before Islam — “treated inhumanely” (PAGE 8). The jahiliyya condition extended to the present: widows dishonoured “in the pre-Islamic period of ignorance and also today in other religions” (PAGE 61), with exercises and a teacher-directed debate (PP. 64–65). |
| 8 | Social Studies | The contemporary-India node — “Hindu racists”, “atrocities”, present behaviour continuous with 150 years ago (PAGE 52) — but as political aggression, never as cruelty to women. And, fifteen pages earlier, Al-Beruni learning philosophy from Hindu pundits (PAGE 47). |
| 9 | Islamiyat | “They felt proud to bury their daughters alive”; “Due to common ignorance, idolatry had become their religious motto” (PAGE 95). “The Age of Ignorance” (PAGE 146) with MCQ (PAGE 147). |
| 10 | Pakistan Studies | Caste appears only in the non-discrimination formula (PAGE 7). No Indian-side moral claim. |
6. Counter-evidence, weighted equally
- Sati does not exist in this corpus, in either medium. Zero genuine occurrences across all 112 books — two OCR corruptions in English, nine OCR word-splits in Urdu out of 187 raw substring hits. The single most specific element of the hypothesis is absent everywhere. This is not a marginal gap; it removes one of the two named terms of the parallel entirely.
- No Indian female infanticide anywhere. Not one book attributes the killing of girls to India, Hindus or the pre-Islamic subcontinent. Where killing of girls appears, the subject is always Arabia. Child marriage as a topic is likewise not established in Urdu and appears once in English — as a present-day Pakistani problem.
- Zero same-page co-occurrence of the ignorance vocabulary with Hindu / Hindustan / Bharat across the whole Urdu corpus. The lexical bridge the hypothesis requires is not there in the medium where most of this material is actually taught.
- Balochistan assesses the Indian side and not the Arabian side — the inverse of the pattern the hypothesis predicts — and does so descriptively, asking for the structure of caste rather than any moral judgment on it.
- Punjab’s Islamiyat omits the frame. The classes 9 and 10 chapters on the treatment of women use a vague unlocated formula with no jahiliyya, no Arabia and no live burial. The board that carries the frame most heavily elsewhere leaves it out of the subject where it would be most authoritative.
- Sindh Social Studies 7 explicitly credits pre-Islamic India with respecting widows — contradicting Sindh’s own Islamiyat 8 within the same board’s syllabus.
- Sindh Islamiyat 6 names Europe as the region rescued from “darkness and ignorance”, and examines it. The template exists and is portable, and its one named application in Sindh’s Islamiyat is not India.
- Punjab removes rather than inverts the Hindu-reform narrative. Ram Mohan Roy and Dayanand Saraswati appear only as anti-Muslim actors; the abolition of sati is not credited to them, to the British, or to anyone — because it is not mentioned. The book does not use sati to indict Hindu society; it deletes the topic.
- KP inverts the frame outright by grouping low-caste Hindus with Muslims as fellow victims of colonial inequality.
- Sindh Social Studies 8 presents Hindu pundits as teachers of a Muslim scholar and records that Hindus honoured Al-Beruni as “Vidya Sagar”.
- Punjab’s “social evils” and “superstition” go to Muslims and to pre-Enlightenment Europe, not to Hindu India.
- Punjab History 6’s caste treatment is functional and descriptive, with no untouchability, no ritual cruelty, and no claim about the treatment of women or girls.
- The present-day Hindu node in Sindh carries an aggression charge, not a barbarism charge. Where contemporary India is impugned, the accusation is forcible conversion and violence against Muslims — never cruelty to its own women.
7. Limits — what this method cannot show
- It cannot demonstrate that any pupil forms the inference. It can show whether the materials, the repetition, the sequencing and the assessment demands are present, in which board and at which grade — and nothing about what a reader does with them. The informant’s recollection concerns books of 1989–94; this corpus is current editions (Punjab’s National-Curriculum-aligned English 9/10, Balochistan’s 2026 pilot). A finding of absence here is not a finding of absence in the books he actually read, and the sati material he recalls may well have been present in earlier editions and since removed. This study cannot test that; it can only report the present state.
- Urdu-medium evidence is structural only, and this is a large share of the corpus. Punjab and KP teach Islamiyat entirely in Urdu at classes 6–10; KP teaches History and Geography in Urdu too; Balochistan’s only substantive book on this thread is Urdu. Nastaliq OCR is degraded and splits words arbitrarily, so nothing from those files is quoted and their contribution is reported as topic presence at low confidence. For Punjab, KP and Balochistan the decisive Tier-2 test — one evaluative register, two targets, one volume — cannot be run to the standard applied to Sindh, which is the only board teaching Islamiyat in English. Sindh reaching the highest tier may therefore partly reflect that it is the only board fully testable. Conversely, the two most interesting structural findings in this study — Punjab Urdu 8’s examined jahiliyya lesson and Balochistan History 6’s dual-cluster volume — are precisely the ones this method cannot quote, and so cannot state at full strength.
- One Balochistan book is simply lost.
islamiyat-6-unwas OCR’d with a Latin-script model against an Urdu Nastaliq original and is unreadable noise. It is BTBB’s only Islamiyat volume, and Islamiyat is where every other board carries the jahiliyya material. BTBB’s Tier-3 ceiling is therefore a floor, not a ceiling — the book most likely to raise it has not been read. Re-OCR of that file is the single highest-value follow-up for this thread. - Absence claims are bounded by OCR quality. “Not established” for a token in an OCR’d scan is weaker than “absent”. The sati finding is unusually robust — searched in both scripts, with all 196 raw hits across both media individually adjudicated — but “no Indian infanticide anywhere” rests on the absence of several phrasings and could in principle miss a paraphrase, and the Urdu negatives are additionally weakened by OCR word-splitting.
- Balochistan’s syllabus is not yet stable. These are 2026 pilot-edition books on the National Curriculum 2022–23, printed for a single academic year and explicitly soliciting feedback for revision. A finding about BTBB is a finding about a pilot.
- Adjacency is not linkage, and generalisation is not naming. Punjab English 9’s “draw parallels” question is the strongest structural finding in this study precisely because it demands the transfer operation — but it names no target, and the study cannot show which targets pupils or teachers supply.
- Two books contradicting each other within one board is a real finding, not noise. Sindh Social Studies 7 and Sindh Islamiyat 8 make opposite claims about widows in pre-Islamic India. Which one a pupil retains is outside what this method can reach.
8. Urdu-medium: structural findings
Reported at topic/structure level only. Nothing quoted. Nastaliq OCR is degraded and splits words at arbitrary points, so all searches were run whitespace-tolerantly; every “absent” below should be read as “not established by token search” unless stated otherwise.
8.1 The two findings that matter
(a) urdu-8-ur, PP. 95–102 — the only examined jahiliyya lesson in the Urdu corpus, and it is in Punjab, at class 8. A discrete lesson on the status of women: chapter heading and learning outcomes (PAGE 95); narrative carrying the daur-e-jahalat term and the live-burial-of-daughters motif (PP. 96–97, with zinda dargor explicit on PAGE 97); then four consecutive exercise pages — short and long answer items, two of which ask directly about the pre-Islamic condition of women and of daughters (PAGE 98); an MCQ plus fill-in-the-blanks whose blanks are specifically the “women had no rights” and “birth of a daughter” propositions (PAGE 99); vocabulary, with dargor itself as a listed item (PP. 100–101); and an essay task on the rights of men and women (PAGE 102). This closes a gap the English-medium evidence left open: Punjab pupils meet the assessed Arabian moral frame at class 8, not class 9 — and they meet it in the Urdu-language textbook rather than in Islamiyat.
(b) history-6-ur — the only volume in the entire corpus, either medium, that carries both clusters. A 133-page world-history spine in seven chapters. Chapter 4 (PP. 40–54) covers Aryan migration and the Vedic four-varna order, naming Shudras and the untouchable category and describing those outside the hierarchy as socially base, with Hinduism and the Vedas at PAGE 42 and a chapter summary restating caste and untouchability at PAGE 38. Chapter 6 (PP. 70–105) then covers pre-Islamic Arabia under an explicit “social life before Islam” sub-heading, carrying jahalat at PAGE 72 and the burial of infant girls at PAGE 73, and the chapter summary at PAGE 103 names the pre-Islamic section by title. The two sit about thirty pages apart in one class-6 volume — the tightest structural juxtaposition of the two clusters anywhere in this study.
But the linkage is lexical-negative and the assessment is asymmetric in the opposite direction from every other board:
- The jahalat vocabulary is confined to the Arabia chapter. The India chapter is descriptive-neutral: caste, untouchability and varna are named as social structure, without the ignorance label.
- The India chapter IS examined — PAGE 53, short-answer item asking about the origin of the Aryans and the caste system, plus MCQs and activities including one comparing the Indus Valley people with the Aryans and one on the “golden age of the Hindus”. The Arabia chapter is NOT examined — the Chapter 6 exercises (PP. 103–105) test prophets, the Kaaba, the Rashidun, the Umayyads and the Abbasids, and touch the pre-Islamic section nowhere.
So Balochistan is the one board that assesses the Indian-side material and not the Arabian-side material, and it does so descriptively. BTBB reaches Tier 3 and no higher, and its assessment pattern cuts against the hypothesis rather than for it.
8.2 The decisive negatives
- Zero same-page co-occurrence of jahiliyya/jahalat with Hindu / Hindustan / Bharat anywhere in the Urdu corpus. No volume rhetorically extends the jahiliyya label to Hindus or India.
- Sati is absent from the Urdu corpus too. 187 raw substring hits for sati; 9 where the whitespace-delimited token is exactly sati; 0 genuine. All nine are OCR word-splits of ordinary vocabulary (riyasati, qaum-parasti, susti, sakti, and one garbage image page), individually inspected. Bewa (widow) occurs about 17 times across ten files, never in a burning or immolation context. Combined with the English-medium result, sati does not exist anywhere in this 112-book corpus, in either medium.
- Bachpan ki shadi (child marriage) and huqooq-e-niswan as a topic: not established anywhere. The single niswan hit is the magazine title Tahzeeb-e-Niswan inside an author biography (
pctb-punjab/class-9/urdu-9-urPAGE 49). - Zinda dargor (live burial) is established in exactly two files: Punjab Urdu 8 (PP. 97, 101) and BTBB History 6 (PAGE 73).
8.3 Where the Urdu corpus does not carry the frame
- PCTB Islamiyat’s recurring “kind treatment of women” chapter does not use the jahiliyya frame at all. Islamiyat 9 (PP. 77–79) and Islamiyat 10 (PP. 47–48) carry near-identical text using only a vague, unlocated formula — that in many civilisations and societies women were deprived of rights — with no jahiliyya, no Arabia and no live burial. The daughters-hadith appears, framed positively. Punjab’s Islamiyat, in other words, omits the frame that Punjab’s Urdu-language book at class 8 and Punjab’s Pakistan Studies at class 9 both carry.
- KP Islamiyat 7 PAGE 35 is a near-miss that must not be miscounted. Jahiliyya appears twice on an exercise page (fill-in-the-blank, short answer, true/false) — but the items are Farewell-Sermon recall (“the customs of jahiliyya are under my feet”; blood-feuds abolished), keyed to the sermon narrated at PAGE 36. It is sermon recall, not a pre-Islamic social-conditions section.
- PCTB Islamiyat 10 PAGE 67 carries both tokens incidentally, inside a chapter on superstition and omens (PP. 66–70) — one clause noting that in the age of jahiliyya the month of Safar was also thought inauspicious. The exercises (PP. 69–70) test superstition and magic, not jahiliyya.
- KP History 6, 7 and 8 carry no pre-Islamic-India social-evil vocabulary at all — no caste, untouchability, Shudra or widow terms, despite Hindu appearing across 21, 26 and 28 pages respectively. KP History 8 PAGE 16 does cover nineteenth-century Hindu reform (Arya Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati, Vedic teachings, Shuddhi) — but as modern political-communal history, not as pre-Islamic barbarism, and mirroring the Punjab PS9 English treatment.
- KP Urdu 10 PAGE 115’s apparent achhoot (untouchable) hit is a false positive — achhoota andaz, “a novel style”, in a literary-devices exercise. Likewise Sindh Pakistan Studies 9 PAGE 159’s apparent shudra hit (an education-policy page).
- Sindh’s Urdu-medium books (Urdu 6–8, Urdu 9–10, Pakistan Studies 9, General Science 6) carry neither cluster. Hindu in Sindh PS9 clusters at PP. 11–32 in the colonial / Two-Nation-Theory register.
8.4 Corpus-integrity findings surfaced by the sweep
islamiyat-6-un(170 pages) is an Urdu Nastaliq book OCR’d with a Latin-script model — a total OCR failure producing non-lexical noise. It is unsearchable and must be excluded from all present/absent conclusions. This matters: it is Balochistan’s only Islamiyat volume, and Islamiyat is where every other board carries the jahiliyya material.english-6-unandgeneral-science-6-unare genuinely English-medium (zero Arabic-script characters, coherent English prose) despite the-unsuffix.chemistry-10-unandurdu-9-10-urare 0 bytes. Sindh’s usable file isurdu-9-10-ur.
9. Method note
Searches were run with ripgrep across all extracted text, plus a page-level co-occurrence scan (India|Hindu|Aryan|Vedic|caste|Brahmin × ignorance|barbar|savage|buried alive|infanticide|social evil|cruel custom|uncivilised|dark age|sati|widow-burning) over every English-medium file. That scan returned eight candidate pages corpus-wide; five resolved as false positives — “Barbar” = OCR of “Babar” (Punjab History 7 PAGE 72); “ignorant of Greek language” of Ibn Batuta (Sindh SS8 PAGE 47); “caste” inside a pride-list (Sindh Islamiyat 9 PAGE 146); “Dark Ages” = medieval Europe (Sindh SS7); “Sati” = Sutlej (KP English 10). No page in the English-medium corpus places an Indian-side subject and a barbarism-side predicate in genuine contact. All 49 quotations above were re-verified by exact substring match against source files before inclusion.
The Urdu-medium sweep was run separately over every *-ur and *-un file across all four boards, using whitespace-tolerant matching to survive Nastaliq OCR word-splitting (exact-string matching alone undercounts — jahalat renders as two tokens in the BTBB file, and qabl repeatedly renders as an unrelated form). The same page-level co-occurrence test was applied in Urdu (jahiliyya / jahalat × Hindu / Hindustan / Bharat) and returned zero hits corpus-wide. Every one of the 187 raw sati substring hits was reduced to nine whitespace-delimited candidates and each of those nine was individually adjudicated. Nothing from the Urdu files is quoted; all Urdu findings are reported at structure/topic level with confidence marked Low or Low–Mod.
Highest-value follow-up: re-OCR islamiyat-6-un with a Nastaliq model. It is Balochistan’s only Islamiyat volume, it currently contains nothing readable, and Islamiyat is the subject that carries this thread’s material in every other board.