Pakistan, May 24 -- Prime Minister Imran Khan's promise of making Pakistan a welfare state - he likes to call it riyasat-i-medina - is commendable. Prof Hossein Askari, an academic at the George Washington University, has developed an Islamic City Index to rate states in order of their adherence to Islamic doctrines and teachings. In the 2017 rankings, only three Muslim majority countries made it to the top 50. Malaysia, having the best ratings among all Muslim majority countries, stood at number 43. These ratings show that according to Prof Askari's system, Quran's teachings are better represented in Western societies than in Muslim majority countries.
Most of Pakistan's issues are related to governance and are a result of man-made socio-...