Cyril Radcliffe was given five weeks to draw the border between India and Pakistan.
He had never been to India. He arrived in July 1947, was handed out-of-date maps and census returns, worked in a bungalow in the heat, and produced a line that cut through Punjab and Bengal. He left the subcontinent the day the line was published and never returned. He later burned his papers and declined his fee.
Between ten and twenty million people were displaced. Somewhere between one and two million were killed. It remains the largest mass migration in human history.
A man with no knowledge of a place, working for five weeks from bad maps, determined where a fifth of humanity would live and who they would die alongside. And the resulting line is now treated as a fact of nature, defended by two nuclear-armed states.
That is the nation-state in the Muslim world, in one biography.
It is not how the world has always been organised. The nation-state is an invention, it is European, it is recent, and it was built to solve a specific European problem.
The problem was the Thirty Years' War.
Westphalia, in 1648, ended it with a specific and rather brilliant renunciation. Sovereignty becomes territorial. Each state is supreme inside its borders.
That was a sane answer to a real catastrophe, and I would not want to argue otherwise.
The difficulty is what happened next. A local remedy for a local pathology was then declared to be the natural form of political organisation everywhere, and exported, at gunpoint, to civilisations that had never had the Reformation, had not fought the Thirty Years' War, and were not organised on the assumptions the remedy presupposed.
A nation-state cannot function unless its citizens hold their national identity above competing loyalties.
Which is why the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, founded in 1969 to enable collective action, has in more than half a century never imposed a meaningful sanction on any aggressor, never coordinated a military response to an attack on any Muslim population, and never produced a common currency, market or defence pact.
That is usually explained as cowardice or corruption, and there is plenty of both available. But it is more simply structural. An organisation of sovereign states cannot act against the sovereignty of its members, because sovereignty is the thing each member exists to protect.
None of which makes the alternative obvious, and this is where the argument has to be honest.
"The nation-state is a prison" is a diagnosis, not a programme. Fifty-seven states exist. A Pakistani is not pretending. Nobody dissolves that by observing that Radcliffe was unqualified.
What the diagnosis does establish is narrower and still worth having. The current arrangement is not natural, not ancient, and not chosen. It is the residue of decisions taken by a handful of Europeans, some of whom had never seen the places they were dividing, one of whom did the job in five weeks with the wrong maps and then burned his working.
Whatever else is true, that is a strange thing to defend as the permanent shape of the world.