The region of Gilgit-Baltistan

Excerpts:

The indigenous people in the region comprise speakers of several languages and practice four wider faiths. There are the Shina speakers in Gilgit proper, Burushaski speakers in Hunza, Nagar and Gojal, Wakhi speakers in the upper Hunza valley, and then the mainstream Balti speakers spread across Baltistan. There are Ismailis, Twelver Shias, the followers of Noor Bakhsh (a halfway house between Twelver Shia and the Barelvi school of Sunni thought), and a sprinkling of mainstream Sunnis. They have lived peacefully in the region for centuries, even practicing inter-faith marriages. If there’s one place in Pakistan where Islam is in no danger, it is Gilgit-Baltistan; hence the absence of the self-styled defenders of the faith there.
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Religion retains its pristine spiritual beauty and simplicity, which was the norm across Pakistan until the 1970s, despite the religious parties which had started flexing their muscles for public mind and space in the 1960s, but nothing beyond that.
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The Aga Khan Foundation has done wonders over the years to make basic amenities available to people across the region, even in the vast areas that do not have Ismaili population. Water and sanitation works, the building of tertiary roads, education, healthcare centres and vocational institutes are the sectors where co-operative rather than competitive module of development has been applied, and the results are showing. It is now up to the government to build on the basic spade work that has already been done there.

Read at source: http://blog.dawn.com/2009/11/07/away-from-the-lunatic-fringe/