Thread by @_FarihaRashid_

History of the National Anthem of Pakistan:

1. In December 1948, the Government of Pakistan established the National Anthem Committee (NAC) with the task of coming up with the composition and lyrics for the official national anthem of Pakistan.

2. The NAC was initially chaired by the Information Secretary, Sheikh Muhammad Ikram, and its members included many politicians, poets and musicians, including Abdur Rab Nishtar, Ahmad G. Chagla and Hafeez Jullundhri. But it faced difficulties in finding suitable music and lyrics

3. When President of Indonesia became the first foreign head of state to visit Pakistan on 30 Jan 1950, there was no Pak national anthem to be played. In 1950, the impending state visit of the Shah of Iran added urgency to the matter...

and resulted in the government of Pakistan asking the NAC to submit a state anthem without further delay.

4. The NAC chairman, then Federal Minister for Education, Fazlur Rahman, asked several poets and composers to write lyrics but none of the submitted works were deemed suitable.

5. The NAC also examined several different tunes and eventually selected the one presented by Ahmed G. Chagla and submitted it for formal approval. On 21 August 1950, the Government of Pakistan adopted Chagla's tune for the national anthem.

6. The anthem, without lyrics, was performed for the first time for a foreign head of state on the state visit of the Shah of Iran to Pakistan in Karachi on 1 March 1950 by a Pakistan Navy band.

7. Official recognition to the national anthem, however, was not given until August 1954.

8. Eventually, the lyrics written by Hafeez Jullundhri were approved and the new national anthem was broadcast publicly for the first time on Radio Pakistan on 13 August 1954, sung by Hafeez Jullundhri himself.

9. The composer, Ahmed G. Chagla, died in 1953, before the new national anthem was officially adopted.

10. The lyrics have commonality with Persian, rendering them mutually intelligible in both Urdu and Persian languages. No verse in the three stanza lyrics is repeated. The lyrics have heavy Persian poetic vocabulary, and only uses one exclusively Urdu word 'kā'.

(Wikipedia)

Something I failed to mention:

The lyrics were chosen from amongst 723 official entries!