Viewers were encouraged to stretch and breathe to cultivate healthy bodies and minds, a goal not incompatible with the moderately conservative form of Islam practiced by 90 percent of Pakistanis. Yoga even began to come out into the open, with sessions held in public parks, where some teachers made mild comparisons between yogic meditation and Islamic reflection, or the poses in a simple sun salutation and the positions taken in salat, a ritual Islamic prayer. This opened up yoga to middle-class, conservative Pakistanis who might have remained hostile to the practice had it been presented as a purely Hindu or Indian ascetic discipline.

Today, yoga is immensely popular in all cities of Pakistan; a yoga teacher named Shamshad Haider claims to run 50 yoga clubs in Punjab, and International Yoga Day has been celebrated in Pakistan for three years in a row. Yoga is practiced all the way from Chitral in the north to Karachi in the south. There’s a whole crop of younger teachers now equipped with training from India, Thailand and Bali, as well as from yoga schools in North America and Britain. Teachers at swank studios in Karachi attract students through Facebook pages and affiliations with the International Yoga Alliance.

Their classes incorporate styles from hatha, vinyasa flow, ashtanga, even power yoga and Bikram yoga. They use the Sanskrit names for the poses interchangeably with the English ones, and both women-only and mixed classes are popular. Meanwhile, yoga still appears on television, in schools and in park sessions, with women meditating while wearing shalwar kameezes, or full abayas and hijabs, and men with long beards and shalwar kameezes performing sun salutations next to men in track pants and T-shirts.

Yoga purists would probably bristle at the attempt to dissociate yoga from Hinduism or India, but it’s not that different from what’s happening to yoga in the West, with its hot yoga studios and aerial yoga and Yoga Asana championships. It also reminds me of what has been happening to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. In the West, Sufism has been disconnected from its Muslim roots and presented as a universal movement of peace and tolerance, the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi portrayed as a lovelorn poet singing of love rather than a conservative Islamic cleric bent on forging a fierce connection with his creator. A necessary sacrifice, perhaps, to spread the universal message of peace, tolerance and love.

Pakistan, which was amputated from India in 1947, then lured by the promise of power and richness coming from the Middle East, has never been able to decide whether its identity is Arab or South Asian. After decades of trying to identify with a purely Islamic heritage and history, some Pakistanis are finally recognizing that their heritage is unique, informed by strains of tradition and heritage from many geographical areas: Central Asia and Persia, as well as India and the Middle East.