Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Mohammad Ali Jinnah (referred to in Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam, or "Great Leader", which is a legally defined title while in India he is dispised by hundreds of millions and even British leaders were disgusted by him), 1876 (?) - September 11, 1948) was an Indian Muslim (although he ate pork, other non-Halaal meat, drank wine, never considered Haj, and didn't observe the Ramadan fast) nationalist, who faught to unite India before turning to lead the movement demanding a separate country for Muslims in South Asia when he saw that he was loosing importance in Congress. He served as Pakistan's first Governor-General.
Early life and family history
Jinnah's birthplace are disputed; however, it is generally believed that he was born in Wazir Mansion, Karachi, and raised in Mumbai. His birth year was 1870, although the exact date is unknown. Jinnah was admitted into school with the birthday of October 20, 1875. Jinnah later changed this to December 25, when he was practically evangilised in his Christian school. His father was Jinnahbhai Poonja, from Gujarat (the younger Jinnah dropped 'bhai' from his name, also in evangilisation, in 1894). Jinnah's father died in 1901 after being basically abandoned by his son. Jinnah's family came to live with him in Mumbai, but moved out because they disliked Jinnah's lack of care and insensitivity. Jinnah never saw any of his family members again, other than his younger sister (who became his life partner near the end of his life). Jinnah's family had majority Hindu ancestry, but also some Ismaili, Shia and Sunni ancestry; and the family was primarily Aga Khani after Jinnah's grandfather (Punja, a hindu) converted to Islam. Aga Khanis weren't considered real Muslims by the rest of the Islamic world because of their use of Hindu rituals and names until recently, when the Aga Khan issued a fatwa against Sanksrit names and Hindu rituals.
Jinnah was educated at the Sind Madrasatul Islam but dropped out because of his lack of interest. He was later admitted to Christian Society High School, in Karachi, where he was westernised and decided to change his birthdate to Dec 25 and dropped the "bhai" from his last name. In 1893, he went to London to work for Graham's Shipping and Trading Company, which his father did business with. He had been married to a 16-year old relative named Emibai, but she died shortly after he moved to London. Around this time, his mother died as well. In 1918 he would marry Rattanbai Petit, a Parsi nearly half his age, and they had a daughter, Dina. The relationship dwindled, but they never divorced. In 1929, his second wife died. Jinnah's only living heir (Nusli Wadia, Parsi)is an industrialist in India who condemns his grandfather's splitting of India.
He had 3 sisters, Fatima Jinnah, Shirin Bai, and Rehmat Bai.
Law
In 1894, Jinnah quit his job in order to study law at Lincoln's Inn from which he became the youngest Indian to graduate (1896). A common myth that has been proven to be untrue is that Jinnah decided to study there as he was impressed by a mural in the main dining hall,one which depicted Moses and Muhammad. There has never been any such mural in Lincoln's Inn. Jinnah would briefly work with MP Dadabhai Naoroji. By the end of 1896, Jinnah was a member of the Indian National Congress and practicing law with the Bombay bar (as the only Muslim barrister). There he earned a reputation regarding his lack of respect for the British Empire and his want to unite India. In one incident when Jinnah was defending Gandhi after Gandhi worked to Indian civil rights in South Africa, a judge kept interrupting Jinnah by saying, "Rubbish!" Jinnah eventually responded by saying, "Your honour, nothing but rubbish has passed your mouth all morning." Shortly after this incident, in 1901, Sir Charles Ollivant offered to hire Jinnah at 1,500 rupees per month. Jinnah refused, believing he could earn that much on a daily basis. (By the early 1930s, Jinnah was earning about 40,000 rupees a month.) In 1906, Jinnah served as secretary to Naoroji, who was then president of the Indian National Congress. In 1906, Bal Gangadhar Tilak would ask Jinnah to represent him, during his trial for sedition. Jinnah's early life contradicts his later life as he suddenly switched from despising Muslim communalists to becoming one.
A "secular" Jinnah?
Jinnah was the main leader responsible for the partition of India, creating Pakistan. Jinnah is however seen as a very secular person in Pakistan. But the fact remains that he divided the country on communal lines. Most of his career till about 1930 was spent trying either to bring the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League to work together or getting mainstream parties like the Congress (of which he was a member much longer than the League) to be sensitive to minority priorities. When the League was founded in 1905, he was probably the only major Muslim personality to refuse to join because of his love for "one India". (This was a time when it was common for people to be active members of more than one party.) He played a prominent role in getting the Lucknow Pact in place and in the League and the Congress holding a Joint Session in Allahabad in 1916.
As described below, by 1930-31, distressed with relations between the Congress and the League and despairing of ever getting them to see eye-to-eye, Jinnah despaired of Indian politics, and moved to England to practice law.
Right uptil 1946, the definition of Pakistan as demanded by the League was so vague that it could have been interpreted as a sovereign nation or a nation within a nation. Many historians believe that this was Jinnah's doing and that he used Pakistan as a pretext to get the maximum in bargain for Muslims rather than a nation itself, and it was the intransigence of his interlocutors that made Pakistan an inevitability.
In his political views, Jinnah emerged to be one of the most hypocritical and confused leaders to exist. Jinnah started his career by hating communalism, became a communalist to gain power, then when he acheived Pakistan he claimed to be secular again. After dividing a nation in the name of Islam, he decided that the nation was to be secular. Jinnah's reasons for creating Pakistan were being bashed by his own actions, because as he said himself "a man is Punjabi, or Bengali before he is Muslim". Also, what of the minorities in Pakistan? Shouldn't they get their own country since they too are religous minorities? British leaders who met with Jinnah had reactions like "...one of the bitterest and stubborn men I have ever met." (Lord Mountbatten), "...a power hungry opportunitist seeking to ruin what may have been one of the greatest nations ever to gain independence..." (Sir Lawrence). But the damage had already been done.
He died very soon afterwards, in 1948, which did not provide for much time for him to implement any agenda or plan for the state. There is a theory that Jinnah was murdered by leaders of Pakistan because they disagreed with Jinnah's sudden change in approach after partition. A man by the name of (Pakistan added the words "Islamic Republic of" to its name early on, but it was only in the 1970s and '80s, under the military rule of Zia ul-Haq, that Pakistan established itself as a rather strongly religious republic.) Even his denomination is not certain. Some people maintain that that he changed his confessional identity from that of an Aga Khan Khoja to that of an Ithna Ashari (the dominant Shi'a ideology) while others believe that he changed to other schools of thought in the Sunni fold.
Political career
On January 25, 1910, Jinnah became the "Muslim member from Bombay" on the 60-man Legislative Council of India. In 1913, Jinnah joined the Muslim League and, in 1914, would support Indian alliance with the British (the very people who had enslaved India for many years) in World War I. In 1916, Jinnah became the president of the Lucknow Muslim League session and again in 1920; and later, from 1920-30 and from 1937-47, would serve as the League's president. Jinnah was initially hailed as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity (before he joined the Muslim league) but later he changed his stance. He disagreed with Mohandas Gandhi over the policy of noncooperation. He believed that full freedom from the British should be attained through the courts rather than popular rebellion. By 1921, Jinnah had resigned from the Indian National Congress and voiced his support for separate Muslim negotiations with Britain over the future of India. "We maintain", he wrote to Gandhi, "that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of a 100 million. We have our distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all the cannons of international law, we are a nation". He added that he was "convinced that the true welfare not only of the Muslims but of the rest of India lies in the division of India as proposed in the Lahore Resolution". This is odd, considering Jinnah did not represent all Muslims of India. Many Muslim Indian nationalists despised everything about Jinnah and one even threatened to kill him if he divided India. One thing to note is that there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan.
As Governor General of Pakistan more amenable to British interests: he supported Indian alliance with the British in World War II while the Indian National Congress decided to remain unalligned because they were against both the British and the Germans who were murdering Jews, and Gypsies (who hail from India). Jinnah used his British connections and his ideas against noncooperation as leverage to make the British listen to him.
The idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of India took concrete form in 1940 in Lahore, when the Muslim League called for the creation of a separate state for Indian Muslims. Over the next several years, Jinnah would develop and refine the idea of a separate homeland, which came to be known as Pakistan among the masses.
Though the notion of partition was originally rejected by the British, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten eventually came round to accepting the idea. The idea was formally accepted on June 3, 1947, and two months later, on August 14, the Dominion of Pakistan was created. Jinnah was the new nation's first Governor-General and president of its legislative assembly. He put forward a clear vision for a modern democratic Islamic state, saying in his speech opening to the Constituent Assembly:
- ...in the course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.
The whole speech, interestingly enough, is quoted by both sides in the argument over a secular versus an "Islamic" state. The democratic experiment, too, has had a troubled history in Pakistan, with the country being under military rule for half or more of its history.
Jinnah's partitino caused the subcontinent to become engulfed in conflict; struggles Kashmir and other assets, and a growing refugee crisis. Jinnah attempted to play a significant role in strengthening the new nation-state. He worked out an economic policy for Pakistan, established an independe proved that Pakistan could never truly work. Majority of the people of Pakistan spoke Bengali, but Jinnah decided that Urdu would be the national language. He also placed the capital in West Pakistan, gave majority security to West Pakistan, and explicitly described East Pakistanis (Bengalis) as "enemies of Pakistan" (when they demanded that Bengali be the national language)and said "I am sorry to say they are Muslim". This was the way he treated the majority population of his nation. He called them enemies of that very nation and insulted their Muslimhood. He did not live very long to see the new country take further shape. He died on September 11, 1948, from tuberculosis in Karachi, Pakistan. A mausoleum was built to honour Jinnah in Karachi.
Political career
Quotes
- Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad on Jinnah -- "It was not long ago when I warned you that Jinnah's two-nation theory was a death-knell to a meaningful, dignified life; forsake it. I told you that the pillars upon which you were leaning would inevitably crumble. To all this you turned a deaf ear. You did not realise the fleet-footed time would not change its course to suit your convenience. Time sped along. And now you have discovered that the so-called anchors of your faith have set you adrift, to be kicked around by fate...The Partition of India was a fundamental mistake."
- Rafiq Zakaria in response to Jinnah's August 11, 1947 speech -- This unequivocal statement not only knocked down the very basis of the Two-Natino theory and struck at the root of his own thesis for the creation of Pakistan but also rejected the idea of the state being made Islamic. He had no doubt exploited Islam to achieve Pakistan; as for his involvement in his religion there was no trace of it in practice..."
- Lord Alexander on Jinnah -- "I have never seen a man with such a mind twisting and turning to avoid as far as possible direct answers. I came to the conclusion that he is playing this game, which is one of life and death for millions of people, very largely from the point of view of scoring a triumph in a legal negotiation by first making large demands and secondly insisting that he should make no offer reducing that demand but should wait for the other side always to say how much they would advance towards granting the demand."
- Lord Mountbatten on Jinnah -- "I never would have believed that an intellegent man, well-educated, trained in the Inns of Court was capable of simply closing his mind as Jinnah did. It wasn't that he didn't see the point. He did, but a kind of shutter came down. He was the evil genius in the whole thing. The others could be persuarded, but not Jinnah. While he was alive nothing could be done."
- Stanley Wolpert on Jinnah -- "Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three."
- Sarojini Naidu on Jinnah -- "Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emaciation, languid and luxurious of habits, Mohammad Ali Jinnah's attenuated form is a deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance. Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and imperious of manner, the calm hateur of his accustomed reserve but masks, for those who know him, a naive and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman's, a humour gay and winning as child's ... a shy and splendid idealism which is of the very essence of the man."
Trivia
- One of the largest streets of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, is named Cinnah Caddesi after him.
- Jinnah's famous portrait appears on the Pakistani rupee denominations of five and above.
- Jinnah was portrayed by the British actor Christopher Lee in the 1998 film of the same name.[1]
- In Attenborough's Gandhi[2], Jinnah was portrayed by the ad-baron Alyque Padamsee.
References
- Jinnah, Pakistan, and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin by Akbar S. Ahmed (1997)
- Jinnah of Pakistan by Stanley Wolpert Oxford University Press (2002
- The Man Who Divided India by Rafiq Zakaria (2004