When Jinnahbhai Poonja and his wife Mithibai were blessed with a baby boy they never imagined that the infant, whom they named Mahomedali, was destined to become a man of history. Jinnahbahi’s parents had settled in the state of Rajkot but soon after his marriage in the last quarter of the nineteenth century he shifted to Karachi where the young couple rented a second-floor apartment in Wazir Mansion. Prior to 1879 the Karachi municipality did not issue birth and death certificates and the correct birth date of Mahomedali is uncertain. The register of the Madressa-tul-Islam, where he was first enrolled, shows that “Mahomedali Jinnahbhai” was born on Oct 20, 1875, but in later years he claimed that it was Dec 25, 1876. He also modified his name to Mohammad Ali Jinnah shortly before his enrolment at the Lincoln’s Inn.
Thomas Carlyle defined history as “the biography of great men,” and seldom has this proved more true than in the life of Jinnah. It is said that spoken words may not live long unless preserved in the encasement of print. Jinnah’s speeches and writings show that nothing can destroy words that are pregnant with imperishable verities distilled by the fire of sincerity. But mere words without action are meaningless, and this was what Jinnah also believed. He fearlessly articulated what he thought, and did what he said. as though to fulfil the Quranic injunction: “O you who have attained to faith!… Most loathsome is it in the sight of God that you say what you do not do!” It was the anxious solicitation for justice and truth that were the motivating impulses in Jinnah’s eventful life.
When he set sail for England in January 1893, Jinnah was only sixteen. By the time he returned in 1896, he was like a diver on a high board ready to plunge into the tempestuous waters of Indian politics. The three-and-a-half years in England had moulded him into a liberal nationalist. He had spent many an hour at the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons and was enthralled by the debates where men with razor-sharp intellects would vigorously defend their points of view on the outstanding issues of the times.
That was the time when the groundswell of support for the Liberal Party enabled William Gladstone to become prime minister for the third time in 1892. The same surge brought Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi from Bombay, into the House of Commons form the Central Finsbury constituency. During the campaign the defeated Tory prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had disparagingly described Dadabhai as a “black man” and the racial slur was never forgotten by Jinnah. He said later: “From that day I have been an uncompromising enemy of all forms of colour bar and racial prejudice.”
The other lesson that Jinnah was never to forget was the value of free speech. In her memoirs, preserved at the National Archives in Islamabad, Fatima Jinnah reminisced about her brother’s belief that without freedom of speech a nation would wither “like a rose bush that is planted in a place where there is neither sunshine nor air.” He was convinced that the unrestrained flow of expression and opinion, like a breeze from an open window, is the birthright of man. Jinnah despised religious obscurantism, which he believed was responsible for the stifling of free articulation of thought among Indian Muslims. This was evident from his address to the Aligarh University Union on Feb 5, 1938: “What the Muslim League has done is to set you free from the reactionary elements of Muslims… It has certainly freed you from that undesirable element of maulvis and maulanas.”
Three years earlier, on Feb 7, 1935, he had declared at the Central Legislative Assembly: “Religion should not be allowed to come into politics.” In his concluding remarks at the Muslim League Legislators’ Convention in Delhi in April 1946, Jinnah was even more emphatic: “What are we fighting for? What are we aiming at? It is not theocracy – not a theocratic state…”
Amir Ahmed Khan, the Raja of Mahmoodabad, was like a nephew to Jinnah and would unfailingly stay with him in Bombay for at least three months every year.
In a paper he had prepared in 1967 for a conference on Partition in London he disclosed that Jinnah “thoroughly disapproved” his “advocacy of an Islamic state.” And he asked him to refrain from expressing such views from “the League platform, lest the people might be led to believe that Jinnah shared my views and that he was asking me to convey such ideas to the public.” In the same paper he concluded, “now that I look back I realise how wrong I had been,” because Jinnah rightly wanted only a homeland for the Muslims, not an Islamic state.
Jinnah’s extempore address to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly on Aug 11, 1947, was perhaps his most forceful assertion, that the state had nothing to do with matters of faith. That historic speech, a bare thirteen months before his death, encapsulates his vision for the country that he founded. The rest of the Pakistan story has been about the deconstruction of that vision.
With the adoption of the Objectives Resolution by the Muslim members of the Constituent Assembly in March 1949, Islam became the state religion and, in the words of former chief justice Muhammad Munir, “Ahmadis became the first target” of the religious parties. With the adoption of the Second Amendment to the 1973 Constitution on Sept 10, 1974, they became a hated non-Muslim minority.
Despite the Objectives Resolution, the 1956 Constitution did not declare Islam as the state religion and its preamble stated correctly: “The founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, declared that Pakistan would be a democratic state based on Islamic principles of justice.” But Article 2 of the 1973 Constitution declares Islam to be “the state religion of Pakistan” and the oath prescribed in its Third Schedule for the president, prime minister, governors, chief ministers, federal and provincial ministers and all members of the legislatures reads: “I will strive to preserve the Islamic ideology which is the basis for the creation of Pakistan.”
Amazingly this formulation is borrowed from Article 20 of Yahya Khan’s Legal Framework Order of 1970 and is a crass distortion of history. Not once did Jinnah refer to, or define, any ideology for Pakistan. In fact, it was not till 1962, when the Ayub Khan cabinet was discussing the Political Parties Bill, that the question of the country’s ideology was raised. Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, who was later to become president of Pakistan, observed correctly that this had still to be defined.
Critics say that Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan as a democratic and progressive homeland for the Muslims was like a sandcastle on some dreamland shore which the turbulent waves swept away. Yet it is undeniable that had he not died so soon after the emergence of Pakistan his vision would have been fulfilled. It is intriguing that it should have taken authors of the 1973 Constitution a quarter of a century to discover that Islam was the ideology and “the basis for the creation of Pakistan.” The discovery was patently false, as it was not what the Quaid-e-Azam had ever envisaged
well it is good to read and analyze that article., but that Jinnah vision of Pakistan as a democratic and progressive homeland for the Muslims was bound fail from the beginning. Because Jinnah never read Quran, never read Hadith, never read Islamic History, Never understood Islam and its fundamentals and its origins And
Topic: Pakistan: The Nation.. The Politics... and The Religion