Free B005OWFTDW EBOK by John Freeman

broke down, and Pakistan’s founder nearly died, stranded on the roadside. He passed away a few hours later at Government House on 11 September 1948, his new country as frail as its founder.
     
     
    C ompared to Nehru, Gandhi and the never reticent Mountbatten, Jinnah remains a shadow in twentieth-century world history. Judging from the documents, books, expensive clothes, smart cars and stylish furniture assembled at the national mausoleum and museum in his birthplace, Karachi, he was a fastidious man with a taste for the best of everything. The museum curators’ choices are remarkable for the absence of religious belongings: on show are the artefacts of a rich lawyer. There is a tasselled black silk dressing gown made in Marseilles, shoes from Lobb in London, black patent pumps with satin bows for his swearing in as Governor General, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles by E. B. Meyrowitz in Paris, several suits from among the two hundred Savile Row models that hung in his wardrobe at his death, a cream 1938 Packard convertible and a black 1947 Cadillac.
    ‘The man had class in whatever he did,’ said my companion at the museum, retired brigadier Javed Hussain, a former special forces officer. ‘There was no barrister like him in Bombay. The judges would avoid him. He was so witty, so brilliant the judges felt inadequate in front of him.’ The brigadier particularly liked the photo of Jinnah leaning into a pool table, cue stick in hand, cigar clenched between his teeth, taking aim.
    Jinnah was born into a Shia mercantile family. After secondary school he sailed for London, practised law at Lincoln’s Inn, attended parliamentary sessions at Westminster, and became a devotee of parliamentary procedure. He returned to India just before World War I, committed to Hindu–Muslim unity. His wife, a beautiful socialite, Ruttie Dinshaw, the daughter of Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit, the scion of one of Bombay’s wealthiest families, was a Parsi.

     
     
    T he idea of an independent Muslim homeland on the subcontinent first surfaced in the nineteenth century, and was popularized in the 1930s by the poet Muhammad Iqbal, a national hero in Pakistan, whose portrait can also be found in offices and living rooms all over the country. In the same period, a Cambridge University student, Rahmat Ali, coined the word Pakistan from the initials: Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Sind; and from Baluchistan he added ‘stan’, meaning land.
    These were the fragments that Jinnah built upon as he organized the Muslim League into a pre-eminent position among Muslim voters in the late 1930s. Key to the success of the League was Jinnah’s pact with Sikandar Hayat Khan, a powerful landlord in the Muslim-majority Punjab who controlled the votes of the overwhelmingly rural electorate.
    At the same time, Jinnah began using the rhetoric of Islam and adopted a slogan, ‘Islam in Danger’, for the Muslim League. In 1940, in the Lahore Resolution, Jinnah defined a two-nation theory, saying the Muslims were a ‘nation by any definition’. Under Jinnah’s direction, the League embraced pirs (spiritual leaders) and ulema (religious scholars) as a way of mobilizing the different ethnic and linguistic groups of the Muslim masses.
    The big Muslim landlords who had thrown their weight behind him were not particularly religious but tolerated the use of religion as the path to greater power for themselves in their provinces. For political meetings, Jinnah shed his British suits and began wearing a high-collared, knee-length and tight-fitting jacket known as a sherwani that was favoured by educated Muslims. A portrait of him in these clothes hangs in the National Gallery in Islamabad. He was now referred to as Quaid-i-Azam, or ‘Great Leader’.
    Even so, the main religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed the new platform of the Muslim League, arguing that Islam was a world religion, not a religion of the state. To counteract this opposition, and to overcome