Free B005OWFTDW EBOK by John Freeman Page B

green-and-white Pakistani flag, decorated with a crescent moon and star, on Independence Day. That was a great accomplishment, a promising start for the Islamic cause. But ever since, he said, the foreign powers have worked against Pakistan becoming an Islamic state.
    This is not exactly true. In the 1980s, the United States backed the Islamic military dictator Zia ul-Haq, who had overthrown and then hanged the democratically elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Together, the United States and Pakistan supported the mujahideen fighters in their battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As the war raged inside Afghanistan, the United States looked the other way as Zia moved Pakistan towards becoming an Islamic state, one that ideologically matched the Islamic cause over the border in Afghanistan.
    It was in this period that Jinnah was rewritten, redrawn, repackaged. The lawyer and astute politician was transformed into a proud Islamist. The school books were overhauled, and to this day retain the view of Zia and his Islamic ideologues. The language became stridently anti-Hindu, more fundamentalist. Some of the recasting verged on the comical as the curriculum mandarins tiptoed around uncomfortable facts. One passage in a social studies book reads: ‘At the initial period of his political career, Jinnah had a conviction that the interests of the Hindus and those of the Muslims were not colliding, but with the passage of time he had to change his mind.’ Jinnah is described as a ‘true devotee of Islam’. Pakistan, the book says, is not merely a ‘tract of land’ but ‘a laboratory for the implementation of Islamic injunctions’.
    Jinnah, for all his secular habits, is partly to blame for this posthumous transformation. He often said one thing, but did another. He carved out his state on the basis of Islam and rallied the support of the Islamic religious leaders, but never intended that Pakistan would be a theocratic state. When he was garnering the support of the imams, photographs show Jinnah looking remarkably uncomfortable. In one shot he stands under a banner written in Urdu – ‘Allah is Great’ – looking terrified of the throngs of youth jostling around him.
     
     
    T he Jinnah portrait in the inner sanctum at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi – the room where Pakistan’s top commanders meet each month around a long, oval, polished wood table – presumably reflects the Pakistani Army’s verdict on Jinnah. A tall, lean, elegantly dressed Jinnah, in beige summer suit, white shirt and tie, sits in a 1940s art deco armchair, his right arm draped over the back of the chair, a cigarette in his fingers. He could be mistaken for an imperious, pre-World War II Hollywood producer. Outwardly, there is an eerie echo of the current army chief, the most powerful man in Pakistan, General Parvez Ashfaq Kiyani, in military fatigues, erect and handsome, who presides at the table in front of the Jinnah portrait chain-smoking cigarettes much as the founder did.
    There seems little question that Jinnah would be shocked by Pakistan today. His daughter, Dina Wadia, now in her nineties and living in Manhattan, has told acquaintances that her father must be turning in his grave. On 11 September 2001, exactly fifty-three years to the day after his death, al-Qaeda showed the world how far Islamic extremists had eaten into the fabric of Pakistan.
    A civilian government tarnished by the corruption and nepotism that Jinnah warned about in his inauguration-day speech is nominally in charge. But the army essentially runs the show. In July, the government granted General Kiyani an unprecedented three-year extension of his term, handing the military even more power. The military receives about 17 per cent of the total state budgetary expenditure, a precedent that Jinnah established when he devoted an overwhelming proportion of Pakistan’s first budget to the army.
    Today, the Pakistani Army is convinced that the India Jinnah left behind is