Person · barrister & Muslim League leader · Pakistan

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Date

1876–1948

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

24.861, 67.001

Worth knowing

He achieved it in seven years and lived thirteen months into it, dying of tuberculosis he had concealed throughout the negotiations — a fact Mountbatten later said would have changed everything had the British known it.

About the place

Placed at Karachi, where he was born and where he is buried. His working life was in Bombay, where his house on Malabar Hill still stands empty and disputed.

Connections (7)

• Alternative toMaulana Abul Kalam Azad

  Both were Muslims who had spent decades in the national movement and they reached opposite conclusions about the same problem. Jinnah, a secular constitutionalist who barely observed the faith, concluded that a minority of a quarter could not be protected by guarantees alone and demanded a state. Azad, a trained alim who argued from within Islamic tradition, held that Muslims belonged in an undivided India and that partition would strand more of them than it saved — which, numerically, it did.

• Teaching lineageDadabhai Naoroji

  Jinnah was Dadabhai Naoroji's private secretary in London in 1906, at the Calcutta Congress where Naoroji as president demanded swaraj for the first time from the chair. He joined the Congress before he joined the Muslim League, negotiated the 1916 Lucknow Pact between them, and Gokhale called him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. Every step of the thirty years after that moved in the other direction.

• Contemporary capital withMuhammad Iqbāl

  Iqbāl's 1930 presidential address at Allahabad proposed a consolidated Muslim state in the north-west of India; Jinnah, then in political retreat in London, was persuaded back partly by Iqbāl's letters of 1936 and 1937 urging him to take up the question of Muslim political future in economic as well as communal terms. Iqbāl died in 1938, nine years before the state was made, and the division of credit between the poet who framed the idea and the barrister who obtained it has been argued over in Pakistan ever since.

• Alternative toAbdus Salām

  Jinnah's Pakistan and what happened to its only science Nobel laureate are hard to hold in the same frame. Salam was born at Jhang in 1926, took the Physics prize in 1979 for the electroweak unification, advised the government on science policy and founded its space agency. He was also an Ahmadi, and the second constitutional amendment of 1974 declared Ahmadis non-Muslim; the word Muslim was later effaced from his gravestone at Rabwah, which now reads simply First Nobel Laureate.

• Life routeZiārat & the Residency

  Jinnah spent most of the summer of 1948 at the Residency in Ziarat, being treated for the tuberculosis and lung cancer that had been concealed throughout the years of the Pakistan campaign. He was flown to Karachi on 11 September and died that evening. The concealment matters historically: had his condition been known in 1946 or 1947, the Muslim League's negotiating position rested on a leader whose life expectancy was already measured in months, and several arguments about the pace of Partition turn on it.

• Former member ofIndian National Congress (founding era)

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress in 1906 as Dadabhai Naoroji's secretary at the Calcutta session, served as the Bombay Presidency Association's secretary alongside Pherozeshah Mehta, and became Gokhale called 'the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity' for his negotiation of the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League. He left the Congress over Gandhi's methods in 1920 and the League took him in a different direction over the following two decades.

• Publicly debated withMohandās Karamchand Gandhi

  Gandhi and Jinnah met for fourteen days in September 1944 at Jinnah's house on Malabar Hill, Bombay, to see whether the Congress and the Muslim League could agree on a shared framework for independence. Gandhi arrived without a Congress mandate; the talks broke on whether Pakistan would be settled before or after the British left and on who would speak for Indian Muslims. Jinnah's formula won in 1947.

On these journeys

• Decolonisation, partition and integration

Sources

Wikipedia, “Muhammad Ali Jinnah”. Jinnah’s speeches and statements (ed. Zaidi); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (1985).

• Wikipedia — Muhammad Ali Jinnah