1

Jinnah, in a Class of His Own

by Eqbal Ahmad
Dawn, 11 June 1995
Mohammad Ali Jinnah is an enigma of modern history. His aristocratic English lifestyle,
Victorian manners, and secular outlook rendered him a most unlikely leader of Indias
Muslims. Yet, he led them to separate statehood, creating history and, in Saad R. Khairis
apt phrase, altering geography.
Several scholars, among them H.M. Seervai, Aisha Jalal and Saad R. Khairi, help explain
his shift from Indian nationalism to Muslim separatism but the mystery of Jinnahs appeal
remains. After all, neither Muslim nationalism nor the idea of Pakistan originated with
him; he embraced them somewhat reluctantly.
There is another way of viewing the matter. In the twentieth century, two extraordinary
personalities competed for the leadership of Indian Muslims. They were Abul Kalam
Azad and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. As a point of departure in comprehending the
aspirations of Muslims in India, we might review their biographical profiles.
The contrasts in their family background, education, culture, and styles of leadership
were remarkable. Azads ancestors belonged since Emperor Babars time to the Persian
and Urdu-speaking Muslim aristocracy of India. His great-grandfather was one of the last
Ruknul Mudarrasin, a position roughly analogous to todays minister of education, in
Mughal India. After the War of 1857 his family migrated to Madina where it intermingled
with the Sharifain aristocracy. Azads mother was a daughter of Sheikh Mohammed
Zaher Watri, in his time Madinas best known Alim. His father Maulana Khair al-Din
gained much fame in the Muslim world for his ten-volume work on Islam, and for his
central role in the restoration of Nahr Zubeida, Makkahs main source of water. Among
Indian Muslims who were still wistful over a lost empire, and reeling from the excesses
of British colonisation, it is hard to envision a family with better credentials than Abul
Kalam Azads.
Abul Kalam was a most worthy scion of an extraordinary family with roots deep in the
dualityIndian and pan-Islamicto which South Asias Muslims have been historically
linked both psychologically and culturally. Born in Makkah, he was fluent in Arabic, at
ease in Persian, and a most gifted writer of Urdu prose. He was deeply immersed in the
mystical tradition of Islam. As early as 1919 he wrote on Sarmad Shaheed and the grand
dichotomy between state and civil society in Islam. His later commentaries on the Holy
Quraan are still regarded as among the best in the world.
Who is your master among the mufassareen? I asked the late Maulana Kausar Niazi
some years ago. Abul Kalam he replied reflexively. Al-Hilal, the magazine Azad
founded in 1912, at age 22, marked the beginning of serious, mass circulation Urdu
journalism. With its successor al-Balgah, it remains a milestone in the development of
Urdu as a popular vehicle of political and social discourse. Azad was a spellbinding

2
speaker and, like Jinnah, an ardent nationalist. In 1923, at age 35, he was the youngest
man to be elected president of the Indian National Congress, a record Nehru will break
later. An overwhelming majority of Indias Ulema supported him.
The man we shall later revere as the Quaid-i-Azam was a contemporary of Azad, and a
most unlikely contender for Muslim leadership. He was born in 1876; Azad in 1890. But
beyond the proximity of age, the two stood in sharp contrast to each other. While Azads
aristocratic roots lay in the Muslim heartland of UP and Bengal, Jinnah was born to a
middle class business family in the port town of Hindu-dominated Karachi. At age 21 he
moved to England, thence to Bombay, the modern gateway to British India. Unlike Azad
who belonged to the majority Sunni denomination of Islam, Jinnah came from the
minority Shia community. He was the prototypical westernized Indian, tutored at
Lincolns Inn, tailored at Saville Row, in his youth a Shakepearian actor, a
constitutionalist barrister in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, married to a Parsi woman. More
at home in English than his native Gujrati, Jinnah spoke little Urdu which he would later
designate as Pakistans official language, knew neither Persian nor Arabic, and had only
the rudimentary knowledge of Islam which is common to western educated Muslims. He
was anathema to an overwhelming majority of the Ulema of the subcontinent, including
so grand a figure as Maulana Husain Ahmed Madani and such ideologue as Abul Ala
Maudoodi.
Mr. Jinnah made little effort to overcome his obvious handicaps. Unlike Barrister M.K.
Gandhi with whom Jinnah shared similarities of language, class, and education, and who
donned the Mahatmas home spun dhoti, Jinnah stuck to his western ways and pin-stripe
suits. He bowed but rarely to populist symbols, appearing only occasionally at political
ralies, and shunning the display of emotion in public. Reasoned arguments and cold logic
were the hallmark of Jinnahs discourse. He spoke at political rallies as though he were
addressing a courtroom, or a conference of lawyers. This is not the populist style
anywhere, least of all in South Asia. Yet, in less that a decade of his return from London
in 1935, he had eclipsed his political foes no less than colleagues in the Muslim League,
and successfully established himself and the League as the sole spokesman of Indias
Muslims. In the elections of 1937 the Muslim League barely survived as a minor political
party; in 1940 it set Pakistan as its goal. Barely seven years later the new state was born.
In the Introduction to this first volume of Jinnah papers Professor Zaidi has asked this
central question: What then turned Jinnah into the embodiment of Muslim hopes and
aspirations? One answer, admirably documented by Saad Khairi and H.M. Seervai, is
that the leadership of the Indian National Congress allowed Jinnah no alternative even
though he constantly probed for one. But a deeper explanation offered in Professor
Zaidis Introduction worth quoting:
What distinguished Jinnah from his great contemporaries is that he was quite selfconsciously a modern man one who valued, above all, reason, discipline, organisation,
and economy. Jinnah differed from other Muslim Leaders in so far as he was
uncompromisingly committed to substance rather than symbol, reason rather than
emotion, modernity rather than tradition.

3
But how could this apparently modern figure so powerfully appeal to a people laden with
tradition and religious inertia? I should summarise Professor Zaidis answer to this
question: Jinnahs peculiar appeal worked because collectively Indian Muslims had an
instinctive if inarticulate grasp of recent history. It was a community conscious of its
declining condition, and it had experienced the ineffectiveness of old remedies. After all,
neither the revivalist prescriptions of Shah Waliullah, nor the fiery war cries of Syed
Ahmed Shahid, nor the flamboyant, though confused, demarche of the Khilafat
movement with which Abdul Kalam Azad had become associated and from which
Jinnah kept a pronounced distance provided relief from the ills which afflicted Muslim
society in India. Restorationist alternatives had nearly exhausted when Jinnah re-entered
the second act of contemporary Muslim tragedy in India. On their part, leaders of the
Indian National Congress were so overcome with hubris that they refused to open viable
political doors to this wounded and bewildered people.
Significantly, by then the modernist view of the causes of Muslim decline and of the
remedies it required, especially as articulated by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and his
ideological successors, including Iqbal, had seeped into the consciousness of the Muslim
intelligentsia. There was to this phenomenon also a pan-Islamic context: In the 1930s the
Muslim world as a whole had entered what Albert Hourani has described as the Liberal
Age when Muslim nationalism grew exponentially on the premises of modernism and
reform. Mr Jinnah returned from England in 1935 to find himself swept to the crest of
this wave.
In the four decades that have followed his passing, Pakistan has moved precipitously
away from the country its founding father had envisioned, and the people had created at
costs beyond counting. The two volumes of Jinnah Papers and the archives from which
they are drawn do not tell the story of the cowardice and betrayals which followed the
Quaid-i-Azam. What they do tell us is who he was, how he waged a difficult and deeply
painful struggle for statehood, the vision he nourished, and the hopes he had for this
country. I would like to recall him and remind us in passing of what we have done with
his legacy. I am sorry if in the process I cause some discomfort to some of you readers.