Political biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, 1876-1948, statesman and founder of Pakistan.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, 1876-1948, statesman and founder of Pakistan.

Saleena Karim's Secular Jinnah & Pakistan: What the Nation Doesn't Know is a unique study of M.A. Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, and his ideological convictions. Seven years after it was originally published, the book has been thoroughly revised and new material has been added, including updates in light of recent scholarship; commentary on how the ideological divide has affected the education curriculum; discussion of Bengal in the ideological context, with a full review of the controversy over the Delhi Resolution of 1946; details of how Chief Justice Munir and Governor-General Ghulam Mohammed justified the first dictatorship of Pakistan; notes on Scheduled Caste leader J.N. Mandal's political support of the Muslim League; assessment of resistance to socialist economic reforms by landlords backed by religious leaders; accounts of provincial politics; evidence from early Muslim sources that support the progressive thinking of Pakistan's founders; extensive reviews of works only touched upon in the previous edition; appraisal of Jinnah's powers as a person as well as a statesman; and more. Popularly known for having revealed that a false quote ascribed to Pakistan's founder is still being used as part of the standard argument for a 'secular Jinnah', the book's most important contribution is its argument that while scholarship recognises three ideological categories in Pakistan - religious, secular, and synthesist - Jinnah belongs to a fourth, and this has yet to be explored.

In 1916-17 Mohammed Ali Jinnah persuaded the warring Hindu and Muslim politicians to sign a pact for an agreed future constitution of a united India. For this he was hailed as "Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity." Thirty years later, he brought about Partition. What was responsible for this change? Personal ambition? British intrigues or Hindu obduracy? This book questions many of the myths that have grown around India's struggle for independence and highlights many factors that have been deliberately suppressed by historians on both sides of the border.

The issues concerning the Partition of India in 1947 have long been debated both by Indian and Pakistani historians, but now a leader directly responsible for the Defence and Foreign Affairs of India has come forward with a historical appraisal that helps both countries come to a better understanding of the contentions between them. Jaswant Singh has not written a hagiography of Jinnah, but focused on him as a key figure in the final deliberations preceding Independence.

Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. The Muslim Secular complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri politician Sheikh Abdullah, and the nonviolent Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Revising the common view that they were mere acolytes of their celebrated Hindu colleagues M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, this book argues that these three men collectively produced a distinct Muslim secularity from within the grander family of secular Indian nationalism; an intellectual tradition that has retained religion within the public space while nevertheless preventing it from defining either national membership or the state. At a time when many across the decolonising world believed that identity-based majorities and minorities were incompatible and had to be separated out into sovereign equals, Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan thought differently about the problem of religious pluralism in a postcolonial democracy. The minority, they contended, could conceive of the majority not just as an antagonistic entity that is set against it, but to which it can belong and uniquely complete. Premising its claim to a single, united India upon the universalism of Islam, champions of the Muslim secular mobilised notions of federation and popular sovereignty to replace older monarchical and communitarian forms of power. But to finally jettison the demographic inequality between Hindus and Muslims, these thinkers redefined equality itself. Rejecting its liberal definition for being too abstract and thus prone to majoritarian assimilation, they replaced it with their own rendition of Indian parity to simultaneously evoke commonality and distinction between Hindu and Muslim peers. Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan achieved this by deploying a range of concepts from profane inheritance and theological autonomy to linguistic diversity and ethical pledges. Retaining their Muslimness and Indian nationality in full, this crowning notion of equality-as-parity challenged both Gandhi and Nehru's abstractions and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's supposedly dangerous demand for Pakistan.

Was Jinnah the sole driving force behind the Partition of India? Or was he a champion of Islam who stood for a new Islamic renaissance? Mahomed Ali Jinnah started his political career in the Congress as a staunch Indian nationalist. He believed in secular politics and was opposed to bringing religion into it. He was known as an ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity. So why did he, towards the end of his career, initiate the creation of a separate Muslim-state? This new biography provides the answers while casting fresh light on Jinnah's character, his personal life, his political and legal careers, his relationship with Gandhi, Nehru as well as his disagreements with their ideas. Carefully examining the major events of his life – from early childhood to his first speech as President of the All India Muslim League – Yasser Latif Hamdani presents a complex and compelling portrait of Jinnah who is often narrowly regarded as a votary of a theocratic Islamic state. Based on extensive research and a wealth of archival material, Hamdani has revealed those traits of Jinnah’s personality that made him the most misunderstood leader of his times. He also comments on how religious zealots have turned Pakistan into an Islamic Republic contrary to Jinnah's vision.