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A few months later I returned to see my friend. Same signing of documents, same clerk, different portrait above the mantel. The new visage showed a serious young man with a full head of dark hair, an Edwardian white shirt, black jacket and tie, alert dark eyes. What happened? I asked.

‘I would like to see Jinnah brimming with life,’ my friend said. He did not want to be reminded of the clerical image that is now considered politically correct in many places throughout Pakistan. An Anglophile acquaintance of my friend’s in Peshawar had found the more youthful, secular image of the founding father as a law student in England and had personally come to hang the replacement.

The question of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s portrait is no small matter in Pakistan. For a foreigner, the choice of portrait is one of the most telling signs of where you are, whom you are meeting. The style of portrait will give clues as to how your host interprets the intentions of the founder, a lonely, ascetic and, by all accounts, brilliant,
British-educated
lawyer.

In most nations, there is energetic debate about the philosophy of the founders; sometimes over who among a group of prominent men was the true maker. There is no doubt about who was responsible for the birth of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. It was Jinnah who had argued for Pakistan, and who stood beside Mountbatten in the new legislature in Karachi to accept a message from King George welcoming Pakistan to the Commonwealth as a new independent nation. But there is ceaseless argument over what the founder intended, and the identity of Pakistan – secular nation or Islamic state – has been in dispute among its citizens ever since.

What did Jinnah envision? Did he wish for a homeland for Muslims, a secular country where they could practise their religion without discrimination, and where others could too? Or did he want Pakistan to be an ideological state committed exclusively to the practice of Islam? Did he even want a separate country from
Hindu-dominated
India? Maybe not. As historians comb the archives, and a small but increasing number of Pakistanis watch with envy as India surges ahead, it has become fashionable to argue that Jinnah used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.

An astute tactician, Jinnah never explicitly answered these vital questions. From 1938, he fought for Pakistan as a principle but provided few details, a tactic that allowed him to appeal to many kinds of Muslims – landlords, religious leaders, the urban elite, bureaucrats, villagers. There is little argument, however, that Jinnah was personally indifferent to his religion – he drank, smoked, ate pork. He was so unaware of the religious calendar that he planned the inauguration-day banquet for Pakistan as a luncheon even though it was Ramadan and the guests would be unable to eat. (It was eventually changed to a dinner.)

In his first speech to the newly independent country, Jinnah sounded the themes of a secular man. Like some upper-class Pakistanis today, he could not speak Urdu, the national language. In his patrician English accent, his voice ravaged by his daily habit of more than fifty Craven A cigarettes, Jinnah said: ‘You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.’

When he took charge as Governor General in the new capital, the brutally hot seaside town of Karachi, he was terminally ill with tuberculosis and lung cancer. He died eleven months later aged seventy-one. He did not write an autobiography, and had few confidants. His wife had died of ill health ten years after they married. His constant companion, his sister Fatima, had little of substance to say during his life, although later she tried to keep the secular flame alive during a brief career as a politician.

The first year of Pakistan was marked by the staggering bloodletting that accompanied partition. The exchequer was empty. Experienced Muslim bureaucrats, some of whom had ruled large swathes of territory for the British in India and Burma in great style, arrived in Karachi to find not even desks and chairs for their makeshift offices.

Jinnah’s physical decline prevented him from taking on the usual role of founding father: galvanizing the people. He spent his last weeks sequestered in the clear air of remote Baluchistan, his body a skeleton of less than eighty pounds. When his doctors agreed to fly him back to Karachi so he could die in dignity, Jinnah lay in the plane gasping for air from oxygen canisters. The ambulance that took him from the airport to Government House 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 the anti-Pakistan Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind, Jinnah made sure a new Islamic party was created under a more compliant imam, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. By 1946, Jinnah had been so successful at transforming the Muslim League into a mass movement that the party won 75 per cent of the Muslim vote, a stunning leap from only 4.6 per cent of the Muslim vote in 1937.

There seems little argument that Jinnah was seeking political guarantees, not so much religious guarantees, for the Muslim minority within India. A group of historians led by Ayesha Jalal, the author of
The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan
, argue that if those guarantees had been entrenched in a strong federal state the Muslims would have stayed inside a unified India. They point out that in the rushed negotiations under Mountbatten, Jinnah was forced to accept what he called a ‘moth-eaten’ version of Pakistan. The new country was awarded only half of the vastly important Punjab and Bengal provinces and more Muslims were left behind in India than ended up in the new country.

T
o find out what the Islamists of Pakistan make of Jinnah, I travelled to the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa in Akora Khattack, not far from Peshawar. Some of Pakistan’s most notorious militants have graduated from this place, including Jalaluddin Haqqani, the veteran Afghan Taliban commander allied with al-Qaeda. At a recent graduation ceremony at the madrasa, tens of thousands of Taliban fighters, organizers, funders and sympathizers turned up, all of them opposed to a secular Pakistan. I had visited Haqqania several times. The administrator, Maulana Yousaf Shah, is a friendly, gregarious preacher and politician. From time to time he welcomes Western journalists, and when journalists have been kidnapped in the tribal areas he has tried to help as an intermediary.

I turned up with my colleague Pir Zubair Shah, who is from south Waziristan, and a member of a prominent family of the Mehsud tribe. It was Friday, just before midday prayers at Haqqania, so we sat on the floor of the maulana’s reception area, a grubby narrow room with a single bed, a row of cushions arrayed along one wall for the guests to recline on. A strip of neon light illuminated the dark space, and a clutch of red plastic flowers sprouted from a space on the wall. There was no image of Jinnah, or anyone else.

While the maulana delivered the sermon at the nearby mosque, we chatted with a barefooted, poorly dressed man who introduced himself as Juma Khan, a former member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant group from the Punjab that is formally banned in Pakistan but seems unstoppable in its capacity to carry out terror attacks in major urban centres. He had been jailed a dozen times for speeches against the Shia, he said. Weary of jail, he had now retired from militant work to devote himself to hunting quail.

What did a foot soldier in one of Pakistan’s myriad militant groups think of Jinnah? A dark look crossed his weathered face. ‘He was a Shia. They are the worst infidels on earth,’ he shot back. ‘His past is not so good.’ But was he not the founder of the nation? ‘God made Pakistan, not Jinnah.’

The maulana, fresh from the pulpit, walked in wearing a dark turban and a fresh white shalwar kameez. Three of his children, two boys and a girl all under the age of seven, scampered in and out. One of them dutifully brought a tin spittoon and placed it on the floor by the bed where the maulana sat. Occasionally, he spat in it.

‘I grew up in a very religious family; they didn’t like Jinnah,’ said the maulana. ‘My forefathers were active in the referendum, and they supported Jinnah at every level at the formation of Pakistan. Then they complained: “You separated us from the Hindus but we do not have an Islamic state.”’

In 1947, the expectations of the Islamists were high, the maulana said. The president of the new Islamic party, Maulana Usmani, raised the 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.