Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-i-Azam - Revision history

Jyoti: /* In 1946, he did */

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‎In 1946, he did

Jyoti: /* India’s unity and the Quaid */

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‎India’s unity and the Quaid

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‎Religion and the Quaid

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‎Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah: books about

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‎Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah

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‎The Quaid's personality

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Pdewan: /* Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah: on World Affairs II */

2013-11-10T10:48:00Z

‎Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah: on World Affairs II

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  The Muslim League had largely been an elitist party but all that changed in 1940. The other change that year was Jinnah’s increasingly shrill pitch for the creation of Pakistan. On March 25, 1940, at the end of the Lahore session of the League, Jinnah gave a press conference. ‘The declaration of our goal,’ he said, ‘which we have definitely laid down, of the division of India, is in my opinion a landmark in the future history of the Mussalmans of India…. I thoroughly believe that the idea of one united India is a dream.’
  Later that year, he told the Delhi Muslim Students’ Federation: ‘The Hindus must give up their dream of a Hindu raj and agree to divide India into Hindu homeland and Muslim homeland. Today we are prepared to take only one-fourth of India and leave three-fourth to them. Pakistan was our goal today, for which the Muslims of India will live for and if necessary die for. It is not a counter for bargaining.’
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 More from the author
 [[Category:History|JMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAMMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM

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 This was in keeping with the Muslim League’s ‘hostage theory’.
-[[Category:History|J
 MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM]]
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+[[Category:Name|ALPHABETMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAMMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM
 MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM]]
-[[Category:Pakistan|J
+[[Category:Pakistan|JMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAMMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM
 MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 06:48, 11 May 2022
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	'' Yasser Latif Hamdani: The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He tweets as @theRealYLH (twitter.com/therealylh) ''		'' Yasser Latif Hamdani: The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He tweets as @theRealYLH (twitter.com/therealylh) ''
		+
		+
		+	=Vignettes=
		+	==Ajeet Jawed’s anecdotes==
		+	[https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/did-jinnah-say-he-made-a-blunder-by-creating-pakistan/articleshow/90909881.cms Ishtiaq Ahmed, April 18, 2022: ''The Times of India'']
		+
		+	In this excerpt, the professor emeritus of political science at Stockholm University cites a book that claims how the founder of Pakistan began pining to return to his Mumbai house after Partition and wanting to be ‘friends’ with Nehru again
		+
		+	[Scholar and author of Secular and Nationalist Jinnah ] Ajeet Jawed narrates that when Mohammad Ali Jinnah heard that the Indian government was thinking of requisitioning his Malabar Hill house, he was shocked. In desperation, he pleaded with the first Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, Sri Prakasa:
		+
		+	“Tell Jawaharlal Nehru not to break my heart. I have built it brick by brick. Who can live in a house like that?... You do not know how I love Bombay. I still look forward to going back there.”  Sri Prakasa asked in amazement, “May I tell the Prime Minister that you are wanting to be back there?” Jinnah replied, “Yes, you may.”  Ajeet Jawed does not tell us if Sri Prakasa informed Nehru and what his response was. We learn that the high commissioner felt that after the assassination of Gandhi, Jinnah realised that it was pointless wanting to return to Bombay. Such a conversation must have taken place shortly before the assassination of Gandhi.
		+
		+	To express such longing for his beloved house in Bombay [now Mumbai] when millions of people had lost family and friends and been uprooted violently from their ancestral abodes provides some idea of Jinnah’s complete disconnect — in fact, dissonance — with the traumatic experience of ordinary folks. There can be no denying that Jinnah was the principal protagonist of the partition demand: others reacted to it.
		+
		+	Another alleged statement of Jinnah that Jawed quotes is: “I have committed the biggest blunder in creating Pakistan and would like to go to Delhi and tell Nehru to forget the follies of the past and become friends again.”
		+
		+	At another place she mentions that Jinnah told the Muslim League Council that he was still an Indian citizen: “I tell you I still consider myself to be an Indian. For the moment I have accepted the Governor-Generalship of Pakistan. But I am looking forward to a time when I would return to India and my place as a citizen of my country.”
		+
		+	That sounds incredible, and if anything of the sort was uttered by Jinnah, it must have been with a view to maintaining his right to property, because the Malabar Hill house had not been sold, although a deal with the industrialist Dalmia was discussed, according to rumours.
		+
		+	The meeting of the Muslim League Council was held on December 17 in Karachi. From the excerpts which we have quoted earlier Jinnah persuaded the Muslim delegates from India not to dissolve the Muslim League and join the Indian National Congress as Maulana Azad had advised them. Such a decision would mean the end of distinct Muslim political identity in India.
		+
		+	Moreover, on December 19, in an extended interview to Robert Stimson of the BBC, Jinnah had outright rejected the suggestion of the BBC correspondent that since Pakistan had been achieved the Muslim League could be opened for membership to all Pakistanis and given a new name, the Pakistan League. Jinnah had argued that such a drastic change of name and membership would not be accepted by Pakistani Muslims.
		+
		+	MA Jinnah longed to return to his house in Malabar Hill, Mumbai
		+
		+	Continuing with other such remarks she mentions the more familiar claim of Jinnah: “Who told you that the Muslim League brought in Pakistan? I brought in Pakistan with my stenographer.” Now, if he said that, then the supposition that he was sceptical about the creation of Pakistan, let alone wanting to dissolve it, becomes extraordinarily questionable.
		+
		+	Having said that, one cannot discount altogether that Jinnah had confided in Sri Prakasa a human longing for Bombay and all the associations that Malabar Hill represented.
		+
		+	Jawed also informs that Jinnah allegedly wrote to Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. She quotes the letter:
		+	Khan Sahib I know that you are a man of character and integrity. It is honest men like you whose help I need to build up Pakistan. As it is I am surrounded by thieves and scoundrels and through them I can do little for the poor Muslims who have suffered so much [...] I am a very much misunderstood man. I never wanted all this blood-shed. I want peace, believe me so that I can do something for the masses [...] I am myself anxious to convert the League into National League, open to every loyal citizen of Pakistan. But I am being attacked by mad Mullahs and extremists who are out to create trouble for me. That is exactly why I want you and your colleagues to join the League and help me oust these dangerous elements.  In all the collected works of Jinnah’s speeches, statements and messages, this speech does not figure. The reference to bloodshed, thieves surrounding him, his being under pressure from mad mullahs and extremists to declare Pakistan an Islamic state and his desire to change the name of the Muslim League to National League all means that Pakistan had come into being, with rioting and mounting pressure to declare Pakistan an Islamic state.
		+
		+	That could be any time after the August 11, 1947 speech, probably more towards the end of 1947 or early 1948. The problem is that on August 22, 1947, the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) ministry headed by Dr Khan Sahib, the elder brother of Ghaffar Khan, was dismissed by Jinnah, who arbitrarily acquired such powers.
		+
		+	As noted earlier, even his hand-picked governor of the NWFP, Sir George Cunningham, found that the dismissal contravened the powers he had been granted as governor-general. Jinnah had already, in March 1947, demanded that Dr Khan Sahib should resign and again in July 1947 after the referendum was won by the Muslim League.
		+
		+	Such demands had been followed by the decision to dismiss the ministry in complete contravention of the parliamentary system. In such circumstances, writing such a conciliatory letter to Ghaffar Khan, in which he described his close colleagues as thieves, makes little sense.
		+
		+	It is to be noted that Ghaffar Khan did join the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on February 23, 1948 but a meeting between him and Jinnah never took place and both remained estranged. The several statements and the letter to Ghaffar Khan are not to be found in the collected works of Jinnah. Ajeet Jawed alleges that they have been expunged by the Pakistan government.
		+
		+	Excerpted with permission from Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History (Penguin Random House).
		+
		+
		+	==Agreeing to a united India ==
		+	[https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/when-jinnah-agreed-to-a-united-india/articleshow/85509567.cms Saurabh Banerjee, August 22, 2021: ''The Times of India'']
		+
		+
		+	In 1946, Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission’s plan of an undivided India. Had that happened, the history of the subcontinent could have been very different..
		+
		+	As tributes go, Stanley Wolpert’s praise for Mohammad Ali Jinnah was gushing. ‘Few individuals,’ wrote Wolpert in his biography of Jinnah, ‘significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.’ Except, in June 1946, Jinnah agreed to a plan which would neither have modified the map, nor created a nation-state.
		+
		+	The Muslim League had largely been an elitist party but all that changed in 1940. The other change that year was Jinnah’s increasingly shrill pitch for the creation of Pakistan. On March 25, 1940, at the end of the Lahore session of the League, Jinnah gave a press conference. ‘The declaration of our goal,’ he said, ‘which we have definitely laid down, of the division of India, is in my opinion a landmark in the future history of the Mussalmans of India…. I thoroughly believe that the idea of one united India is a dream.’
		+
		+	Later that year, he told the Delhi Muslim Students’ Federation: ‘The Hindus must give up their dream of a Hindu raj and agree to divide India into Hindu homeland and Muslim homeland. Today we are prepared to take only one-fourth of India and leave three-fourth to them. Pakistan was our goal today, for which the Muslims of India will live for and if necessary die for. It is not a counter for bargaining.’
		+
		+	But in 1946, the same Jinnah was willing to accept a united India — minus Pakistan. How did that happen?
		+
		+	The War had ended. The last great imperialist, Winston Churchill, had been swept out of office in a Labour landslide. It was clear that Britain would have to leave India. So, Clement Attlee, then the British PM, cleared a three-member Cabinet Mission to visit India and try and hammer out a solution. Maybe it was already too late, but this would be the last attempt at an orderly withdrawal.
		+	Secretary of State for India, Lord Freddie Pethick-Lawrence, was the nominal head of this mission. But the heavyweight was Sir Stafford Cripps, whose earlier mission to find a solution in 1942 had come to nothing. This time round Cripps was determined to go down in history as the person who had finally found the Answer to the ‘India Question’. To balance out these two public-school socialists, Attlee picked as the third member, the First Lord of the Admiralty, AV Alexander, a working-class Labour leader and a Chelsea supporter who loved beer and poetry.
		+
		+	The mission left Britain on March 19, 1946. This would be Cripps’ third visit to India. For Pethick-Lawrence, it would be the second. For years, he had written a weekly column for Annie Beasant’s ‘New India’. His wife, a suffragette, was a member of the India Conciliation Group, set up on Gandhi’s advice after the Second Round Table Conference. Cripps’ stepmother, too, was a member of this group. To the optimist, it might have seemed a solution was in the offing.
		+
		+	For Britain one thing was very clear. India should remain united. Because to divide India would be to divide its armed forces. How would one do that, without a very weak Pakistani army which would not be able to defend its western frontier?
		+
		+	By April 10, the mission had drawn up its plans. There would be two schemes. Scheme B would be the choice of the last resort, if there was absolutely no way of getting Indian players to accept Scheme A.
		+
		+	Broadly, Scheme A was a plan for a loose federation of Hindu-majority, Muslim-majority and princely states. It would be a three-tier system of government. At the top would be a small central ‘union’ government, which would look after communications, defence and foreign affairs. There would be equal representation of Hindus and Muslims at the centre. At the bottom would be the individual provinces. In the middle would be a grouping of provinces with a large degree of autonomy and power to secede from the union in the future. One group was to comprise Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province.
		+
		+	Another, Bengal and Assam. And the third was the rest of India.  Scheme B was to divide India into ‘Hindustan’ and a truncated Pakistan, a plan which Britain wanted to avoid at all cost.
		+
		+	The mission spent about three and a half months in India. Pethick-Lawrence managed to faint in the summer heat when the mercury touched 46 degrees Celsius, and then apologised for his ‘terrible weakness’. Cripps came down with colitis and spent some days in hospital. Alexander struck up a friendship with viceroy and governor general, the one-eyed Archibald Wavell, and bonded over poetry and piano. Hectic meetings took place in the summer heat and Wavell suspected Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps were being soft on Congress. In fact, he was appalled when Gandhi asked for water during a meeting, Pethick-Lawrence himself got up to fetch water, and when he was taking some time to return, Cripps went out to get water for Gandhi.
		+
		+	And then in May, they all escaped to Simla where Cripps, Pethick-Lawrence, Alexander and Wavell met the Indian politicians separately in batches. Gandhi, too, reached Simla in a special train. The stage was set for hard negotiations.
		+
		+	But there was far too much animosity between the League and the Congress. At the opening session, Jinnah refused to shake hands with Abdul Kalam Azad, calling him a ‘stooge’ of the Hindus. By May 12, Pethick-Lawrence declared the Simla session closed. Little progress had been made.
		+
		+	But the mission issued a statement. They declared the creation of a constituent assembly of elected representatives from 11 provinces who would frame a new constitution. They also outlined Scheme A, which explicitly opposed the creation of Pakistan, and made it clear that Pakistan, if created, would be a truncated version of Punjab and Bengal. The ball was now in the court of Jinnah and Congress.
		+
		+	On June 6, 1946, Jinnah agreed to Scheme A. This was his best bet, even though it would lead to speculation that Pakistan had, after all, been a bargaining chip for him, never mind what he had told students in November 1940. While this would not give him Pakistan now, it would not leave him with a ‘moth-eaten’ state to inherit. Besides, there was always the provision to leave the union in the future. He couldn’t have known that he would be dead in two years’ time.
		+
		+	Initially, Gandhi seemed willing to go along with this scheme. It would, he said, ‘convert this land of sorrow into one without sorrow and suffering’. But then Congress changed tack and refused to play ball. What did it have to lose? Jinnah could get his truncated lands, and India would be a strong, united country, with a powerful Centre, have its own constitution, its own secular philosophy.
		+
		+	After that both sides hardened their stance. On August 16, Jinnah gave his call for Direct Action. One riot led to another, and then by mid-August 1947, two countries were born.
		+
		+	Wolpert’s superman, MA Jinnah, a Khoja Shia by birth, a London lawyer in Saville Row suits puffing away at his Craven A cigarettes, a man who had seduced the young daughter of his Parsi businessman friend and then married her, a man who built his politics around Islam but loved his ham sandwiches, a man who once talked of Hindu-Muslim unity, thus ended up being the father of a Sunni nation-state.
		+
		+	Sources: Jinnah: His Successes, Failures And Role In History by Ishtiaq Ahmed, Keeping The Jewel In The Crown by Walter Reid, Liberty Or Death by Patrick French
		+
		+	Saurabh Banerjee is Associate Editor, The Times of India. He is usually not as rude when you meet him person
		+
		+	[[Category:History\|JMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM
		+	MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM]]
		+	[[Category:Name\|ALPHABETMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM
		+	MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM]]
		+	[[Category:Pakistan\|JMOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM
		+	MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, QUAID-I-AZAM]]

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 pp. Rs210
 =Religion and the Quaid=
 ==An Islamic cultural relativist or a brown sahib?==

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:18, 2 January 2018
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	Prof Sharif al Mujahid, a scholar of the Pakistan Movement and the Quaid-i-Azam, is Distinguished National Professor, Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. His other books include Ideology of Pakistan and Quaid-i-Azam and His Times: A Compendium.		Prof Sharif al Mujahid, a scholar of the Pakistan Movement and the Quaid-i-Azam, is Distinguished National Professor, Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. His other books include Ideology of Pakistan and Quaid-i-Azam and His Times: A Compendium.
		+
		+	=== Mr Jinnah’s marriage ===
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/mohammed-ali-jinnah-mr-and-mrs-jinnah-book-rutti-jinnah-wife-sheela-reddy/1/967988.html Nayantara Sahgal , Power and passion “India Today” 12/6/2017]
		+
		+	[[File: Ruttie as a teenage bride , India Today .jpg\| Ruttie as a teenage bride , India Today \|frame\|500px]]
		+
		+	[[File: Ruttie at age six, with brothers Fali (L) and Manek , India Today .jpg\| Ruttie at age six, with brothers Fali (L) and Manek , India Today \|frame\|500px]]
		+
		+	[[File: Jinnah with daughter Dina , India Today .jpg\| Jinnah with daughter Dina , India Today \|frame\|500px]]
		+
		+
		+	Sheela Reddy's book is a sumptuous read, starting with vivid descriptions of early 20th century Bombay. The British empire is firmly in place and Bombay is awash with Parsi enterprise and Parsi millionaires - of whom Sir Dinshaw Petit is one. In his luxurious home, Petit Hall, with its French furniture and Persian carpets, all is well. His children are brought up by English governesses, and his cosmopolitan lifestyle takes him and his family on vacations to Europe. At home, hospitality is never-ending. An army of servants serves lavish meals to an unending flow of visitors. Sarojini Naidu is a close friend and frequent guest. Mohammed Ali Jinnah is a frequent visitor. A successful barrister and member of the Viceroy's Imperial Legislative Council, he is a rising star in politics whom Sir Dinshaw greatly admires. He has been a familiar figure in Ruttie Petit's home since her childhood. She is still in her teens and Jinnah, aged 43, is just three years younger than her father when they marry in secret and she converts to Islam, creating a scandal that engulfs both their communities. This unlikely love story plays out against the social and political scene of the time. There are personality problems. Unable to cope, Ruttie runs away from her marriage and later comes back, but there is no repairing the mismatched relationship. Disowned by her father and her community, cut off from her family and all contact with her convivial home and carefree past, she turns to Sarojini Naidu for understanding and companionship and to Padmaja Naidu, her closest friend, for unfailing support. Ruttie tries to make a life for herself in a variety of ways-from unbridled shopping to theosophy and seances - but slides into a state of despair, into drug-induced illnesses and death at the age of 29.
		+
		+	"She was a child and I should never have married her," confessed Jinnah years later. "The fault was mine." Sarojini Naidu's was the more perceptive epitaph: "What a tragedy of unfulfilment Ruttie's life has been - she was so young and so lovely and she loved life with such passionate eagerness, and always life passed her by leaving her with empty hands and heart."
		+
		+	The marriage appeared to have been flawed from the very beginning. "She yearned to break through the veils of his many self-repressions and discover for herself the real man but the real J kept eluding her, hidden behind his cool and rational mind, never giving himself up to even a single display of deep emotion. Worse, sex with him was not thrilling, even before the initial novelty wore off." Nothing could have been more disillusioning for the adoring 18-year-old whose beauty, sparkling vivacity and hero worship of him had captivated Jinnah. Ruttie had associated marriage to this handsome, distinguished man with high romance - that he would prove a passionate lover who would sweep her off her feet. She was too young and inexperienced to realise that his lack of demonstrativeness during their courtship was a sign of his habitual forbidding reserve, or that in his struggle for professional success, intimate relationships had apparently played little or no part. Intimacy was not his style. He was also rigidly bound to his routine and almost fanatically focused on his legal work and political career. He comes across as a man set and fixed in his habits - reading several newspapers from beginning to end (including the advertisements) first thing in the morning and disliking interruptions of any kind. I found myself wishing he had occasionally put down a newspaper and spared a moment for a quick cuddle before going to work. It might have made all the difference to his marriage. His love for Ruttie fell far short of the needs of her physical and emotional nature, and they had no tastes in common except horseback riding.
		+
		+	This did not deter Ruttie from trying to coax him out of his fortressed reserve, and she fully shared his public life. She not only adapted to her role as a leading politician's wife, but had an absorbing interest in the field herself and was proud of his eminence. She believed in his political mission of eventually freeing India from British rule and took part in the public events that claimed him-sitting on the platform with him and listening to hour-long political speeches with fortitude. But their personal life had no such glue to bind them. Ruttie was widely read, wrote poetry and had a poetic way with words. In an era of letter-writing, her exuberant and highly literate letters to her friends reveal her as a young woman of intellectual capacity and rare sensitivity. In a letter she wrote while at Mahabaleshwar, to Padmaja Naidu, who was a 16-year-old like herself, Ruttie wrote, "All nature seems to be astir with song birds and little insects, and often while you are feasting your soul on the exquisite and fierce grandeur of the ghats, the mist will rapidly and almost suddenly veil the scenery as though it were jealous. A few days ago while returning from Bombay Point, the delicate strains of a shepherd's flute caught my ears." A year later, in 1917, puzzled about Jinnah, then her secret fiance being so restrained toward her, she wrote to Padmaja: "I revel in the storming passions that burn and tear at the fibres of my being till my very spirit writhes in an agony of excitement." Later, as a newly married woman, she wrote to Padmaja's younger sister Leilamani, about forgiving Jinnah his stiffness and inflexibility, and said she still nursed the dream of "pouring love on parched unlighted souls and through sympathy and understanding" hoped to let her "passionate desire grow into a fair and fragrant flower - so beautiful that it shall draw and command love through its own loveliness". These are remarkably mature letters, a striking contrast to the illiterate, abbreviated and misspelt texts that pass for communication among the young today. Sheela Reddy acknowledges that the book owes much to the treasure trove of letters she had access to from Padmaja Naidu's rich collection of her family's correspondence. Certainly nothing illuminates Ruttie's personality more vividly than her own words. In contrast, Jinnah's is a severely curtailed personality, concentrated on his career and lacking the lightness and humour of ordinary give-and-take. The political scene he dominated during World War One centred on his leadership of the Muslim League and the Congress. The latter had been founded by an Englishman in 1885 as a loyal opposition to His Majesty's Government, and Congress sessions were well-dressed events attended by the English-speaking political and industrial elite and their families, to pass resolutions petitioning the British government for a greater role for Indians in the governing of India. Its approach was gradual, legal and constitutional, eminently suited to Jinnah's training and frame of mind. He disapproved of Tilak's ultimatums demanding freedom without delay.
		+
		+
		+	The most radical demand until then had been Annie Besant's, for Home Rule. Into this 'correct', westernised political climate came Gandhi, whom Jinnah was immediately disposed to dislike as a rank outsider, who insisted on speaking in Gujarati and Hindi, dressed Gujarati-style (before he took to the langot), and preached civil disobedience. Indian politics had had no greater shock than the arrival of Gandhi, and it was a sign of Jinnah's distance from Indian realities that the man whom Tagore hailed as a Mahatma and the masses as their deliverer from suffering, was to Jinnah a virtual gate-crasher on the political scene.
		+
		+	The difference between these two men made the partition of India inevitable. Gandhi had sought to keep India together, looking upon this composite civilisation and culture as the very meaning of 'India'. Jinnah had worked to divide it, as had the British, into religious identities that suited Britain's intention to divide and quit. But I am thinking of the sheer human difference between them, which must have contributed to India's partition in the way that all historic events reflect something of the character of the humans who bring them about. Gandhi, before he became a crank about sex, was, according to his own autobiography, thoroughly acquainted with lustful love, delighting in a fulfilling sex life with his wife in a marriage that produced four sons and a devoted lifelong partnership dedicated to the fight for freedom. Kasturba Gandhi died beside her grieving husband while she was imprisoned with him in Poona. Jinnah's married life is bleak, one in which sex is more absent than present. His only child, a daughter unnamed for years until her grandmother took charge of her after Ruttie's death, was ignored by both parents who went their own ways, leaving her to servants. I like to think (and maybe Freud would have agreed) that Jinnah would have been a more relaxed and open-minded negotiator if he had a normal sex life. The high priests of religions are never accommodating men. Asceticism does not make for human give-and-take.
		+
		+	It remains something of a mystery why an anglicised Khoja Muslim who belonged to the Ismaili sect, who ate pork, enjoyed his whisky and was unfamiliar with the Koran, came to be the founder of a Muslim nation based on its religious identity. But this is a contradiction that seems to repeat itself in history. Napoleon was a Corsican, not a Frenchman. Hitler was Austrian, not German and both made their mark through imagined identities.
		+
		+	This is an important book. As the title indicates, it is primarily the story of a relationship, but is also interesting for its portrayal of Jinnah the Indian nationalist, before there was thought or talk of Pakistan. Ruttie's friend and admirer, Kanji Dwarkadas, firmly believed that had the marriage endured, her influence on Jinnah might have kept his politics from taking a communal turn.

	==Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah and Javid Iqbal==		==Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah and Javid Iqbal==

@@ Line 480: / Line 480: @@
 In addition to the writer’s narrative, the valued opinion of Ashfaq Ahmed (late) the famous literary giant of Urdu at the back leaf of the hard binding, also adds savour to its flavour.
 Quaid-i-Azam: Bemisaal Shakhsiyat, Darakhshan Kirdaar Ki Jhalkiyan
 By Saleem Chaudary
 Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore.
 ISBN 969-35-0694-4
 pp. Rs210

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 Many memorials and representations from various bodies have already been sent to you, we will not therefore so far as possible, repeat the same grounds but confine ourselves to the feelings and sentiments of Muslims in India, regarding the future of the Ottoman Empire.
 For generations past the Muslims of India generally have recognised the Khilafat of the House of Osman and Constantinople as Darul-Islam and Khilafat (the seat of Islam and the Khalifa). For many centuries the Sultan of Turkey has been recognised as the Servant of the Holy Places of Islam and their custodian by all the Muslims of the world, including the Shareef of Mecca. Whenever Turkey has been in trouble a reaction of it has been felt in India, and the Muslims have done all to help the Sultan of Turkey as the head of Islam to maintain his spiritual and temporal honour and position. More than once the Government of India itself encouraged the Muslims in that sympathy. The greater the danger for Turkey the more concerned Muslims have felt. So much so that in modern times during the Balkan Wars, Muslims of India organised the Red Crescent fund for Turkey at a very great cost...