Mr. Jinnah, the man widely credited with single-handedly creating a new country, has always remained a paradoxical figure. The original Jinnah was so different from the masses he led that it's unbelievable they loved him.
For instance, he couldn't speak Urdu. He was more fluent in English than in his native tongue (Gujrati). Yet he proclaimed that Urdu would be the national language of the new country. And he said it during a speech in English in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, the population of which was greater than that of West Pakistan. In fact, even in today’s Pakistan, Urdu is spoken by less than ten percent of the people, but because it is understood by the majority of the urban population, it continues to remain the national language.
Jinnah also didn’t know much about what Islam means to most Muslims. He didn’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam, as he joined the minority Shia sect when he married a Catholic/Parsi woman and had to leave the Ismaili sect (in which he was born). He also didn’t know that those belonging to the Ahmadi (Qadiani) religion are not Muslims, he said they are Muslims when asked why he had an Ahmadi advisor (Zafrullah Khan). Not only that, he even asked the Sikhs to join Pakistan, offering them to impose any conditions they wanted to become part of the new Muslim nation. If they had done so, more than a third of Pakistan’s population would have been non-Muslims. This disproves the widely propagated claim that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam. In fact, the first Pakistan Resolution explicitly stated that Pakistan would be a country where the minorities of India would be able to safely practice their religions.
Finally, there was his speech in which he said that all citizens of Pakistan are equal, that there is no difference between Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, that they are free to practice their religion in Pakistan. Evidently, he didn’t know that most Muslims in the subcontinent hated non-Muslims, particularly Hindus.
Despite all his foibles, I believe that by creating Pakistan, he saved the Muslims of the subcontinent from extinction.
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