Investigation : The Home of Jihad
- M J Akbar 

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, aristocrat by temperament, catholic in taste, sectarian in politics, and the father of Pakistan, was the unlikeliest parent that an Islamic republic could possibly have. He was the most British of the generation of Indians that won freedom in August 1947. As a child in the elite Christian Mission High School in Karachi, he changed his birthday from 20 October to Christmas Day. As a student at Lincoln’s Inn, he anglicised his name from Jinnahbhai to Jinnah. For three years, between 1930 and 1933, he went into voluntary exile in Hampstead, acquired a British passport, set up residence with his sister Fatimah and daughter Dina, hired a British chauffeur (Bradley) for his Bentley, kept two dogs (a black Dobermann and a white West Highland terrier), indulged himself at the theatre (he had once wanted to be a professional actor so that he could play Hamlet) and appeared before the Privy Council to maintain himself in the style to which he was accustomed. He wore Savile Row suits, heavily starched shirts and two-tone leather or suede shoes. Official portraits in Pakistan present him in a more ‘Islamic’ costume, but the first time he wore a lambskin cap and the long Indian coat known as sherwani was on 15 October 1937 when he presided over the Lucknow session of the Muslim League. He was 61 years old. 

Despite being the Quaid-e-Azam, or the Great Leader of Muslims, he drank a moderate amount of alcohol and was embarrassingly unfamiliar with Islamic methods of prayer. He was uncomfortable in any language but English, and made his demand for Pakistan — in 1940 at Lahore — in English, despite catcalls from an audience that wanted to hear Urdu. His excuse was ingenious: since the world press was in attendance, he said, it was only right that he speak in a world language. The brilliant lawyer was never short of a convincing argument. 

He married a beautiful young Parsi girl, Ruttie Petit, child of a wealthy non-Muslim Bombay business family who was disowned by her parents for marrying outside her faith. Ruttie wore fresh flowers in her hair, silk dresses, headbands that sparkled with diamonds, rubies and emeralds, and smoked English cigarettes in ivory holders. The marriage frayed, but it produced a daughter, Dina, who loved her father but was more reticent about the nation he created. Dina stayed back in India, and must have been the only Indian to wave a Pakistani flag from her balcony on 14 August 1947. In an incident poignant with Wodehousian overtones, Jinnah, who wore a monocle as a young barrister, recalled his first ‘friction with the police’ to his biographer, Hector Bolitho (Jinnah, Creator of Pakistan, John Murray, 1954). It was during an Oxbridge boat race: ‘I was with two friends and we were caught up with a crowd of undergraduates. We found a cart in a side street, so we pushed each other up and down the roadway, until we were arrested and taken off to the police station ...[and] let off with a caution.’ It was the only time Jinnah went to jail. In contrast, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who gave up Savile Row for unshaped homespun cotton, spent half the years between 1920 and 1947 in a series of British prisons.