Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a lawyer, politician and the founder of Pakistan.

He served as the leader of the All-India Muslim League from 1913 until Pakistan’s creation on 14 August 1947, and then as Pakistan’s first Governor-General until his death.

Jinnah Family

Jinnah’s given name at birth was Mahomedali Jinnahbhai, and born on December 25, 1876. Jinnah’s family was from a Gujarati Ismaili background, though Jinnah later followed the Twelver Shi’a teachings.

He was from a wealthy merchant background, his father was a merchant and was born to a family of textile weavers in the village of Paneli in the princely state of Gondal (Kathiawar, Gujarat).

Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Jinnah was the second child, he had three brothers and three sisters, including his younger sister Fatima Jinnah. The parents were native Gujarati speakers, and the children also came to speak Kutchi and English.

As a boy, Jinnah lived for a time in Bombay with an aunt and gained his matriculation from Bombay University at the high school.

In 1892, Sir Frederick Leigh Croft, a business associate of Jinnahbhai Poonja, offered young Jinnah a London apprenticeship with his firm.

Soon after his arrival in London, Jinnah gave up the business apprenticeship in order to study law, enraging his father, who had, before his departure, given him enough money to live for three years.

Soon after his arrival in London, Jinnah gave up the business apprenticeship in order to study law, enraging his father, who had, before his departure, given him enough money to live for three years.

Jinnah Biography

Jinnah’s legal education followed the pupillage (legal apprenticeship) system, which had been in force there for centuries. During this period, he shortened his name to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

During his student years in England, Jinnah was influenced by 19th-century British liberalism, like many other future Indian independence leaders.

This political education included exposure to the idea of the democratic nation, and progressive politics. He became an admirer of the Parsi British Indian political leaders Dadabhai Naoroji and Sir Pherozeshah Mehta.

In 1895, at age 19, he became the youngest Indian to be called to the bar in England. Although he returned to Karachi, he remained there only a short time before moving to Bombay.

Jinnah History

At the age of 20, Jinnah began his practice in Bombay, the only Muslim barrister in the city. As a lawyer, Jinnah gained fame for his skilled handling of the 1907 “Caucus Case”.

Although Jinnah did not win the Caucus Case, he posted a successful record, becoming well known for his advocacy and legal logic.

Mr Jinnah was also a supporter of working class causes and an active trade unionist. He was elected President of All India Postal Staff Union in 1925 whose membership was 70,000.

Later he began political life by attending the Congress’s twentieth annual meeting, in Bombay in December 1904.

He was a member of the moderate group in the Congress, favouring Hindu–Muslim unity in achieving self-government, and following such leaders as Mehta, Naoroji, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

Although Jinnah initially opposed separate electorates for Muslims, he used this means to gain his first elective office in 1909, as Bombay’s Muslim representative on the Imperial Legislative Council.

In December 1912, Jinnah addressed the annual meeting of the Muslim League although he was not yet a member.

He joined the following year, although he remained a member of the Congress. He stressed that League membership took second priority to the “greater national cause” of an independent India.

Jinnah attended a reception for Gandhi, and returned home to India in January 1915.

Jinnah Daughter

In 1918, he married his second wife Rattanbai Petit (“Ruttie”), 24 years his junior.

She was the fashionable young daughter of his friend Sir Dinshaw Petit, and was part of an elite Parsi family of Bombay.

The couple’s only child, daughter Dina, was born on 15 August 1919. The couple separated prior to Ruttie’s death in 1929, and subsequently Jinnah’s sister Fatima looked after him and his child.

Muhammad Jinnah’s daughter, Dina, was educated in England and India. Jinnah later became estranged from Dina after she decided to marry Neville Wadia from a prominent Parsi business family.

When Jinnah urged Dina to marry a Muslim, she reminded him that he had married a woman not raised in his faith.

He continued to correspond cordially with his daughter, but it strained their personal relationship. She did not come to Pakistan in his lifetime, but only for his funeral.

Jinnah 14 Points

In 1920, however, he resigned from the Congress when it agreed to follow a campaign of satyagraha. He regarded it as political anarchy.

In 1928, British challenged Indians to come up with their own proposal for constitutional change for India.

The Nehru Report favored constituencies based on geography on the ground that being dependent on each other for election would bind the communities closer together.

He put forth proposals that he hoped might satisfy a broad range of Muslims and reunite the League. He called for mandatory representation for Muslims in legislatures and cabinets.

These became known as his Fourteen Points. He could not secure adoption of the Fourteen Points. The League meeting in Delhi at which he hoped to gain a vote instead dissolved into chaotic argument.

Jinnah Pakistan

By 1940, he had come to believe that Muslims of the Indian subcontinent should have their own state.

In that year, the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, passed the Lahore Resolution, demanding a separate nation.

During the Second World War, the League gained strength while British imprisoned leaders of the Congress. In the elections held shortly after the war, it won most of the seats reserved for Muslims.

Ultimately, the Congress and the Muslim League could not reach a power-sharing formula for the subcontinent to be united as a single state.

He lead all parties to agree to the independence of a predominantly Hindu India, and for a Muslim-majority state of Pakistan.

As the first Governor-General of Pakistan, he worked to establish the new nation’s government and policies.

He aided the millions of Muslim migrants who had emigrated from the new nation of India to Pakistan after independence. He personally supervising the establishment of refugee camps.

Jinnah Death

Jinnah worked with a tin of Craven “A” cigarettes at his desk. He used to smoked 50 or more a day for the previous 30 years, as well as a box of Cuban cigars.

From the 1930s, he suffered from tuberculosis; only his sister and a few others close to him were aware of his condition. He believed public knowledge of his lung ailments would hurt him politically.

In June 1948, he and Fatima flew to Quetta, in the mountains of Balochistan, where the weather was cooler than in Karachi.-

On 6 July 1948, he returned to Quetta, but at the advice of doctors, soon journeyed to an even higher retreat at Ziarat.

By 9 September, Jinnah had also developed pneumonia. Doctors urged him to return to Karachi, where he could receive better care. He was flown there on the morning of 11 September.

He died later that night at 10:20 pm at his home in Karachi on 11 September 1948 at the age of 71, just over a year after Pakistan’s creation.

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