Muhammad Ali Jinnah was born on 25 December 1876. He was a barrister, politician and the founder of Pakistan. Jinnah served as the leader of the All-India Muslim League from 1913 until Pakistan’s independence on 14 August 1947. He was Pakistan’s first Governor-General until his death. He is revered in Pakistan as Quaid-i-Azam (“Great Leader”) and Baba-i-Qaum, (“Father of the Nation”). His birthday is a national holiday in Pakistan.
Family and childhood
His father Jinnah Bai Poonja and his wife Mithi Bai had been living in a rented apartment on the second floor of Wazir Mansion near Karachi. Jinnah’s family was from a Gujarati. His father was from a wealthy merchant background and was born to a family of textile weavers in the village of Paneli in the princely state of Gondal. 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. Jinnah was not fluent in Gujarati, his mother-tongue, nor in Urdu; he was more fluent in English.
Education
As a boy, Jinnah lived for a time in Bombay with an aunt and may have attended the Gokal Das Tej Primary School there, later on studying at the Cathedral and John Connon School. In Karachi, he attended the Sindh-Madrasa-tul-Islam and the Christian Missionary Society High School. He gained his matriculation from Bombay University at the high school.. Jinnah studied at Bombay University and at Lincoln’s Inn in London. He then ran a successful legal practice in Bombay.
Political Career
He was already a member of the Indian National Congress, which was working for autonomy from British rule, when he joined the Muslim League in 1913. The league had formed a few years earlier to represent the interests of Indian Muslims in a predominantly Hindu country, and by 1916 he was elected its president. In 1920, the Indian National Congress launched a movement of non-cooperation to boycott all aspects of British rule. Jinnah opposed this policy and resigned from the congress. There were by now profound differences between the congress and the Muslim League.
After provincial elections in 1937, the congress refused to form coalition administrations with the Muslim League in mixed areas. Relations between Hindus and Muslims began to deteriorate. In 1940, at a Muslim League session in Lahore, the first official demand was made for the partition of India and the creation of a Muslim state of Pakistan. Jinnah had always believed that Hindu-Muslim unity was possible, but reluctantly came to the view that partition was necessary to safeguard the rights of Indian Muslims.
His insistence on this issue through negotiations with the British government resulted in the partition of India and the formation of the state of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. This occurred against a backdrop of widespread violence between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, and a vast movement of populations between the new states of Pakistan and India in which hundreds of thousands died.
Jinnah became the first governor general of Pakistan, but died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948.