Jinnah: Quaid e Azam

Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Founder of Pakistan)
While looking for anything in the category of Jinnah Archives - all I found in google search included: Wikipedia's Jinnah page, Jinnah - Gems of Pakistan, Faraz Mushtaq's jinnah dot pk and an article 'Jinnah: Secular or Islamist'.

I was really hoping to see a governmental portal to top the list but I was wrong. One success, among these hits and misses, was a book review by Barbara Crossette of Dr, Akbar S. Ahmed's book: Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: Search for Saladin; Routledge, 1997.It goes like this:

Islam gave the Muslims of India a sense of identity; dynasties like the Mughals gave them territory; poets like Allama Iqbal gave them a sense of destiny. Jinnah's towering stature derives from the fact that, by leading the Pakistan movement and creating the state of Pakistan, he gave them all three. For the Pakistanis he is simply the Quaid-i-Azam or the Great Leader. Whatever their political affiliation, they believe there is no one quite like him.

She finally refers to one important question that crosses everybody's mind every now and then - and so it has the author's mind which is: should there have been a Pakistan at all? On this point Ahmed has no doubt, and in answering that question he raises an explosive issue rarely discussed in the subcontinent.

''What if Jinnah were to come alive to see the mess that is his Pakistan?'' he asks, and then he answers: It would still look better than Muslim life in Hindu-dominated India. With Hindu fundamentalism on the rise, there is ample evidence to back his assertion that pogroms, poverty and prejudice have dogged those Muslims who stayed behind after partition. Though still a rough work in progress, Ahmed concludes, Jinnah's Pakistan was worth the fight.

This book review was published in The New York Times and can be read in detail on links at the end of the post.

Another fantastic find was via my sister's recommendation to look for Jinnah Papers. They are undoubtedly a rich source of a first hand account about Jinnah and Pakistan. It is a lifetime spent by Dr. Zawwar Husain Zaidi on this rather difficult and labourous academic work that he undertook. We all know that this is a topic that lacks scholarship due to the difficulty in finding the original sources. This will prove to be a stepping stone for researchers and scholars in the future. It is an enormous body of work and in this regard Dr. Zaidi in one of his interviews said;

" … The Quaid-e-Azam Papers can be divided into five broad categories (i) personal, (i) political, (iii) published material, (iv) photographs and (v) maps and diagrams."

I think that we must read Jinnah Papers to know the founder of this country a little better.

LINKS for Dr. AKbar's Book:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/14/reviews/971214.14crosset.html?_r=2
OR
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/ahmed-jinnah.html
A whole chapter is available here:
http://www.amazon.com/Jinnah-Pakistan-Islamic-Identity-Saladin/dp/0415149665#reader_0415149665
Probably the whhole book is available FREE online; have to search more for this.

Some additions on Jinnah related sites..

http://m-a-jinnah.blogspot.com/