Quaide Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah: A Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Luminary ndia became Independent in 1947 when the country was divided as India and Pakistan. Four men played a significant role in I shaping the end of British rule in India: The British Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Indian National Congress leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League leader, Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah led the Muslims of India to create the largest Muslim State in the world then. In 1971 East Pakistan separated to emerge as Bangladesh. Much has been written about the first three in relative complimentary terms. The fourth leading player, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founding father of Pakistan, lovingly called Quaid-e-Azam (the great leader) has been much maligned by both Indian and British writers. Richard Attenborough's hugely successful film Gandhi has also done much to portray Jinnah in a negative light. Excerpt from Endangered Species | 4 The last British Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, spared no adjectives in demonizing Jinnah, and his views influenced many writers. Akber S. Ahmed quotes Andrew Roberts from his article in Sunday Times, 18 August,1996: “Mountbatten contributed to the slander against Jinnah, calling him vain, megalomaniacal, an evil genius , a lunatic, psychotic case and a bastard, while publicly claiming he was entirely impartial between Jinnah’s Pakistan and Nehru’s India. Jinnah rose magisterially above Mountbatten’s bias, not even attacking the former Viceroy when, as Governor General of India after partition, Mountbatten tacitly condoned India’s shameful invasion of Kashmir in October 1947.”1 Among recent writers, Stanley Wolport with his biography: Jinnah of Pakistan, and Patrick French in his well researched Freedom or Death analyzing the demise of the British rule in India come out with more balanced portrayal of Jinnah - his role in the struggle for India’s independence and in the creation of Pakistan. Prof. Akber S. Ahmed in his Jinnah – Pakistan and Islamic Identity – The search for a Saladin makes a valiant attempt at reassessing the role of Jinnah. “While paying lip service, most of the leaders of Pakistan have ignored him,” writes Akber S. Ahmed. “He was too much of a giant, too honest and firm in his moral correctness to make them comfortable. This indeed is the perception of those who knew Jinnah and can compare him to his successors.”2 The first Netherlands Ambassador to independent India, Mr. Winkelman told me that he knew Jinnah well. He had bought Jinnah’s house at 10 Auranghzeb Road in New Delhi which served as the Chancery for the Netherlands Embassy in Delhi. In response to my Quaide Azam Mohamed Ali Jinnah | 5 query whether Jinnah was a difficult man to deal with, Winkelman gave me an interesting analysis. ‘Jinnah’ he said, ‘was an extremely intelligent person. At the same time he had an equally high standard of personal morality. Such people would not stand mediocrity and flippancy. As a result they at times sound impatient or cold since they would not suffer fools. Jinnah was one such person’. Mr. Winkelman was full of praise for Jinnah as a ‘most well mannered and cultured gentleman.’ In the light of the Indian scene then, Mr. Winkelman went on to define the philosophical difference between a Hindu and a Muslim. According to him, for a Hindu, the ultimate utopian concept was the mythological Ram Raj where a person would live in a thatched hut; eat out of palm leaves to serve as plates and where a lion and a goat would peacefully drink water from the same pond. For a Hindu, the Ram Raj had come and gone and one could only yearn for it. For a Muslim, according to Mr. Winkelman, there has not been such Ram Raj. Even in the days of the Holy Prophet, the life of Prophet Muhammad was beset with endless struggle. The Ram Raj for a Muslim is the ultimate concept of Jannat for which he has to work hard in this life to be worthy of it. Jinnah understood this philosophical difference between the Hindu and the Muslim outlook and struggled to lead Indian Muslims to a better future.3 To add to the complexity of Jinnah bashing, a new debate has since emerged among Pakistani Muslims. Questions are now raised as to whether Jinnah was a Shia or a Sunni. There are claims and counter claims. A man who throughout his life never projected himself as a deeply religious person, did not court cheap popularity on religious Excerpt from Endangered Species | 6 grounds and was careful enough not to be entrapped into the sectarian divide that ails the Muslim society today, is now being touted as either Sunni or Shia by the respective communities. Who was Jinnah then? Why this belated interest in determining the sect he belonged to? Mohamed Ali Jinnah was born in Karachi on December, 25, 1876, in a Khoja family. As we have seen before and reviewed in greater depth in this book, the Khoja community in India was then fragmented into three sections. There were Khoja who practiced the Nizari Ismaili faith and looked upon the successive Aga Khans as their Nizari Ismaili Imams. The second group practiced the Shia Ithna-Asheri faith while the third group was known to be practicing the Sunni faith. Despite their doctrinal differences, because of common ethnicity, all three Khoja societies were closely interlinked and operated as one ethnic group. Often the individual sectarian beliefs and practices were so intertwined and overlapped with the beliefs and practices of the other Khoja sects that at times it was difficult to determine who was an Ismaili, Ithna-Asheri or a Sunni Khoja. The crunch came in 1862 when the first group separated to proclaim themselves distinctly as Sunni Khoja. A decade later, from 1873 onwards, yet another group branched out from the main Khoja community to proclaim themselves as the Khoja Shia Ithna-Asheri community. It has been widely believed that at about the period when Mohamed Ali Jinnah was born, his parents had declared themselves as Shia Ithna-Asheri as was the case with many other Khoja families at the time. Hatim Alavi, an associate of Jinnah, himself a reformist Quaide Azam Mohamed Ali Jinnah | 7 Bohra, has stated that “Jinnah was born as Ithna-Asheri Khoja and remained to be one until his death.”4 Commenting on the faith of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the community he hailed from and the attributes of the Khoja community, Stanley Wolport author of Jinnah of Pakistan writes: “Though religion never played an important role in Jinnah’s life - except for its political significance - he left the Aga Khan’s “Sevener” Khoja community at this stage of his maturation, opting instead to join the less hierarchically structured Ithna-Asheri sect of the “Twelver” Khojas, who acknowledged no leader. One of Jinnah’s most admired friends, Justice Badrudin Tayabji (1844-1906) the first Muslim high court judge and third president of the Indian National Congress was Ithna Asheri”5 About the community of Jinnah and his personal attributes, Stanley Wolport further writes: “Jinnah (in Arabic, wing as of a bird or army) was born a Shi’ite Muslim Khoja (Khwaja, noble) a minority community within Islam, itself a religious minority in India, the Khojas of South Asia remained doubly conscious of their separateness and cultural difference, helping perhaps to account for the “aloofness” so often noted as a characteristic quality of Jinnah and his family. Khojas, like other mercantile communities the world over, however, traveled extensively, were quick to assimilate new ideas, and adjusted with relative ease to strange environments. They developed linguistic skills and sharp intelligence, often acquiring considerable wealth. Mahatma Gandhi’s Hindu merchant (bania) family, by remarkable coincidence, settled barely thirty miles to the north of Jinnah’s grandparents, in the state of Rajkot. Thus the parents of the Fathers of both India and Excerpt from Endangered Species | 8 Pakistan shared a single mother tongue, Gujarati, though that never helped their brilliant offspring to communicate.”6 In Moslems on the March, F.W. Frenau comments that the family of Jinnah “was not of the Sunnite persuasion of the majority of the Indian Moslems, but belonged to the sect of Khojahs. This is one of the countless offshoots of the Shia. It is something like a cast, in so far as one can only become Khojah by birth. Most of the Khojahs are followers of the Aga Khan. Jinnah was a believing Moslem, but by no means was a fanatic; or he would not have married a Parsee lady.”7 M. A. H. Isphahani, a close associate of Jinnah who later became the first Pakistani Ambassador to the United States writes in Quaid-E- Azam Jinnah as I knew him: “In the course of one of our many intimate conversations, the Quaid-E-Azam told me that he was an Ismaili Khoja by birth, and when he was twenty-one, decided to quit the ranks of the Ismailis and join the Ithna Asheri fold. This he did and before long, he converted his family too. He was convinced that the faith built up by the first and second Aga Khan and thereafter by the third Aga Khan, Sir Sultan Mohamed Shah, the present Aga Khan was so unnecessary that he tried to persuade the Aga Khan himself to abandon his headship of the Ismailis and to join the ranks of the Ithna Asheri, to which sect most members of the Aga Khan’s own family belonged.” 8 The nationalist in Jinnah did not approve of the Aga Khan’s role in Indian politics.