M. Sarmad
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I disagree completely - the British are one angle for it. He had family and he had friends. You cannot use just one narrative to build a picture in a flawed academic approach. Heck try that on any topic and use just one reference and likely you will get a poor grade.
You cannot study Jinnah without the works of Wolpert, Bolitho, Dehlavi or his own sister.
Anything else is Cherry picking -
As for the British - they might even have played it out as they wanted by manipulating both the rulers of Pakistan and the overall institutions both state and non-state.
Jinnah was a forlorn conclusion in 48 - his influence on what Pakistan was to be died after the 61 election fraud by Ayub.
So whether or not he was some pan-Islamist is now irrelevant to the current Pakistan which has nothing to do with Jinnah besides his portrait on its bank notes.
That "cherry picking" you are referring to is exactly what Wali Khan has done in his book "Facts Are Facts," in which he has selectively referred to declassified British documents to support his claim that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, was, in fact, a British agent. According to Wali Khan, Jinnah was acting to serve British interests and his primary motivation behind the creation of Pakistan was to act as a buffer state against the USSR, using Islam as a tool to counter Soviet influence in the region, and he has quoted quite a few so-called declassified documents to support his assertion !!
Such (selectively) declassified documents are generally quite a mixed bag. They contain a lot of speculation, opinions, and observations. One can just pick and choose whatever one wants to support his pov.
This thread is another prime example of such cherry-picking, but unlike the communists, the selective use of speculative information here is aimed at portraying Jinnah as an anti-British pan-Islamist. However, this argument is a non-starter since the supposed letter from Jinnah to Al-Banna, which forms the basis of the Islamists' case regarding Jinnah's pan-Islamism, is nowhere to be found in any archives. On the contrary, the only letter written by Jinnah to Al-Banna, which is preserved in our national archives, completely dismantles this argument. In that letter, Jinnah distanced himself from any involvement with Muslim Brotherhood/Pakistan Association Cairo...
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