The Karachi-born, London-trained barrister who began his career as a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity and ended it as the founder of Pakistan, the first modern state created expressly as a homeland for Muslims — winning it not through mass agitation but through constitutional argument and the two-nation theory, and serving barely a year as its first governor-general before tuberculosis killed him in 1948, leaving the question of whether he wanted a secular state or a religious one to be fought over ever since.
He was an Anglicized barrister in tailored suits, more at home in a courtroom than a mosque, and he built one of the world's largest Muslim states. Muhammad Ali Jinnah once embodied Hindu-Muslim unity so fully that a Congress leader called him its best ambassador. Two decades later he argued that Hindus and Muslims were not one people but two, and that the Muslims of India needed a country of their own. He won it through constitutional argument, party organization, and hard bargaining rather than marches and fasts, and named it Pakistan. He lived just thirteen months as its leader. Whether he wanted a secular republic that happened to be for Muslims, or a state ruled by Islam, is an argument his death left unsettled, and South Asia is still having it.