It is hard to believe now that the founding dream of Pakistan, born out of the partition of British India in 1947, was a secular one. The founder of this oddest of nations, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a Bombay barrister who was a firm believer in British law and Indian nationalism. He had married his second wife outside the Islamic faith and had wanted nothing to do with the Mughal culture of North India that had yearned for a separate Muslim state.
It was one of modern nationalism’s great paradoxes that this most assimilated and modern of men would be the one to lead his people to the promised land of Pakistan. The creation of this polity came at the very end of Jinnah’s life; the man who moved to Karachi, from his home in Bombay, was old and ravaged by tuberculosis and lung cancer
looking beyond borders 