Jinnah, Mohammad Ali (1876-1948), the founder of Pakistan, popularly known as Qaid-I-Azam ("the great leader").

Born in Karachi in a Khoja mercantile family, Jinnah had his early education at Karachi and Bombay and then proceeded to Lahore. There he joined the Lincoln's Inn and in 1895 became the youngest Indian barrister to be called to the bar. He returned to Karachi in 1896 and a year later moved to Bombay, where he was able to build a flourishing practice, becoming in due course one of India's foremost lawyers.

Jinnah's first wife died while he was in England. In 1918 he married Ruttenbai, the daughter of Dinshaw Petit, a Bombay Parsi millionaire, despite her parents' tenacious opposition. After a period of estrangement Ruttenbai died in 1929. Jinnah's sister Fatima, remained his close companion until his death.

During his student days in England, Jinnah had come under the spell of nineteenth-century British liberalism. He admired Gladstone and Morley and became associated with Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian member of the British Parliament. When he returned to India his faith in liberalism and evolutionary politics was confirmed through his close association with three Indian National Congress stalwarts-G. K. Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta, and Surendranath Banerjea. These chief formative influences in his early life, buttressed by his own experience as a lawyer in a predominantly non-Muslim but cosmopolitan metropolis convinced him of the primacy of initiative, enterprise, and hard work, and goaded him to start his political career in 1905 from the Congress platform. He was secretary to its president Naoroji in 1906, and he soon became prominent in national politics.

In 1910 Jinnah was elected by Bombay Muslims to the Imperial Council, and his parliamentary career spanned some thirty-seven years. From 1912 onward he began wielding increasing influence in Muslim politics. At his insistence, the Muslim League (founded in 1906) adopted self-government as its ideal. He joined the league in 1913, becoming its president three years later. He brought the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League together and was chiefly responsible for the Congress-League Pact (1916), a joint scheme for postwar reforms, which conceded Muslims the right to separate electorates. For his untiring efforts to effect a communal settlement, the poet and political leader Sarojini Naidu hailed him as "the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity." Since he stood for civil liberties, he resigned from the council in 1919, when the Rowlatt Bill was passed into law; and since he stood for "ordered progress," moderation, gradualism, and constitutionalism, he left the Congress in 1920 when it opted for Mohandas Gandhi's direct action and noncooperation platform. Jinnah also resigned from the Home Rule League, whose Bombay branch he headed, when Gandhi, upon his election as president, unilaterally changed its constitution and nomenclature. Jinnah's ascendancy to national leadership thus received a serious setback, obliging him to withdraw from active politics for the next three years.

In 1924 Jinnah reorganized the Muslim League, of which he had been president since 1919, and devoted the next seven years attempting to bring about unity among the disparate ranks of Muslims and to develop a rational formula to effect a Hindu-Muslim settlement, which he considered the pre-condition for Indian freedom. He attended several unity conferences, wrote the Delhi Muslim Proposals (1927), pleaded for the incorporation of basic Muslim demands in the Nehru Report (1928), formulated the "Fourteen Points" (1929) as minimum Muslim demands for any constitutional settlement and as a riposte to the Nehru Report, and participated in the Round Table Conference (begun in 1930) in London, called by the British to formulate a new constitution for India.

Despairing alike of the "negative" Congress attitude and of Chronic disunity in Muslim ranks, he went into self-exile in London (1931), but returned to India in 1934 at the fervent pleas of his followers. From 1936 onward, despite heavy odds, he breathed new life into the moribund Muslim league, gave it a coherent all-India policy and program, set up a machinery to fight elections in early 1937, and cooperated with the Congress against pro-British parties. The poor showing of the Muslim League in the 1937 elections led to the formation of one-party Congress governments and the exclusion of the Muslim League from power in the Hindu majority provinces. Jinnah responded to the developing Congress policy by reorganizing the league in October 1937 on a more popular basis, changing its creed to "full independence" and going to Muslim masses for grassroots support. He was thus able to exploit both Muslim passion for freedom and heightened disenchantment with the Congress in order to gain support for the league's platform, put pressure on the otherwise reluctant provincial leadership to fall in line, and consolidate his claim as the sole spokesman of Indian Muslims. He was rewarded by overwhelming league victories in by-elections from 1938 onward and the celebration, at his call, of a "deliverance day" by Muslims in December 1939, on the Congress's exit from power. His leadership of Muslims was also recognized by the British when they needed the league's support in the war effort.

In March 1940, at the league's session, Jinnah pronounced the 100 million Indian Muslims a nation in its own right, and on that basis demanded a separate independence for predominantly Muslim regions of northwestern and eastern India. Popularly known as Pakistan, this demand was first ridiculed and then vehemently opposed by the Congress. Nor were the British amenable to the idea of partitioning the subcontinent. But Jinnah organized his movement so adroitly that the Pakistan demand gathered momentum within a few years, became the central issue in all subsequent constitutional proposals, and was overwhelmingly voted for by Muslims in the 1945-1946 general elections. In the long, drawn-out controversy centering on certain provisions of the Cabinet Mission Plan (1946), Jinnah proved himself a strategist of a rare caliber and outmaneuvered the Congress, causing an insoluble deadlock that led directly to the plan of 3 June 1947, under which India was partitioned. Pakistan was established in August 1947.

Because of Jinnah's critical role in its emergence, Pakistan has been termed a "one-man achievement." For the same reason, the Muslim League nominated him as governor-general, and the Pakistan Constituent Assembly elected him as president. Although aged and weak, he carried the heaviest burden in Pakistan and worked hard to secure its survival in rather treacherous circumstances. He died of overstrain, after a brief illness.