Myths about Jinnah's last words

Nadeem Paracha

Like an impressionable teenager, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan circulated a video of Dr Israr Ahmed claiming that the Quaid advocated a caliphate from his deathbed, when the claim is highly suspicious

On December 14, 2018, Prime Minister Imran Khan uploaded two short videos of eminent Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmed. I am not quite sure which year the videos were from but they were obviously at least eight years old, since he passed away in 2010. In one of the videos, Ahmed quotes an excerpt from a diary written by Dr Riaz Ali Shah, who was a physician of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, when the latter was suffering from tuberculosis. Jinnah passed away in September 1948.

In the video, Ahmed informed his audience that he had picked the excerpt from an article published in a September 1988 edition of the Urdu daily Jang — 40 years after Jinnah’s demise. Ahmed quoted the 1988 newspaper article about Riaz Ali’s ‘diary’ in which he wrote  that as Jinnah lay on his bed suffering from tuberculosis, he (Jinnah) spoke about his vision of a Pakistan that would be an Islamic state, or a 20th century manifestation of a state, constructed during the rule of Islam’s first four caliphs (Khilafat-i-Rashida).

Riaz was one of the four doctors present during Jinnah’s last hours. According to an article in the Pulse Fortnightly written by Lt Gen (Rtd) M Ahmad Akhtar and published on November 1, 2014, four physicians accompanied Jinnah when he travelled to the vacation resort of Ziarat in Balochistan. They were: Dr M Ali Mistri, Dr Illahi Bakhsh, Dr Ghulam Muhammad and Dr Riaz Ali Shah. Dr Mistri was Jinnah’s personal physician who, according to Lt Gen Akhtar, had moved to Karachi from Bombay on Jinnah’s request after the creation of Pakistan.

Nothing was reported about Jinnah’s ‘last words’ as such until the appearance of a book in 1978 by Dr Illahi Bakhsh, which was re-printed by the Oxford University Press in 2012. Dr Illahi’s book, With the Quaid-i-Azam during his Last Days, is largely a detailed account of the Quaid’s illness and how Jinnah tried to live with it. There is nothing in the book about a man ravaged by a crippling disease but one lucidly advocating the creation of an Islamic state.

There is also a PDF copy available online of an Urdu translation of Dr Illahi Bakhsh’s book. However, attached to it is an Urdu translation of notes supposedly kept by Riaz Ali Shah in a diary. The notes appear in the shape of a booklet called Quaid-i-Azam Kay Akhri Lamhaat (The Quaid’s Last Moments). It does not mention the date of publication. It is not available in any of the major bookstores in Pakistan nor on Amazon. And it is not mentioned in the long list of books and papers on Jinnah that appears on the Government of Pakistan’s website dedicated to the study of Pakistan’s founder.

In a 2003 article for The Concept, Raja A Khan wrote that the booklet by Dr Shah was published in 1950. However, Raja only speaks about Jinnah sharing his views on Kashmir with Riaz. One wonders though, how many diverse topics the founder was discussing with the good doctor during his very last moments. What is more important is that after going through the online version of the booklet, I found no mention of Jinnah speaking to Dr Shah about the idea of the caliphate.

The booklet is only scarcely referenced in the papers and books written on Jinnah. Moreover, whenever it is, as in Masud-ul-Hasan’s Anecdotes of Quaid-i-Azam (1976) and in an article in the 2002 issue of South Asian Studies, they simply quote Riaz as saying that Jinnah’s last spoken words were, “Allah, Pakistan.” Therefore, Imran Khan may have gotten a tad too excited — like an impressionable teenager — after coming across the mentioned clip of Dr Ahmed. Without much thought, the Prime Minister used it in the same manner in which Jinnah was concocted by the Gen Zia dictatorship in the 1980s.

This is why I believe the confusion in this respect is rooted in what transpired during the Zia regime. For example, only quotes of Jinnah that had the word ‘Islam’ in them were allowed to be used in state-owned media. From 1978 onward, the sequence of words of Jinnah’s motto, “unity, faith, discipline” was switched to “faith, unity, discipline.”

In 1982, a portrait of Jinnah painted by artist Ahmad S Nagi was replaced in the waiting lounge of the Karachi Airport just because it showed Jinnah wearing a suit and a tie. An article on Nagi that appeared in the September 2, 2006 edition of Dawn said that the painting was finished in 1944 and then brought to Karachi after the creation of Pakistan. It was placed in the airport lounge but replaced in 1982 with another portrait of Jinnah in which he is seen wearing a sherwani.

Then in 1983, the Zia regime gleefully announced the ‘discovery’ of a diary kept by the founder in which he had expressed his desire of an Islamic state. KK Thomas, in the 1998 issue of Asian Recorder, and author Khaled Ahmed in his 2001 book Pakistan: Behind the Ideology Mask: Facts About Great Men We Don’t Want to Know, write that the state-owned media enthusiastically began discussing the contents of the so-called diary.

According to Ahmad, Jinnah’s personal secretary, KH Khursheed and veteran Muslim Leaguer, Mumtaz Daultana, challenged the discovery. Consequently, the claim was quietly dropped. Most interesting is the similarity between what Zia claimed Jinnah wrote in his diary and what Dr Ahmed claimed Dr Riaz wrote in his. One can thus conclude that may be a third party was involved who, for political reasons, concurrently ascribed the mentioned quotes to Jinnah as well as Dr Riaz.

(Courtesy: Dawn)

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Courtesy: The Pioneer: 29th December, 2018