Even when his opponents were involved, he advocated the cause of the aggrieved and pled for the restoration of their basic, inalienable rights. Indeed, Jinnah's belief in human equality countenanced no distinction of race, nationality, creed, class or sex. He raised his voice against every system that discriminated between human beings, and against every institution that violated the dignity of the human person. His opposition to colonialism and his pursuit of justice knew no geographical bounds and extended beyond South Asia to the world at large.
In tandem, he stood for women's rights, even from his student's days. To quote Begum Shaista Ikramullah, a member of the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (1947-54), a former ambassador to Morocco (1964-67) and a former leader of the Pakistan delegation to the UN (1956), at a memorial meeting for Jinnah held in Caxton Hall, London, on September 14, 1948 Miss Agatha Harrison, one of the speakers at the meeting, said "When Jinnah was a student in London [1892-96], the suffragette movement was gathering momentum; but we had very few sympathisers and supporters. Young Jinnah always came to our meetings and spoke in defence of vote for women. Even then he was not afraid of championing an unpopular cause."
Jinnah's belief in extending women the opportunities available to men at various stages in their lives was squarely reflected in his careful handling of the schooling and career orientation of Fatima Jinnah, his youngest sister and ward. Much against the family and the (Khoja) community traditions, she was sent first to Bandhara Convent School (1902), and then to St. Patrick School (1906), both in Bombay. Subsequently, she did her Senior Cambridge (1913), and later studied dentistry at Dr Ahmad Dental College, Calcutta (1919-22). Interestingly, she stayed at a hostel, although her sister, Maryam, and her family, were living in Calcutta. Upon graduation, Fatima opened a dental clinic on Abdur Rahman Street, in Bombay, in 1923, and simultaneously worked at the nearby Dhobi Talau Municipal Clinic on a voluntary basis. All this was, of course, something of a rare phenomenon even for cosmopolitan and modernised Bombay. But it was made possible, if only because Jinnah fervently believed that the women have an inalienable right to carve out a career for themselves.
During his long parliamentary career (1910-47), Jinnah stood against every sort of discrimination against women and other marginalized classes. Thus, he stoutly supported Bhupendranath Basu's Special Marriage Amendment Bill (1912), which extended legal cover to marriages falling outside the Hindu and Muslim laws. Likewise, he had materially helped in the passage of the Sarda Act (1935), prohibiting child marriage.
However, Jinnah's major role in the emancipation of Muslim women came in the mid 1930s when he began to reorganise and revitalise the moribund All India Muslim League (AIML), the most authoritative Muslim political organisation since its inception in 1906. Till then, the Muslim women 'were mere shrouded, silent creatures, confined to the four walls of their homes, steeped in dogma and superstition, and denied the fruits of modern education, health care and a career: And Jinnah was the foremost Muslim to raise this authoritative voice against the pathetic conditions to which the Muslim women had been consigned for a long while, and against discrimination of all sorts. He boldly and consistently espoused the women's cause and wished to see them as equal partners of men in all walks of life. No wonder, he declared at Aligarh on March 10, 1940: "No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. I do not mean that we should imitate the evils of the Western life. But let us try to raise the status of our women according to our own Islamic ideas and standards. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable conditions in which our women have to live. You should take your women along with you as comrades in every sphere of life..."
When Begum Shah Nawaz told the AIML Council at Lucknow in October 1937 that she had set up a Punjab Muslim Women's League, Jinnah stood up and said that he did not believe in separate men and women's organisations, but in their working together from the primary League upwards. He instructed the Provincial Leagues to include two women members in their respective quotas of membership in the AIML Council. Thus, adequate women representation came to be secured and ensured. Jinnah also nominated Begum Muhammad Ali to the AIML apex body, the Working Committee, which position she held till her death in 1944.
In December 1938, at the AIML session at Patna, Jinnah appointed a Central Women's Committee, with Fatima Jinnah as convenor, for the specific purpose of drafting a programme for the social, economic and cultural uplift of women. When the question of purdah (veil) was raised by a section at Patna, Jinnah intervened to emphasise that "it is absolutely essential for us to give every opportunity to our women to participate in our struggle for life and death. Women can do a good deal within their homes, even with purdah." On another occasion, Jinnah asserted, "No nation can make any progress without the cooperation of women. If women support their men as they did in the days of the Prophet of Islam, we should soon realise our goal.
Besides political mobilisation, the Central Women's Committee addressed itself to social problems encountered by the community, and organised social work. Thus, it passed several resolutions concerning housewives' problems and food shortages, as well as on more fundamental issues such as women's inheritance. In subsequent years, this Committee would hold separate sessions after the AIML annual sessions. Separate arrangements were also made for women participants in the AIML sessions, while the more prominent among them sat on the dais. And with the years, their participation increased to a point that some 5,000 women attended the AIML session at Karachi, in December 1943. Jinnah had always taken his sister, Fatima, to these sessions, and to quote Salma Tasadduque Hussain, a former member of the Punjab Assembly (1946-58), and a social worker, "it gave great encouragement to women to see that they could find a place of honour with men like Quaid-i-Azam..."
Meantime, at Jinnah's instance, the Muslim Women Students Federation (1941) and the Muslim Women National Guards (1942) were launched and this in a concerted attempt to mobilise the womenfolk alongside the men folk in the struggle for Pakistan. All this signified the acceptance of an entirely new role for women, and the breaking down of the male domination in vogue till then.
During the general elections (1945-46), the Muslim women played a pivotal-role. Women comprised almost one-third of the audiences in the election meetings in the Punjab. Their role in getting the women voters to the polling booths was crucial, especially in the Punjab where the Unionist Ministry had put up all sorts of obstacles in the way of a favourable verdict on Pakistan.
More significant was the women's role in the burgeoning civil disobedience movement in the Punjab (January-February 1947) and in the NWFP (February-June 1947). Women took out processions in Lahore day after day for a whole month, undergoing all sorts of hazards, bravely facing teargas, lathi charge, beatings, arrests, and imprisonment. One of the prisoners, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, made a green flag out of her own dupatta, surreptitiously climbed up the jail building, and hoisted it atop, shouting "Allah-o-Akbar" (God is great) and 'Pakistan Zindabad'. Two weeks later, when a mammoth women procession reached the Punjab Secretariat, at the fag end of the Mall in Lahore, a 13 year old girl, Fatima Sughra, boldly climbed up the iron gate, pulled down the Union Jack and replaced it with the green Muslim League flag, which she had made out of her own dupatta. And all that in the presence of a strong police contingent.
No less striking was the women's performance in the NWFP, traditionally one of the most conservative areas of the subcontinent. During the civil disobedient movement, the timid and traditionally home-bound Pakhtoon women plucked up courage to a point that they cast off their veil and organised public processions and demonstrations, in defiance of Section 144. Like their compatriots in the Punjab, they also faced teargas, lathi charges, beatings, and even gunfire; they also scaled ladders and climbed up buildings to hoist the League flag at various public places. And on April 3, 1947, some 1500 women picketed. More daring: they launched a secret organisation called a "War Council", which set up an underground radio station called the Pakistan Broadcasting Radio Station, which continued to be on the air till Pakistan's emergence on 14-15 August 1947.
Thus, within ten years of their political mobilisation, the apathetic and timid, home-bound, purdah-clad, superstitious-prone Muslim women had transformed themselves as an active, vocal, highly motivated and mobilised group, supremely conscious of their latent potentialities for political and social action. Indeed, the Pakistan movement had enabled them to prove their ability to organise, demonstrate, mobilise, court arrest, face persecution, lathi-charges, and teargas, as well as to raise funds and organise relief work in times of crises. Thus, they had raised sizeable funds during the Bengal famine (1943-44) and the 1945-46 general elections, and for the victims of the communal holocausts in Calcutta and Bihar (1946). They had also organised extensive relief work over there, as well as for the seven million refugees that had poured into West Pakistan during the partition riots in 1947.
Simultaneously, if only because of their role alongside their men folk, they had won the right to vote, to receive education, and to own property. In their emergence as a vocal, pro-active group during the momentous 1937-47 decade, Jinnah had helped them the most. He also acknowledged their notable contribution in the freedom struggle. Upon Pakistan's birth, therefore, he obviously felt that "in the great task of building the nation and maintaining its solidarity, the women have a valuable part to play"... not only in their homes but by helping their less fortunate sisters outside..." And he saw to it that women were represented in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly that they were included in the delegations to the UN and other international moots, and in the executive bodies of almost every organisation set up after Pakistan's birth. Again, it was he who had inspired his own sister, Fatima Jinnah, and Begum Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan, wife of Pakistan's first Prime Minister, to found several institutions and organisations for the educational uplift, economic amelioration and professional training of women in Pakistan's formative years. Thus, a new matrix of socially acceptable behaviour was firmly laid, which, with the years, enabled women to work their way up into the upper echelons of the government, the professions, and the educational and political fields.
It was again, Jinnah's benign influence that had emboldened Fatima Jinnah to contest against Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan in the 1965 presidential elections. Inter alia, her candidature had settled, once and for all, the thorny question whether or not a woman can be the head of an avowedly Muslim state, thus paving the way for Benazir Bhutto to become the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country, in 1988. Equally important, Fatima Jinnah was probably the first woman in the world to contest for the office of the president of a country.
In contesting the elections in the most propitious circumstances, compounded by advanced and failing health, Fatima Jinnah had, in a sense, dramatised Jinnah's vision of Pakistan. When asked, in 1942, by Geti Ara Bashir Ahmad, whether the "foundations of our new State [would] be laid on conservatism" or whether it would assume "the shape of a progressive country", Jinnah had categorically said, "Tell your young girls, I am a progressive Muslim leader. I, therefore, take my sister along with me to backward areas like Balochistan and N.W.F.P. and she also attends the sessions of the All India Muslim League and other public meetings. Insha Allah [God willing], Pakistan will be a progressive country in the building of which women will be seen working shoulder to shoulder with men in every department of life."
"The Prophet of Islam (PBUH) was a great teacher. He was a great law-giver. He was a great statesman and he was a great sovereign who ruled. The life of the Prophet (PBUH) was simple according to those times. He was successful in everything that he did from as a businessman to as a ruler. The Prophet (PBUH) was the greatest man that the world had ever seen. Thirteen hundred years ago he laid the foundations of democracy".
(occasion of the Holy Prophet's (PBUH) birthday at the Karachi Bar Association on 25th January 1948)
(The writer, a HEC Distinguished National Professor, has recently co-edited the "Jinnah Anthology" (3rd edn, 2011) and edited "Inquest of Jinnah", the only oral history on Pakistan's Founding Father).