Yesterday the Chief Justice (Qazi Faez Issa) remarked that if Mr. Jinnah had been alive in 2002, he would have been disqualified under Article 62 from contesting parliamentary elections. He's right, because Mr. Jinnah (whom I admire as a great leader), besides consuming alcohol, didn't know much about Islam.
When he was expelled by the Khoja Ismaili community for marrying a woman of another faith, he was approached by both the Khoja Sunnis and the Khoja Shias to join their communities. Despite the majority of Muslims being Sunnis, he chose to join the Shias (who are not considered to be Muslims today). Not only that. When asked if Ahmadis were non-Muslims, he emphatically declared that they are Muslims (despite the Allahabad High Court's decision to the contrary in 1926). This was enough to condemn him and due to this reason, he was called "Kafir-e-Azam" by religious parties.
The surprising thing is that he was so popular among the sub-continent's Muslims in those days, despite being fully Westernized and not able to speak Urdu.
Despite all this, the fact remains that he was a great lawyer and politician, a man of principles who could not be bought by Gandhi and Nehru. This alone made him one of the greatest men of the twentieth century.
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