Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin - Hardcover

""Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity virtually explodes with provocative ideas and new ways of looking at partition, at Jinnah, and at South Asia as a whole. [Ahmed] is passionate about his subject, but also able to stand back when necessary, especially when analyzing where Pakistan and the larger Islamic world are going." -"The New York Times Book Review ..."Ahmed has written a discursive, provocative book.... a stimulating, and often arresting read." -"World Policy Journal "Ahmed's distinct contribution is his attempt to relate [Pakistani nationalism] to the larger subject of Islamic identity." -"Choice "Akbar Ahmed's book looks at Jinnah from Pakistani, Indian and Western perspectives. It reveals a highly complex figure little known in the annals of India'a independence movement, which included Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi" F.A.O. Journal ."

Every generation needs to reinterpret its great men of the past. Akbar Ahmed, by revealing Jinnah's human face alongside his heroic achievement, both makes this statesman accessible to the current age and renders his greatness even clearer than before.

Four men shaped the end of British rule in India: Nehru, Gandhi, Mountbatten and Jinnah. We know a great deal about the first three, but Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, has mostly either been ignored or, in the case of Richard Attenborough's hugely successful film about Gandhi, portrayed as a cold megalomaniac, bent on the bloody partition of India. Akbar Ahmed's major study redresses the balance.

Drawing on history, semiotics and cultural anthropology as well as more conventional biographical techniques, Akbar S. Ahmad presents a rounded picture of the man and shows his relevance as contemporary Islam debates alternative forms of political leadership in a world dominated (at least in the Western media) by figures like Colonel Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein.