a prob is often pietist Sunnis (such as Ziaul-Haq and various Islamists) would misattribute stuff to Jinnah. This in turn gave secularists (a whole bunch, too many to name here) an easy strawman against which to push own revisionism. Jinnah was a complex & multifaceted person https://twitter.com/aghaahmedullah/status/1260395751680679937

Too many different groups try to impose their idea of what Pakistan should be on Jinnah. A case in point in former chief justice Munir's revisionism of him as a diehard secularist, which was written in 1980s as a counter to idea pushed by Zia etc of him as a centralizing Islamist

Saleena Karim's book does a comprehensive job of bursting these various bubbles. I think it fair to say Jinnah was "Muslim nationalist" with modernist ideas, but also strongly played on pan-Islamic themes (Iqbal etc) & absolutely had some Islamist supporters who played on Shariat

either way he was a terrific leader, among the most underestimated (outside Pakistan) in the modern period, and I think much of the controversy around him misses the point b/c he himself was more an excellent "operator" than an ideologue nor had any visionary pretensions.

This is a case in point. Using the (very much disingenuous) "Islamist" revisionism of Zia etc about Jinnah as a strawman, secularists (Hamdani etc) have managed to con neutral people like Scherezade here into thinking their opposite revisionism is accurate https://twitter.com/Scheherazade_S/status/1260343612182794247

So b/c the idea of Jinnah as a centralist/pro-military (lol) "Islamist" that Zia portrayed is so obviously a charade, equally dishonest portrayals by charlatans such as Hamdani are able to position themselves as fearless truthtellers when their own version is equally ridiculous.

I have rarely encountered a proponent of the "Jinnah was secularist cos he didn't like mullas" revisionist school (a school that includes Paracha, pseudoscholar Hamdani, Rashid, Munir, etc) who DIDN'T preface their argument by pointing at the "Islamist" revisionism by Zia etc

fact is that Jinnah used the arguments of a *classical* pan-Islamist (yes you can throw around the word "religious right" as much as you like but tis true) Iqbal as well as explicitly Islamist ppl such as Bahadur Yarjung. Fact is ALSO that he didn't care for"mullas" nor did Iqbal

Fact is *also* that at other occasions he went out of his way to make links with pan-Islamist groups (Muslim Brethren leader Hasan Banna a case in point, also the argument about Ottomans early in his career). How do we reconcile this beyond saying simply "complexity"?

First realize *no* "Islamist" apart from Khomeneists believe that "mullas should run state", so we can toss that canard out. There's also different strands within political Islam- the territorial (pan-Islamic) type, the conservative type (oft mullas), the modernist type, etc etc.

There's also "jamaati/ikhwani" type which doesn't neatly fit into any of these, but in subcontinent is unhelpfully lumped in with "mullas" - which is doubly ironic b/c neither Maududi nor most Jamaati types are mullas, a fact that often lends to criticism from conservative types

You can write a whole paper on this stuff but for our purposes here it should suffice to note that "Maududi opposed Pakistan creation till well after the fact" (the common argument by secularists) does NOT equate to "Jinnah was a secularist", not even remotely.

As @Scheherazade_S points out, there was a marked attempt by Zia etc in 1980s to revise Jinnah in their preferred model. What she neglects to mention is there was a corresponding revisionist effort by the *other* side that went in the opposite extreme, and was no closer to truth

the *other* side, which includes names such as Ahmed Rashid, Nadeem Paracha, Yasser Hamdani, and former chief justice Mohammad Munir, relies on selective-and-frequently-taken-out-of-context quotations by Jinnah + of course the easy strawman of Zia's revisionism.

So for example Jinnah said that "you are free to worship" and state won't persecute etc etc. This is taken by the second school as proof of secularism EVEN THOUGH the same claim is made by Islamists. If this is secularism then every Islamic polity in history was secularist.

Or the fact that Jinnah did not like the Khilafat movement in the 1920s, which ignores (1) his own political shift and (2) the fact that this dislike was anchored more in dislike of the Khilafat movement's leaders than it was to idea of Islam & politics, on which he HEAVILY drew

occasions where Jinnah cited (for example) the caliph Umar b. Khattab as a model of how to govern, or where he expressly drew on Islamic themes (his lieutenants, such as Yarjung, explicitly called for Shariat), or his partnership with the arch-pan-Islamist Iqbal, are ignored

When this is pointed out, the secular revisionists point out the obviously false "Islamist" strawman that Zia set up of Jinnah as a rightwing Islamist & militarist, imply that anything opposing their own revisionism belongs to Zia's tradition. Which is of course a logical fallacy

b/c both revisionisms (the Islamist/secularist ones) can be/are untrue. Jinnah doesn't fall neatly into either camp. imho insofar as he had ideology it was Muslim nationalism, a modernist in some respects. But he was more an operator than ideologue & to an extent it's irrelevant