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* Jinnah, Pakistan & Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin by Akbar S. Ahmed
Students of South Asia have long held a fascination for Muhammad Ali Jinnah not only as the "founder" of Pakistan but as an eminent Muslim leader of this century. However,Jinnah remains an enigmatic personality, often blamed for the 1947 partition of the subcontinent. Even Richard Attenborough in his movie Gandhi portrays Jinnah, in the words of Salman Rushdie,as"Count Dracula." Akbar Ahmed, benefiting from fifty years of hindsight, had the opportunity, to clear some of the misconceptions about Jinnah.
Unfortunately, Ahmed's book fails to live up to this potential. In confronting a woefully undeveloped topic of South Asian history, Ahmed relies on sources who have remained silent in face of the gross caricatures that have haunted Jinnah for decades, such as Jinnah's daughter, Dina. But this mangling of personal anecdotes, accompanied by lopsided image molding, produces irrelevant sensationalism and...