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for what might come about, mainly because of the mixing of populations in the urban areas. Future decades would have to witness political structures of extreme subtlety.
    Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam (father of the nation), the creator of the state that many have called the most dangerous and explosive in the world, is buried in the middle of a vast immaculately landscapedgarden in central Karachi. So beautiful and perfect is the garden that once inside it you realize just how poor and chaotic much of the rest of the city is. The mausoleum itself is a bullet-shaped dome socketed into inward-sloping marble walls. The geometric design is so severe and cubistic it brings to mind all the too-neat abstractions of political ideology. Meanwhile, the flashy marble interior suggests a shopping mall, or the duty-free zone of one of the new airports in the Gulf. There is something both edgy and curiously vacant about the whole affair. Just as the tomb looked out of place amid Karachi’s ratty mishmash, Jinnah’s model-state has so far proved unsuited for the ground-level realities of a messy world.
    In Pakistan, I detected three schools of thought about Jinnah. The first was the official one, which declared him a great twentieth-century hero of Muslim rights, in the vein of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The second, shared by a few brave Pakistanis and more people in the West, was that Jinnah was a vain man and a failure who unwittingly gave birth to a monstrosity of a nation that was, in turn, linked to much of the violence in Afghanistan in recent decades. The third view, though, was the most interesting, and in its way the most subversive, as well as the most informed.
    In this view, Jinnah was a complex man of India, a London-Bombay intellectual, the son of a merchant from Gujarat and a Parsee from Karachi. Like Ataturk, who had grown up amid the nourishing cosmopolitan influences of Salonika (rather than amid the narrower Islamic world of Anatolia which he came to rule), Jinnah was the product of a sophisticated cultural environment, that of Greater India, and thus was at heart a secularist. Yet he believed his Muslim state was needed to protect a minority from uncertain majority rule. As misguided and politically opportunistic as this might have been, it made room for a state that, though composed mostly of Muslims, might still maintain a secular spirit, much like Ataturk’s Turkey. It would be informed by Muslim values without being necessarily ruled by Islamic law. Moreover, it might be a state with a high degree of provincial autonomy, in order to recognize the territorial-based nationalisms of the Pushtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis.
    As I said, this view was the most subversive because it directly challenged what the ruling class in Islamabad—the generals and the politicians both—had turned the country into. Because Jinnah died in 1948, soon after Pakistan’s birth, it is impossible to know what the country might have evolved into had he lived longer. But one can argue that keyprinciples of the Quaid-i-Azam have been violated. Rather than a state with a moderate sensibility, Pakistan maintained a suffocating Islamic milieu in which extremism was rewarded with political concessions, while the military and political parties jockeyed for position with one another. Alcohol was banned and girls’ schools in the rural areas were burned down. And as for autonomy, that was a myth that my meetings in Baluchistan and Sindh had made clear.
    Jinnah’s tomb was like a two-dimensional stage prop, just as Pakistan itself had all the artificial trappings of a state, with its Mughal-cum-Stalinist public buildings in Islamabad. But in the eyes of many of its ethnic peoples, it still lacked political legitimacy.
    “The Indian Subcontinent has produced only one liberal, secular politician, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. [Mohandas] Gandhi was just a British agent from South Africa, a reactionary with a sweet tongue. Ever since Jinnah,