Fatima Jinnah

Fatima Jinnah was a Pakistani dental surgeon, biographer, and political activist known as Mādar-e Millat, the Mother of the Nation. The younger sister and closest confidante of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, she ran against Field Marshal Ayub Khan in the 1965 Pakistani presidential election as the consensus opposition candidate.

Born on July 31, 1893, in Karachi in the Bombay Presidency of British India, Fatima Jinnah was the seventh of eight children of Jinnahbhai Poonja, a Gujarati Khoja Muslim merchant, and Mithibai. Her brother Muhammad Ali Jinnah, then a young barrister practising in Bombay, took charge of her education after their father's death in 1901, sending her to the Bandra Convent in Mumbai.

She qualified at the University of Calcutta's Dr. Ahmad Dental College in 1923 and opened a dental practice in Bombay, one of the first Muslim women in South Asia to enter the profession.

Fatima closed her practice in 1929 to keep house for her widowed brother and accompanied him through the All-India Muslim League's campaign for Pakistan, settling in Karachi after partition in 1947. She later wrote the memoir My Brother, published posthumously in 1987 with portions censored. After two decades of withdrawal from politics she returned in 1965 as the Combined Opposition Parties' presidential nominee, losing to Ayub Khan in an indirect election widely held to have been rigged. She died in Karachi on July 9, 1967, aged 73.

Her name Fatima derives from the Arabic root fatama, meaning to wean or to abstain, and is the name of the Prophet Muhammad's daughter. Fatima is a popular feminine name across the Muslim world.