Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a Pakistani lawyer, politician, and the founder of Pakistan — the political architect whose decade-long campaign for an independent Muslim state on the Indian subcontinent led to the August 14, 1947 partition of British India and the creation of the modern nation of Pakistan. He was born Mahomedali Jinnahbhai on December 25, 1876, in Karachi, then part of the Bombay Presidency of British India (now in Pakistan). He came from an Ismaili Shia Muslim Gujarati merchant family and converted to Sunni Islam later in life.

He studied law at Lincoln's Inn in London (1893–1896), becoming the youngest Indian to be called to the bar at age 19. He returned to British India and built a substantial Bombay legal practice through the early 1900s, becoming one of the most-prominent Indian commercial lawyers of his generation. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1906 and the All-India Muslim League in 1913, working initially within both organizations to build Hindu-Muslim political cooperation.

His political philosophy gradually shifted from Hindu-Muslim unity (which he had championed during his 1916 Lucknow Pact between Congress and the Muslim League) to the conviction that Muslims and Hindus represented two separate nations that could not coexist in a single post-independence India. His March 22, 1940 Lahore Resolution at the Muslim League's annual session — calling for separate Muslim-majority states in northwestern and northeastern India — became the foundational political document of the Pakistan movement.

The Indian Independence Act of July 18, 1947 partitioned British India into the two new dominions of India and Pakistan, with the partition taking effect on August 14, 1947 (Pakistan) and August 15, 1947 (India). Jinnah served as the first Governor-General of Pakistan from August 14, 1947 until his death from tuberculosis on September 11, 1948, in Karachi, at age 71. He is universally addressed in Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam ("Great Leader") and his birthday December 25 is a Pakistani national holiday.

His name Muhammad is from the Arabic Muḥammad meaning "praiseworthy" — referring to the Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam. Muhammad has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 1990s and currently sits in the US top 200 boys' names.