KARACHI: Perhaps they should have come in costume. With relatives of the nation’s founding fathers coming together on the dais, the stage seemed set for a scene from the 1940s where Jinnah would hold the gaze of a riveted audience as he delivered a thunderous speech. The occasion, however, was not very different. It was in the words of the leader.

The Oxford University Press on Friday held the launch of “Quotes from the Quaid”, edited by two eminent scholars of the Pakistan movement, Professor Sharif al Mujahid and Liaquat Merchant who is Jinnah’s nephew and president of the Jinnah Society. The foreward is by Stanley Wolpert, an acclaimed author who believes that “every Pakistani, from your youngest child to your eldest scholar should read this wonderful little book.”

The book is a pocket-sized summary of Jinnah’s sweeping vision. It presents, as Mujahid points out, “the nation-building aspect of the man” and highlights all his ideals as he saw and pursued them. “Jinnah’s singleness of purpose is clear as he was a man who always had one grand objective,” says the professor.

Mujahid explains that the quotes are mostly from 1937 to 1947 when Jinnah’s sole mission was “to regain the lost power of the Muslims.”

Another poignant speech came from Allama Iqbal’s son and former justice Javed Iqbal who laments how Pakistan has drifted away from Jinnah’s ideals.

“His political ideal was a secular state and not an Islamic state. His principles have been distorted and misinterpreted,” says Mr Iqbal.

He also mentions a speech by Jinnah in which he referred to a section

of maulvis as “undesirable.”

Liaquat Merchant describes the three-year journey of the book and then moves on to shed light on the life and times of the leader. “Unfortunately, there has been no other leader to develop and rally national unity,” says Merchant.

Merchant also quotes the Aga Khan as saying that of all the great statesmen he had known, none “outshone Jinnah’s strength of character and statecraft.”

Sarojini Naidu, on the other hand, had been more poetic in her take on Jinnah and described him as a man with “a faultless perception and flawless refinement of mind. He had an austere code of public honour and private integrity.”

In this book, Jinnah speaks on all almost all issues that plague the country today and its readers will be left with a sense of having been in the company of a man who was a myth as well as nothing short of a legend.—Reema Abbasi