Illustration by Abro
On December 14, 2018, Prime Minister Imran Khan uploaded two short videos of eminent Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmed. I am not quite sure which year the videos are from, but they were obviously at least eight years old, since Dr Ahmed passed away in 2010.
In one of the videos, Dr Ahmed quotes an excerpt from a diary written by Dr Riaz Ali Shah who was a physician of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, when the latter was suffering from tuberculosis. Jinnah passed away in September 1948.
In the video, Dr Ahmed informs his audience that he had picked the excerpt from an article published in a September 1988 edition of the Urdu daily Jang — 40 years after Jinnah’s demise.
Like an impressionable teenager, the PM circulated a video of Dr Israr Ahmed claiming that the Quaid advocated a caliphate from his deathbed, when the claim is highly suspect
Dr Ahmed quotes the 1988 newspaper article about Dr Riaz Ali’s ‘diary’ in which he writes that as Jinnah lay on his bed suffering from tuberculosis, he (Jinnah) spoke about his vision of a Pakistan that would be an Islamic state, or a 20th-century manifestation of a state constructed during the rule of Islam’s first four caliphs (Khilafat-i-Rashida).
Dr Riaz was one of the four doctors present during Jinnah’s last hours. According to an article in the Pulse Fortnightly written by Lt Gen (Rtd) M. Ahmad Akhtar and published on November 1, 2014, four physicians accompanied Jinnah when he travelled to the vacation resort of Ziarat in Balochistan. They were: Dr M. Ali Mistri, Dr Illahi Bakhsh, Dr Ghulam Muhammad and Dr Riaz Ali Shah. Dr Mistri was Jinnah’s personal physician who, according to Lt Gen Akhtar, had moved to Karachi from Bombay on Jinnah’s request after the creation of Pakistan.
Nothing was reported about Jinnah’s ‘last words’ as such until the appearance of a book in 1978 by Dr Illahi Bakhsh, which was re-printed by the Oxford University Press in 2012.
Dr Illahi’s book With the Quaid-i-Azam in His Last Days is largely a detailed account of the Quaid’s illness and how Jinnah tried to live with it. There is nothing in the book about a man ravaged by a crippling disease but one lucidly advocating the creation of an Islamic state.
There is also a PDF copy available online of an Urdu translation of Dr Illahi Bakhsh’s book. However, attached to it is an Urdu translation of notes supposedly kept by Dr Riaz Ali Shah in a diary. The notes appear in the shape of a booklet called Quaid-i-Azam Kay Akhri Lamhaat (The Quaid’s Last Moments). The booklet does not mention the date of publication. It is not available in any of the major bookstores in Pakistan nor on Amazon; neither is it mentioned in the long list of books and papers on Jinnah that appear on the Government of Pakistan’s website dedicated to the study of Pakistan’s founder.
In a 2003 article for The Concept, Raja A. Khan writes that the booklet by Dr Shah was published in 1950. However, Raja only speaks about Jinnah sharing his views on Kashmir with Riaz. One wonders, though, how many diverse topics the founder was discussing with the good doctor during his very last moments.
What is more important is that after going through the online version of the booklet, I found no mention of Jinnah speaking to Dr Shah about the idea of the caliphate.