It would not be wrong to say that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a liberal, par excellence. According to a quote by Hector Bolitho, his official biographer, Jinnah said, “... I happened to meet several important English Liberals with whose help I came to understand the doctrine of Liberalism ... which became part of my life.”

In tandem with his liberal ethos and his consuming concern with human rights was his burgeoning passion for reversing the “wretched” condition of women, who stood marginalised, not only in the pre-modern East, but also in the modern West, in the later half of the twentieth century.

Miss Agatha Harrison, one of the speakers at a memorial meeting for Jinnah in London, on September 14, 1948, narrated, “When Jinnah was a student in London, the suffragette movement was gathering momentum; ...young Jinnah always came to our meetings and spoke in defence of the vote for women. Even then he was not afraid of championing an unpopular cause.”

Jinnah's belief that women should be extended all the opportunities available to men at various stages in their lives was amply reflected in his handling of the schooling and career orientation of Fatima Jinnah, his youngest sister and ward. Much against the family and the community traditions, she was sent first to the Bandhara Convent School, then to the St. Patrick School, both in Bombay, where she did her Senior Cambridge, and later, all the way to Dr Ahmad Dental College, in Calcutta, to qualify for a professional career. There she stayed at a hostel, as in Bombay, although her sister, Maryam, along with her family, was living in the city.

After graduation, Fatima opened a dental clinic on Abdur Rahman Street, in Bombay, in 1923, and simultaneously worked at the nearby Dhobi Talau Municipal Clinic in the evening, on a voluntary basis. All this was, of course, nothing less than a rare phenomenon even for cosmopolitan Bombay. Yet it was made possible only because Jinnah believed that women have an inalienable right to carve out for themselves a career of their own choice.

During his long parliamentary career, Jinnah consistently and religiously stood against every sort and shade of discrimination against women and other unprivileged classes. Thus, he stoutly supported Bhupendranath Basu's Special Marriage Amendment Bill, which provided for legal cover to marriages falling outside the Hindu and Muslim laws, although it caused unrestrained consternation among vast sections of the vocal Muslim strata.

Likewise, 23 years later, when he was already a universally acknowledged Muslim leader, he materially helped in the passage of the controversial Sarda Act, prohibiting child marriage, which again, was stoutly opposed by the predominantly conservative segments of the Indian society.

However, Jinnah's major role in the emancipation of Muslim women came in the mid 1930s when he began reorganising and revitalising the moribund All India Muslim League (AIML), the most authoritative Muslim political organisation since its inception in 1906. Till then, the Muslim women were shrouded, silent creatures, strictly quarantined to the four walls of their homes, deeply steeped in dogma and superstition, and routinely denied the fruits of modern education, health care and a career.

At that juncture, Jinnah was the foremost Muslim leader to raise his commanding voice against the wretched conditions to which the Muslim women had been consigned for a long while, and against all sorts of discrimination.
When Begum Jahanara Shah Nawaz (1896-1979) told the AIML Council at Lucknow in October 1937 that she had set up a Punjab Muslim Women's League, Jinnah stood up and said, that he “did not believe in separate men and women's organisations, but in their working together from the primary League upwards.”

Thus, at Jinnah's insistence, a beginning was made in securing and ensuring women's representation in the AIML. Before long, Jinnah also got women entry at the highest echelon he got Begum Mohamed Ali nominated to the AIML apex body, the Working Committee, a position she held till her death in 1944.

Within six months, Jinnah's initiative at Lucknow seemed to yield positive results. And he was able to report in his presidential address to the AIML's Special Session at Calcutta, on April 17, 1938, “We have made efforts to take our women with us in our struggle and in many places that I visited they took enormous interest and participated in various gatherings and functions.”

In December 1938, at the AIML session at Patna, Jinnah went a step further. He appointed a Central Women's Committee, with Fatima Jinnah as convener, for the specific purpose of drafting a programme for the social, economic and cultural uplift of women, and, among other things, to organise provincial and district sub-committees under the Provincial and Districts Muslim League.

When the question of purdah (veil) was raised by a section at Patna, Jinnah effectively intervened, arguing, “It is absolutely essential for us to give every opportunity to our women to participate in our struggle for life and death. Women can do a good deal within their homes, even with purdah.”

On another occasion, Jinnah pled, “Man must be made to understand and made to feel that woman is his equal and that woman is his friend and comrade and [that] they together can build up homes, families and the nation.” Another famous quote which rightly emphasised his concern for gender equality was, “No nation achieves anything unless the women go side by side with men -- even to the battlefield.”

On his part, Jinnah always took his sister, Fatima, along with him almost everywhere, and she walked shoulder to shoulder -- not behind him. Clearly, this was meant to proclaim a message, loud and clear, for every one within reach the ennobling message of gender equality.

In the 1940s, although it was rashly impolitic to take her along with him to traditional and tribal areas such as the NWFP and Balochistan, especially when he was striving so hard to get them gathered on the burgeoning AIML platform, he did it with rank impunity since he would at no cost compromise on a basic principle he had believed in so passionately since his student days.

“... in those days not even British male politicians encouraged their womenfolk to take a public role as Jinnah did,” recalls Yahya Bakhtiar, a former Attorney-General and a senator from Balochistan. After the formation of the country, he asked Fatima Jinnah to sit beside him at the Sibi Durbar, the grand annual gathering of Baloch and Pakhtun chiefs and leaders at Sibi. He was making a point in his own way that Muslim women must take their place in history. In this way, the Sibi Durbar broke all precedents.

Begum Salma Tasadduque Hussain, a former member of the Punjab and West Pakistan assemblies and a social worker, explained, “It gave great encouragement to women to see that they could find a place of honour with men like Quaid-i-Azam.”

“He was a very enlightened leader ... who sincerely wanted that women should get a status equal to that of men,” testified Khurhsid Ara Begum, wife of Nawab Siddique Ali Khan, who was closely acquainted with Jinnah.
Meantime, at Jinnah's insistence, the Muslim Women Students Federation and the Women National Guards were launched, both of them designed to mobilise the womenfolk alongside the men in the struggle for Pakistan. The Federation could be a closed-door gathering, but not the National Guards who, by their very avocation, had to work in the open, discarding the purdah and the traditional women's role. Surely, a revolutionary step for the early 1940s, and a big leap forward towards women's emancipation and empowerment, towards actualising their potential, towards engendering gender equality.

Thus, within a brief spell of ten years (1937-47), the apathetic and timid, home-bound, purdah-clad, and superstition-prone Muslim women had been able to transform themselves radically. They were turned into a pro-active, vocal, highly motivated and mobilised group -- supremely conscious of their latent potential for political and social action.

Jinnah also duly acknowledged their notable contribution in the freedom struggle, “Half of Pakistan is yours because you have put in no less effort to achieve it than the men,” he emphasised while addressing a women's gathering in Karachi, in late 1947.

After the creation of the country, he said, “I know that in the long struggle for the achievement of Pakistan, Muslim women have stood solidly behind their men. In the bigger struggle for the building up of Pakistan that now lies ahead, let it not be said that the women of Pakistan had lagged behind or failed in their duty.” And later events proved that they did not.

He also saw to it that women were represented in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, they were included in the delegations to the UN and international conferences, and in the executive bodies of almost every organisation set up after Pakistan's birth. Even before Pakistan's birth, Jinnah had set up a precedent by sending Begum Shah Nawaz along with M. A. H. Ispahani to the US in October 1946 to explain the League's viewpoint and the case for Pakistan to the various delegations to the UN as well as to the press and the public at large.

Again, it was Jinnah who had inspired his own sister, Fatima Jinnah, and Begum Ra'ana Liaquat All Khan, wife of Pakistans first Prime Minister, to found several institutions and organisations for the educational uplift, economic amelioration and professional training of women in Pakistan's formative years.

When asked, in 1942, by Geti Ara Bashir Ahmad, sister of Begum Shah Nawaz, whether the “foundations of our new State [would] be laid on conservatism” or whether it would assume “the shape of a progressive country,” Jinnah had categorically assured her “Tell your young girls, I am a progressive Muslim leader. I, therefore, take my sister along with me to areas like Balochistan and NWFP and she also attends the sessions of the All India Muslim League and other public meetings. Insha Allah, Pakistan will be a progressive country in the building of which women will be seen working shoulder to shoulder with men in every walk of life.”