ident of the group in 1916. He disagreed profoundly with the move of the Indian national Congress in 1920 as it launched a non-cooperation movement against the British government. He continued in public affairs into the 1940s, when he helped assure that partition would take place. He came to be known as Quaid-e-Azam, or "Great Leader," and his word was law in the Muslim League. He would be the first leader of Pakistan when it was created in 1947, and Jinnah completely dominated Pakistan and inspired it beyond his own death in Karachi in 1948. Jinnah's vision of independence came true and infused the new country with a strength that would enable it to survive and to build a dedication to independent self-rule. However, this was not to be, in part because the country he created had internal rifts which led to the India-Pakistan War in 1971 and to further division:
Pakistan from the moment of its birth faced crisis after life threatening crisis, breaking in 1971 into two countries, East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh. Jinnah had been forced to accept a Pakistan with such impractical boundaries as to convince many Pakistanis of Mountbatten's desire to ensure its failure. When Jinnah complained of the "truncated" and "moth eaten" Pakistan he was offered, Mountbatten issued an ultimatum on the eve of independence: either accept it or there would be no Pakistan (Ahmed, 1994, 35).
Up until December 1971, Pakistan was bifurcated into East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and these were separated by 1,600 kilometers of Indian territory. The people of the two areas were further estranged from one another by differences in language and cultural traditions because the Bengali "monsoon Islam" of the West was alien to the "desert Islam" of the West. The East Wing was notable for its ethnic Bengali homogeneity and its collective Bangla cultural and linguistic heritage. It contained over half the population of Pakistan and stood in sharp ...