Our Heroes
Our Heroes
Jinnah was an Indian politician who successfully campaigned for an independent Pakistan and became its first leader. He is known there as 'Quaid-I Azam' or 'Great Leader'. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was born on 25 December 1876 in Karachi, now in Pakistan, but then part of British-controlled India. His father was a prosperous Muslim merchant. Jinnah studied at Bombay University and at Lincoln's Inn in London. He then ran a successful legal practice in Bombay. He was already a member of the Indian National Congress, which was working for autonomy from British rule, when he joined the Muslim League in 1913. The league had formed a few years earlier to represent the interests of Indian Muslims in a predominantly Hindu country, and by 1916 he was elected its president.His insistence on this issue through negotiations with the British government resulted in the partition of India and the formation of the state of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. This occurred against a backdrop of widespread violence between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, and a vast movement of populations between the new states of Pakistan and India in which hundreds of thousands died. Jinnah became the first governor general of Pakistan, but died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1948.
Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938), a descendant of a Kashmiri Brahmin family that had embraced Islam in the seventeenth century, was born and settled in Sialkot. After a traditional education in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, he was exposed to a liberal education that defined the contours of his thought and his poetry during the entire period of his life. Beginning his educational career at the Scottish Mission School, he went on to acquire his M. A. in Philosophy, before joining Trinity College, and later earning the degree of Bar-at-Law. He furthered his education by getting the degree of doctorate from Germany on The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. Even while he favoured the idea of the creation of Pakistan and is venerated there as the national poet. King George V decorated him with knighthood and he was called Sir Mohammad Iqbal thereafter and is often regarded as the poet-philosopher of the East who addressed the Muslim ummah, believed in the philosophy of wahdatul wujood, and propounded the philosohy of khudi, or selfhood, which called for self-realisation and the discovery of the hidden talent with love and perseverance.
Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in in Bhopal, India. He immigrated with his family to Pakistan in 1947. After studying at St. Anthony’s High School, Khan joined the D. J. Science College of Karachi, where he took physics and mathematics. His teacher at the college was famous solar physicist Dr. Bashir Syed. Khan earned a B.Sc. degree in physical metallurgy at the University of Karachi in 1960. Khan accepted a job as an inspector of weight and measures in Karachi after graduation. He later resigned and went to work in Netherlands in the 1970’s. Khan gained fame as a talented scientist at the nuclear plant he worked in. He had special access to the most restricted areas of the URENCO facility. He could also read the secret documentation on the gas centrifuge technology. In December, 1974, he came back to Pakistan and tried to convince the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to adopt his Uranium route rather than Plutonium route in building nuclear weapons. According to media reports, A.Q. Khan had a close and cordial relationship with President General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and the Military of Pakistan. He also maintained a close relationship with the Pakistan Air Force..
Liaquat Ali Khan, (born Oct. 1, 1895, Karnal, India—died Oct. 16, 1951, Rawalpindi, Pak.), first prime minister of Pakistan (1947–51). Born the son of a landowner, Liaquat was educated at Aligarh, Allahabad, and Exeter College, Oxford. A barrister by profession, like his leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, he entered politics in 1923, being elected first to the provincial legislature of the United Provinces and then to the central legislative assembly. He joined the Muslim League and soon became closely associated with Jinnah. By degrees he won first the respect and then the admiration of the Muslim community for his share in the struggle for Pakistan; when independence was won in 1947 and Jinnah became the first governor-general, Liaquat was the obvious choice as prime minister. In this post his achievements were outstanding. If Jinnah founded Pakistan, Liaquat established it, laying down the main lines of policy, domestic and foreign, that afterward guided the country. After Jinnah’s death, Liaquat was acclaimed as qaid-i-millet (“leader of the country”). Liaquat was assassinated in Rawalpindi in 1951 by a Muslim fanatic who resented his steady refusal to contemplate war with India.
Choudhry Rahmat Ali was one of the earliest advocates of the creation of the state of Pakistan. Rahmat Ali a Pakistani Muslim nationalist is generally recognized as the creator of the name “Pakistan” for a separate Muslim, homeland in South Asia and is known as the founder of the Pakistan National Movement. Ali was born in November 1895 into a Gujjar Muslim family in a District of Indian Punjab. From his early childhood, Rahmat Ali showed signs of great promise as a student. After completing his schooling, he joined the Islamia College of Lahore, after his graduation in 1918; he initially taught at Aitcheson College Lahore and later joined Punjab University in order to study law. However In 1930 he moved to England to join Emmanuel College Cambridge, in 1931. He obtained a BA degree in 1933 and MA in 1940 from the University of Cambridge. In 1943, he was called to the Bar, Middle Temple Inn, London. Rahmat Ali finished education in England, obtaining MA and LLB with honors from the universities of Cambridge and Dublin. He died in February 1951 and was buried on 20 February at Newmarket Road Cemetery Cambridge UK. Emmanuel College’s Master, who had been Rahmat Ali’s Tutor, himself arranged the burial in Cambridge on 20 February 1951.
Fatima Jinnah was born in Karachi on 30th July 1893. Fatima Jinnah had seven siblings. Mohammad Ali Jinah was the eldest one in the family, and Fatima Jinnah was the 2nd last child of the family. In this family of seven siblings she was the closest one to Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Her well known and respected brother became her guardian after the death of their father in 1901. Fatima Jinna joined the Bandara convert in Bombay in 1902 where she remained in hostels as her parents had died. In 1919 she got admitted to the highly competitive University of Calcutta where she attended the Dr.R.Ahmad dental collage. After she graduated from there, she went with her idea of opening a dental clinic in Bombay in 1923. She was known as Madar-e-millat or mother of the nation. Fatima Jinnah’s name is an important one among the leaders of Pakistan Movement. She joined the All India Muslim League and attended the annual sessions of the party. Fatima Jinnah contributed in the social development sector has been ignored. She along with Begum Liaqat Ali Khan made the greatest contribution in the realm of women’s awakening and participation in national affairs.
SATTAR EDHI was born in 1928 (*1928 - 2016) in India, in Bantva, a small village near Joona Gurh, in Gujarat State.. In 1947, after partition of the former British colony into two separate independent states, India and Pakistan, Abdul Sattar Edhi's family, who were Muslims, moved to Pakistan.In 1974 Abdul Sattar Edhi establishes the Edhi Foundation which over the years has become the largest and best organized social welfare system in Pakistan and in the Third World. he seeds of compassion for the suffering humanity were sown in his soul by his mother’s infirmity. When Edhi was at the tender age of eleven, his mother became paralysed and later got mentally ill. Young Abdul Sattar devoted himself for looking after all her needs; cleaning, bathing, changing clothes and feeding. This proved to be a loosing battle against the disease, and her helplessness increased over the years. Edhi Foundation operates on the basis of local volunteers and through private donations, in a spirit of tolerance and solidarity that goes beyond racial and religious barriers. With his wife Bilquis Abdul Sattar Edhi is still working in Karachi where his organisation helps the poorest and the most destitute, not only in Pakistan but also in other Third World countries.(October 2000).
Abdus Salam, (born Jan. 29, 1926, Jhang Maghiāna, Punjab, India [now in Pakistan]—died Nov. 21, 1996, Oxford, Eng.), Pakistani nuclear physicist who was the corecipient with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Lee Glashow of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in formulating the electroweak theory, which explains the unity of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism.. Salam attended the Government College at Lahore, and in 1952 he received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge. He returned to Pakistan as a professor of mathematics in 1951–54 and then went back to Cambridge as a lecturer in mathematics. He became professor of theoretical physics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, in 1957. Salam was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim scientist to win a Nobel Prize. In 1964 he helped found the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy, in order to provide support for physicists from Third World countries. He served as the centre’s director until his death. Salam carried out his Nobel Prize–winning research at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in the 1960s.
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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, (born Jan. 5, 1928, near Lārkāna, Sindh, India [now in Pakistan]—died April 4, 1979, Rāwalpindi, Pak.), Pakistani statesman, president (1971–73), and prime minister (1973–77), a popular leader who was overthrown and executed by the military. Born into a noble Rājpūt family that had accepted Islām, Bhutto was the son of a prominent political figure in the Indian colonial government. He was educated in Bombay and at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1950). Bhutto studied law at the University of Oxford and then practiced law and lectured in England. Upon his return to Pakistan (1953), he set up a law practice in Karāchi, where he was appointed a member of Pakistan’s delegation to the United Nations in 1957. The government was seized by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, the army chief of staff, on July 5, 1977. Soon afterward Bhutto was imprisoned. He was sentenced to death (March 18, 1978) on the charge of having ordered the assassination of a political opponent in 1974; after an appeal to a higher court, Bhutto was hanged, despite appeals for clemency from several world leaders. He was the author of The Myth of Independence (1969) and The Great Tragedy (1971).
Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, (born Aug. 12, 1924, Jullundur, Punjab [now in India]—died Aug. 17, 1988, near Bahāwalpur, Pakistan), Pakistani chief of Army staff, chief martial-law administrator, and president of Pakistan (1978–88).. Zia was commissioned in 1945 from the Royal Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun and served with the British armoured forces in Southeast Asia at the end of World War II. Bhutto promoted him to lieutenant general in 1975 and made him chief of Army staff in 1976. Zia seized power from Bhutto in a bloodless coup on July 5, 1977, and became chief martial-law administrator while retaining his position as Army chief of staff. He assumed the presidency after Fazal Elahi Chaudhry resigned. Zia tightened his hold on the government after having the charismatic and still-popular Bhutto executed on charges of attempted murder in 1979. Zia suspended political parties in that year, banned labour strikes, imposed strict censorship on the press, and declared martial law in the country (nominally lifted 1985). He responded to the Soviet Union’s invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979 by embarking on a U.S.-financed military buildup. He also tried to broaden his base of support and worked for the Islamization of Pakistan’s political and cultural life. He died in an airplane crash.
