Mr. Jinnah put into focus the Islamic character of Pakistan when he welcomed the newly-appointed Ambassador of Jordan and his Monarch’s message of brotherly felicitations at a function at the Governor-General’s House in Karachi in 1948. Governor-General Jinnah said: “Islam is to us the source of our very life and existence and it has linked our cultural and traditional past so closely with the Arab world that there need be no doubt whatsoever about our fullest sympathy for the Arab cause”.

Since the First World War (1914-1918), when the British forces grabbed Palestine from the defeated Ottoman empire, Mr. Jinnah had been a staunch and vocal advocate of the rights of the Palestinian people to have their independent State of Palestine. Under his direction, in every major conference of the Muslim League during the Pakistan Movement, resolutions demanding Palestine’s independence under Arab rule were passed, including the historic Lahore session of the Muslim League in March 1940. He sent Muslim League delegations to international conference on Palestine held in the Arab countries and in the UK to demand independence for Arab Palestine. As the Governor-General of Pakistan in 1947-48, Jinnah condemned the Zionist-led UN Plan for the Partition of Palestine in order to create the Jewish State of Israel. In the debates in the UN Security Council in New York in 1947 and later on in Paris in 1948, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Sir Zafarullah Khan, thundered denunciation of the West-supported Zionist conspiracy to plant “the canker of Israel” in the heart of the Arab world and predicted that the Middle East will know no peace by the creation of Israel. How very true has been his prediction.

In giving institutional meaning to the concept of Islamic solidarity, Pakistan has contributed enormously to the founding and building up of the Jeddah-based organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In the meeting of Muslim heads of state, drawn from 25 countries, in Rabat in Morocco in 1969, the then Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan lambasted Israel for its acts of sacrilege and arson against the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and called for establishing a permanent organisation of Muslim States. Thus was founded the OIC with Jeddah as its headquarters, and in the past 32 years Pakistan has been its loyal and active member. Its membership has risen to 54 states now. In December 1946, during a visit to Cairo, Jinnah had initialled an agreement with the head of Egypt’s Wafd Party, Nahas Pasha, for establishing a “Democratic Federation of Moslem States” with Cairo as its centre. Jinnah was then hoping that Pakistan would come into being within the next six months or so. The two leaders were expecting that besides Egypt and Pakistan, other Muslim states such as Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan would join it later on. In the archives of the US State Department in Washington D.C. is a memorandum submitted by the London Representative of Egypt’s Wafd Party to the US Ambassador in London on May 22, 1947, which refers to this Jinnah-Nahas accord.

A month before Jinnah died in Karachi, he, as Pakistan’s Governor-General, sent a message of warm friendship and goodwill to the heads of all the other Muslims States on the occasion of Eidul Fitr on August 7, 1948. Jinnah said in this message:

“The drama of power politics that is being staged in Palestine, Indonesia, and Kashmir should serve as an eye-opener to us. It is only by putting up a united front that we can make our voice felt in the councils of the world. Twenty-one years after his death was born the OIC and Jinnah’s Pakistan was among its early founders. To be candid, the woes and suffering of the Muslims in certain trouble spots of the world such as Kashmir, Palestine, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Chechnya and the Philippines can be assuaged or eliminated if the Muslim Ummah and their governments put up what the Quaid-i-Azam called a “united front”. It is the lack of unity in the Muslim Ummah and their 54 states which the enemies of Muslims exploit to inflict injustices on them and to malign them.