The Muslim Who Birthed the Unbelievers — and Called It Pakistan

History’s greatest jokes are written in bloodlines. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, built a nation around Islam—and left behind no Muslim heirs. His descendants live in India as Parsis, the fire-worshippers of Zoroastrian descent. The creator of the Muslim homeland produced a non-Muslim family. His state endures in faith; his bloodline thrives in disbelief.

In 1918 Jinnah married Rattanbai Petit—“Ruttie,” the rebellious daughter of Sir Dinshaw Petit, one of Bombay’s Parsi industrial patriarchs. She was eighteen; he was forty-two, brilliant, cold, and already consumed by politics. Against her family’s wishes she converted to Islam for marriage, but the act was legal, not spiritual. Ruttie remained Parsi in temperament, cosmopolitan in taste, and utterly modern in defiance.

The marriage was brief and brittle. Jinnah’s precision and detachment clashed with her volatility. Estranged from her family and isolated from his austere world, Ruttie fell ill and died at twenty-nine. Jinnah broke only once in public life—when he wept over her coffin. Then he sealed himself again in discipline and distance.

Their daughter, Dina Jinnah, inherited her mother’s independence. She grew up in Bombay’s English schools, poised and witty, less colonial subject than cosmopolitan rebel. When she announced her intention to marry Neville Wadia—a Parsi heir to another Bombay dynasty—Jinnah’s outrage was almost scriptural.
“There are millions of Muslim boys in India,” he wrote, “and you have chosen a Parsi.”
She replied: “There were millions of Muslim girls in India, and you married a Parsi.”
It was the single sentence that shattered the sanctimony of the subcontinent’s future Quaid-e-Azam.

Father and daughter parted for life. Dina stayed in India, later in New York. She never took Pakistani citizenship. When Jinnah died in 1948, she came to Karachi only to attend his funeral—an outsider at the founder’s grave. The patriarch of Islamic nationhood was buried by politicians, while his only child stood apart, a non-Muslim foreigner watching the faithful bury her father.

Dina’s marriage produced one son: Nusli Wadia, born 1944, now chairman of the Wadia Group—an empire spanning textiles, chemicals, and aviation. He is Indian, Parsi, and Western in sensibility. His sons, Ness Wadia and Jehangir Wadia, run the family’s businesses, sponsor cricket teams, and appear in the glossy pages of Mumbai’s social magazines. They are Jinnah’s great-grandsons—by blood, not by belief.

That is history’s masterpiece of irony. The man who founded a Muslim nation has a Parsi line in secular India. The mausoleum in Karachi glows white under the crescent moon; the family in Mumbai lights lamps before the sacred flame. The republic born of religious exclusivity survives; the founder’s own faith expired with him.

This is not gossip—it is geometry. Every ideology collapses along its own axis. Jinnah’s doctrine of separateness, his “Two-Nation Theory,” declared that Hindus and Muslims could never share a common life. Yet his own house was interfaith: a Shia Muslim father, a Parsi wife, an agnostic daughter, and cosmopolitan grandchildren. The Two-Nation theorist lived a one-family contradiction.

In that contradiction lies the truth that religion can never be the basis of civilization. Theologies divide; biology unites. Jinnah’s private life mocked his public creed. He preached the impossibility of coexistence while his own genes dissolved the barrier he built. The Muslim homeland was fathered by a man whose descendants are Zoroastrians. The logic of purity was defeated by inheritance.

There is no need to moralize; the facts themselves are indictment enough. Pakistan continues to struggle over who counts as a Muslim, who is pure enough, loyal enough, orthodox enough. Meanwhile, Jinnah’s heirs live in Mumbai and London, untouched by sectarian anxiety, speaking English, managing corporations, lighting the ancient fire of Ahura Mazda. They are the living epilogue to his revolution—the proof that faith cannot domesticate the human line.

The founder’s tomb in Karachi and his descendants’ towers in Mumbai mark two poles of a single irony. One is marble, static, and worshiped; the other is alive, irreverent, and free. Between them stretches the gulf between doctrine and life, between what men preach and what their children become.

History, patient and merciless, always wins.

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