The bulk of the careful and diligent research for this book was completed more than twenty years ago. This severely limits the value of this study. Sikandar Hayat does make some use of more recent work, especially that specifically on Jinnah. He does not deal with the arguments of the recent rich scholarly literature on the history of India and Pakistan's nationalist movements; not many works are even cited. Most significantly, Hayat devotes only a few pages to refuting what he says is Ayesha Jalal's point that “the Pakistan demand [embodied in the Lahore resolution] was a mere bargaining counter inspired by the British authorities” (p. 218). He does not consider at any length Jalal's interpretation of Jinnah's role in the Pakistan movement.

The use of Max Weber's idea of “charisma,” which purports to serve as the framing concept for what is in the main a detailed descriptive analysis of Jinnah's political life, has been examined in scholarly articles in the years since the chapter “Towards a Conceptual Framework of Charisma” was written, but none is in evidence here. Assertions about Jinnah's charisma appear frequently in the rest of the book, but they are not linked with this conceptual framework. The serious difficulty of proving that Jinnah's popularity and success in reaching his goal of creating Pakistan were attributable to “charisma” rather than other factors—which would involve, at a minimum, significant direct evidence of what those who became his ardent followers believed—is not really tackled. There is a sentence in the concluding paragraph of the book that inadvertently underlines this weakness: “The Muslim nation recognized him as a charismatic leader, revered him as the Quaid-i-Azam, and indeed nominated him to the highest office of the Governor-General of Pakistan” (p. 345). There is no evidence that Muslim voters, let alone the mass of Muslim adults, saw his leadership as “charismatic,” and they most certainly did not “nominate” him for the post of governor-general—as is clear from Hayat's interesting discussion of how and why Jinnah chose to take that position.

This account of the creation of Pakistan is very familiar in its broad outlines. Noting the deep roots of a separate Muslim identity and the perception of threat from a Hindu majority empowered in representative institutions the British were promoting, Hayat devotes most of his discussion to the period after Jinnah returned to a position of leadership in the late 1930s, “when the state of Muslim politics in India was distressful [sic], and insecurity and helplessness prevailed” (p. 336). He provides a detailed analysis of non–Muslim League leadership, the emergence of the Pakistan demand, the mobilization that led to the Muslim League's victories in the 1945–46 elections, and the endgame of politics involving the viceroy and the Congress that led to partition. There is ample evidence drawn from printed sources, and the narrative is well written. It is not surprising that the argument displays a Pakistani point of view, and for the most part, Hayat gives the views of Congress leaders and British government officials a fair hearing. But there is at times a frustrating lack of either candor or understanding: For example, Hayat does not concede that there is a problem with Jinnah simultaneously declaring the impossibility of the “two nations” of the subcontinent living under a single government, and demanding that Punjab and Bengal not be divided so as to allow Hindu-majority areas to join India.

This book would have been a more useful addition to the literature had it been published soon after the research was done. It does, however, provide a compendium of the scholarship at that point for those studying the immediate pre-independence period. There is insufficient value added by the simple assertion of the importance of Jinnah's charisma. And Hayat has missed the opportunity to enrich the narrative with further research into the archives, with interviews with movement participants, especially at the party foot-soldier level, or with a consideration of popular literature from the time, which might have put an empirical foundation under the claims of the existence of Jinnah's charismatic authority.