Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Turkey

Jinnah Road in heart of Ankara

The most important and posh area of the capital has a picture of Pakistan’s founding father installed in a frame at the start of the largest road. The Cinnah Caddesi is a major road located in the heart of Ankara, the capital of Turkey. It is one of the most important arteries of traffic and commerce in the city. It was dedicated to, and named after, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. In Turkish language, Jinnah is spelled as ‘Cinnah’.

The Quaid and the Making of Pakistan

How critical was Quaid-i-Azam’s role in the making of Pakistan? Surprisingly though, it was most succinctly and brilliantly summed up in rather unsuspecting quarters – in H.V. Hodson (d. 2000)’s The Great Divide (1969), perhaps the most authoritative British account of the imperial retreat from the subcontinent. He says: Of all the personalities in the last act of the great drama of India’s rebirth to independence, Mohammad Ali Jinnah is at once the most enigmatic and the most important. One can imagine any of the other principal actors…. Replaced by a substitute in the same role – a different representative of this or that interest or community, even a different Viceroy – without thereby implying any radical change in the denouncement. But it is barely conceivable that events would have taken the same course, that the last struggle would have been a struggle of three, not two, well-balanced adversaries, and that a new nation State of Pakistan would have been created, but for the per

On spiritual and sentimentalities with Turkey (4th Mar 1948)

Reply to the speech made by the first Turkish Ambassador to Pakistan at the time of presenting Credentials to the Quaid-e-Azam on 4th March, 1948. Your Excellency, It gives me great pleasure to welcome you today as the first Turkish Ambassador to Pakistan. But my pleasure is enhanced, as there is a unique significance about today’s ceremony to the people of Pakistan for historical reasons. Your Excellency has yourself observed that many spiritual and sentimental ties born and grown in the course of a long history bind the people of Turkey to the people of Pakistan. Not only this but also by a turn of the world situation during the past 50 years or more, Turkey has been in our thoughts constantly and has drawn our admiration for the velour of your people and the way in which your statesmen and leaders have struggled and fought almost single handed in the midst of Europe for your freedom and sovereignty which have been happily maintained. The exploits of your leaders in many a hist