Every 14th of August, Pakistan risks reducing its Independence Day to a ceremony — a flag hoisted, a new song released, a holiday marked and forgotten. But 1947 was not a ceremony. It was the outcome of a century of resistance that began when the Muslims of the Subcontinent lost their war against British rule in 1857 and did not end until they had built a homeland of their own. Between those two dates lies an unbroken chain of struggle and sacrifice, carried by hundreds of thousands of political workers who gave the two-nation theory its force, and led, ultimately, by Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Jinnah's Pakistan was never meant to be a state managed from above. He envisioned a democratic, progressive welfare state grounded in Islamic principles of justice,........

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