Four men shaped the end of British rule in India: Nehru, Gandhi, Mountbatten and Jinnah. We know a great deal about the first three, but Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, has mostly either been ignored or, in the case of Richard Attenborough's hugely successful film about Gandhi, portrayed as a cold megalomaniac, bent on the bloody partition of India. Akbar Ahmed's major study redresses the balance. Drawing on history, semiotics and cultural anthropology as well as more conventional biographical techniques, he presents a rounded picture of the man and shows his relevance as contemporary Islam debates alternative forms of political leadership in a world dominated--at least in the Western media--by figures like Colonel Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein.