Mazar-e-Quaid

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, died on 11 September 1948, the day he was brought back to Karachi from Balochistan, and was buried the next day on high ground then on the outskirts of the city². Soon afterwards the Quaid-i-Azam Memorial Fund was set up from public donations, in answer to an appeal by Governor-General Khawaja Nazimuddin¹. Migrants from India living in shanties around the grave agreed to leave and were given land elsewhere in Karachi¹. In January 1956 the fund’s central committee, short of money, put the mausoleum and its gardens ahead of the other planned memorials; for almost twelve years the grave lay under a canopy¹.

An international tender for the design was floated in 1958, but the schemes of the Turkish architect A. Vasfi Egeli, the Indian architect Nawab Zain Yar Jang and the British architect Raglan Squire were not approved¹. At the express wish of Jinnah’s sister Fatima Jinnah, the committee adopted a design submitted in December 1959 by the Indian architect Yahya C. Merchant¹. Work began on 8 February 1960, President Ayub Khan laid the foundation stone on 31 July 1960, and it was completed on 2 June 1970; President Yahya Khan opened the mausoleum on 15 January 1971¹. In 1972 the fund became the Quaid-i-Azam Mazar Management Board, under a 1971 ordinance that also protects the site^2,3.

The mausoleum is square, 116 ft a side at the plinth, and its walls lean inward like a truncated pyramid, 90 ft wide at the base and 82 ft at the top, with the corners projecting about 7 ft over the corner staircases¹. With its dome it rises to 43 m⁴. The walls, faced with white Mullaghori marble laid in an offset pattern, open in curved arches fitted with copper grilles^1,3. Behind the marble are courses of machine-made concrete masonry bonded from top to bottom, and the Board describes the building as earthquake-proof; the upper structure took 6,000 tons of cement, and the work used 500 tons of steel, 12 tons of copper and 21,200 cubic feet of marble¹.

The building stands on a platform 75 m square and 4 m high, with steps on three sides, approached along a terraced avenue marked by fifteen successive fountains⁴. The surrounding garden, Bagh-e-Quaid-i-Azam, was announced by Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo in 1986 and opened by Pervez Musharraf on 24 December 2000¹. Its designers took the 250 by 250 ft podium as their module and laid out formal chahar bagh terraces with water channels and fountains, after studying gardens from the Taj Mahal to Isfahan, and kept the tree cover from hiding the mausoleum from any side¹.

Inside is an octagonal main chamber, 36 ft high, whose walls carry patterns of green onyx¹. In the chamber a replica of Jinnah’s grave stands within a bronze and silver fence; the actual grave lies in the middle of the basement below, reached by four staircases from the corners of the chamber¹. The same staircases climb to a balcony 52 ft above the plinth, where the octagon turns into a round wall carrying the reinforced-concrete dome¹. From the dome hangs a gold-leafed chandelier with 48 lights in four tiers, a gift of the Muslims Association of the People’s Republic of China¹. Five more leaders, among them Liaquat Ali Khan and Fatima Jinnah, lie in a hall beside the mausoleum, their graves clad in the same Mullaghori marble¹.