Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan

Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan (August 1884 – 28 June 1958) was an Indian Muslim politician of Meerut, a leading figure of the All-India Muslim League whom the English article counts among the founding fathers of Pakistan, his position described as second only to Muhammad Ali Jinnah's. ^{1 2}

He was born at Meerut in August 1884, the son of Nawab Mohammad Ishak Khan of Jehangirabad, an Indian Civil Service judge and founding member of the Muslim League, and the grandson of the Urdu and Persian poet Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta. ¹ Sent to England at twelve as a boarder at Tonbridge School, he read at St John's College, Cambridge and was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, returning to India in 1908 to practise law, at first alongside Motilal Nehru at Allahabad. ¹

He joined the Muslim League's Working Committee in 1910 and held his place on it for more than four decades, led the United Provinces Muslim League from 1930 to 1947, presided over the All-India Khilafat Committee, and toured the country preaching the Khilafat cause after the First World War. ¹ At the League's 1937 Lucknow session it was his own karakul cap, offered to Jinnah on the dais, that became the famous "Jinnah cap". ¹ He was among those who drafted the Pakistan Resolution in Lahore in March 1940, and at the 1945 Simla Conference and in the interim-government talks of 1946 he stood near the centre of the League's counsels, though he declined to join the Interim Government himself. ¹ He twice served as vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University — succeeding Ross Masood in the 1930s, and again in 1947–1948 — having earlier been the university's honorary treasurer. ^{1 3}

After 1947 he chose to remain in India — "How can I leave my brethren here behind me?" he is reported to have said — and resigned his second Aligarh vice-chancellorship in 1948 and returned to Meerut when he felt his presence might harm the university. ¹ He died at Meerut on 28 June 1958 and was buried in the family graveyard at the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, which his grandfather Shefta had set aside. ¹ Pakistan Post honoured him in its Pioneers of Freedom stamp series in 1990. ¹