It took twenty-three years and four abandoned designs to bury Pakistan’s founder properly. Jinnah died in 1948; a memorial fund was set up in 1949, an Indian architect appointed in 1954 and dismissed, a Turkish architect hired in 1955 and rejected, and an international competition held in 1957 that was won by the British architect William Whitfield. Fatima Jinnah vetoed that result, took control of the fund, and commissioned Yahya Merchant, a Bombay architect and a personal friend of her brother. The foundation stone was laid on 31 July 1960 and the mausoleum inaugurated on 18 January 1971. What Merchant built is a marble cube with a parabolic arch on each face and a low dome — a traditional funerary geometry stripped of ornament and set on a modern frame, its only decoration the herringbone coursing of the marble and a pierced grille band at the springing of the dome. The gardens were not finished until 2000.
The mausoleum’s completion was entangled with the country it commemorates. President Ayub Khan, who had seized power in a 1958 coup, laid its foundation stone in 1960; five years later Fatima Jinnah, who had personally chosen the architect and controlled the memorial fund, ran against Ayub in the 1965 presidential election on a platform opposing military rule, and lost amid opposition claims of vote-rigging. She died in 1967, four years before the building she had commissioned was finished, her death itself clouded by unresolved rumours of foul play. General Yahya Khan, who had by then replaced Ayub, inaugurated the completed mausoleum on 18 January 1971 as a monument to the founder’s vision of a unified Pakistan; ten weeks later his own government’s crackdown in East Pakistan began the war that ended that unity, and Bangladesh became independent before the year was out.
Wikidata Q2571455 · Commons: Mazar-e-Quaid.jpg · Photo: Saiffakbar · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0