I don't wanna go off Topic But Iqbal Jinnah Both shias,
After 1947, Pakistan adopted the position of denying that the population of the country was divided between Shias and Sunnis, among others. The census that followed took account of Muslims and non-Muslims but ignored the sects: it was also an indirect pledge of the state that it would not discriminate on the basis of sect. The founder of the state, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, although himself a Twelver Shia , was wont to describe himself in public as neither a Shia nor a Sunni. His stock answer to a query about his sect was: was Muhammad the Prophet [pbuh] a Shia or a Sunni? Yet when he died in 1948, it was necessary for his sister Miss Fatima Jinnah to declare him a Shia in order to inherit his property as per Jinnah’s will. (Sunni law partially rejects the will while Shia law does not.) She filed an affidavit, jointly signed with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, at the Sindh High Court, describing Jinnah as ‘Shia Khoja Mohamedan’ and praying that his will may be disposed of under Shia inheritance law. The court accepted the petition. But on 6 February 1968, after Miss Jinnah’s demise the previous year, her sister Shirin Bai, moved an application at the High Court claiming Miss Jinnah’s property under the Shia inheritance law on the ground that the deceased was a Shia.
And that is exactly what I alluded to ! He, Jinnah, abhorred any kind of Shi'ite or Sunni labeling whereas he did adhere to the 'Jafari School of Jurisprudence', not only because of expediency in the light of a common struggle but also in view of the 'over-arching Pan-Islamic' identity that Iqbal had been espousing in most of his addresses and poems. I, for example, was raised as a Sunni and in many ways I may be called as such though at the same time I find myself agreeing more with Imam Jafar, with respect to jurisprudence (specifically inheritance laws for such a problem arose in my near family), then I do with Imam Abu Hanifa or Imam Hanbal ! But damn me for ever plastering a 'Sunni' label to my forehead ! If I were to die right now, naturally, my affairs would be managed as per 'Sunni Jurisprudence' simply because there, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't exist a system by which I can cherry pick what I do or do not agree with in a given sects 'Personal Laws' so that I can have my property pass onto my sisters in full measure instead of the customary half-a-share (which I do not agree with). The only words that we do know of Our Father are that 'he was just a Muslim' and that is the only label he prescribed to.
P.S Iqbal also identified himself as 'simply a Muslim' and abhorred this labeling that had injected sectarianism into our society ! However he was, by all accounts, a Sunni practitioner of faith. He has mentioned 'the first 4 Caliphs' in a positive light in his poems and his book. In the same book (The reconstruction of religious thought in Islam) he also distances himself from the concept of 'Immamate' and identifies strongly with the system of Shura (or Islamic Democracy as he called it) in Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman's Khilafat.
P.P.S My maternal Grandfather had the opportunity of offering Friday Prayers alongside Iqbal (I can't remember whether the Allama led them or not) at his Darul Islam Institute someplace called Pathankot ! Dunno where that is ! But they all offered it the Sunni way ! And I, in turn, have had the opportunity of offering Eid prayers in the Badshahi Mosque where Javed Iqbal happened to be standing in the next row....he seemed to be doing what the rest of us were doing.
P.P.P.S I think one would also do well to recognize that Tolu-e-Islam by Ghulam Ahmed Parvez was an initiative supported by both Iqbal and Jinnah to bring about, to borrow the namesake of Iqbal's book, a 'Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam', so that Muslims would go back to the roots (Quran) and shun these sectarian practices that had crept in. That is why neither of those two God's amongst men, identified themselves as anything but Muslims, however, different their view point on certain things maybe ! Does that mean that Jinnah didn't believe in Immamate or some of the other fundamentals associated with Shi'ism ? Frankly I don't know because by most accounts he wasn't a practicing Muslim, but what it means is that they'd never want to have the very natural attribute of seeing the same thing from the same prism and drawing a different conclusion be reason enough for them to differentiate between 'Men who worshiped the same God, loved the same Prophet, had the same Book, prayed towards the same Ka'abah and had exponentially more in common with each other then they ever could with anyone else'.
