Jinnah was born Mahomedali Jinnahbhai,[d] most likely in 1876,[e] to Jinnahbhai Poonja and his wife Mithibai, in a rented apartment on the second floor of Wazir Mansion, Karachi.[4] Jinnah's birthplace is in Sindh, a region today part of Pakistan, but then within the Bombay Presidency of British India. According to a Pakistani Author, Jinnah once said that his male ancestor was a Rajput from Sahiwal (Punjab) and had settled into Kathiawar (Gujarat), [5] Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Yousaf Raza Gillani also ascribes Rajput ancestry to Jinnah.[6] His father was a prosperous Gujarati merchant who had been born to a family of weavers in the village of Paneli in the princely state of Gondal (Kathiawar); his mother was also of that village. They had moved to Karachi in 1875, having married before their departure. Karachi was then enjoying an economic boom: the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant it was 200 nautical miles closer to Europe for shipping than Bombay.[7][8]
Jinnah's family was of the Ismaili Khoja branch of Shi'a Islam,[9] though Jinnah later followed the Twelver Shi'a teachings.[10] Jinnah was the second child;[11][12] he had three brothers and three sisters, including his younger sister Fatima Jinnah. The parents were native Gujarati speakers, and the children also came to speak Kutchi, Sindhi and English.[13] Except for Fatima, little is known of his siblings, where they settled or if they met with their brother as he advanced in his legal or political careers.[14]
As a boy, Jinnah lived for a time in Bombay with an aunt and may have attended the Gokal Das Tej Primary School there, later on studying at the Cathedral and John Connon School. In Karachi, he attended the Sindh-Madrasa-tul-Islam and the Christian Missionary Society High School.[15][16][17] He gained his matriculation from Bombay University at the high school. In his later years and especially after his death, a large number of stories about the boyhood of Pakistan's founder were circulated: that he spent all his spare time at the police court, listening to the proceedings, and that he studied his books by the glow of street lights for lack of other illumination. His official biographer, Hector Bolitho, writing in 1954, interviewed surviving boyhood associates, and obtained a tale that the young Jinnah discouraged other children from playing marbles in the dust, urging them to rise up, keep their hands and clothes clean, and play cricket instead.[18]
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