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Perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes in the history of modern Muslim India is embodied in the respective personalities and careers of Azad and Jinnah--a paradox in themselves as well as in opposition to each other. Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, a "lay" person by descent, by training and by temperament chose to espouse the cause of religious communalism and, in spite of the contradictions between his personality and his career, he was audacious enough to proclaim his ideal loud and clear. On the other hand, Abul Kalam Azad, who was a religious person by birth, by education and by social classification, decided upon secularism as his goal but was not courageous enough to call a spade a spade. He could never get rid of religion as the final authority in his own arguments for secularism and he could never get the 'ulama, the personifications of religious authority, to olear out of politics once he had dragged them in. This thesis is an attempt on my part to assess the role of religion in, and its influence on, Indian Muslim politics in the present century, and to see how the earliest efforts at making Indian Muslims take a more secularist attitude towards politics met with failure.