Pakistan's Father
By Barbara Crossette
Jinnah, Pakistan And Islamic Identity
The Search for Saladin.
By Akbar S. Ahmed.
Illustrated. 274 pp. New York:
Routledge. Paper, $19.95.

This is a defensive book, and that is understandable. Half a century after the end of British rule on the Indian subcontinent and the creation of India and Pakistan, it was India's 50th birthday that attracted all the attention. Pakistan, always the rough military frontier of the Raj, exists for much of the West only in dim outline, as a violent place between the palaces of Rajasthan and fierce, harsh, tribal Afghanistan.
Born in the blood of Hindu-Muslim partition in 1947, when at least two million people died in weeks of butchery carried out in the name of religion, Pakistan soon slipped into long periods of military rule and civilian misrule. In 1950 it was on an economic par with South Korea; now it is one of Asia's poorest, least developed nations.
The man who might have made a difference was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, known to Pakistanis as Quaid-i-Azam, the ''great leader.'' Jinnah was 70 years old and dying of tuberculosis when, in 1947, he became the first Governor-General of Pakistan, a country he more or less created after breaking with the Indian National Congress, the freedom movement that he thought was becoming increasingly Hindu and chauvinist as independence neared.
But Jinnah was not an Islamist. A cosmopolitan lawyer trained in London, he wore European clothes, he drank (a matter of huge controversy in Pakistan) and he was married to a member of the Parsi religion, Ruttie Petit, who has since been written out of Pakistani history. Akbar S. Ahmed makes these points in ''Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity'' to buttress, in despair, his argument that official Pakistan has garbled and distorted the story of the father of the nation.
But Ahmed is even harsher on India and its heroes. The villains of this book are Mohandas K. Gandhi and that strange triangle, Lord and Lady Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru (the last British Viceroy, the first Indian Prime Minister and the woman they appear to have shared from time to time). These evil geniuses conspired, in Ahmed's view, to give Jinnah a ''moth-eaten'' Pakistan stripped of Kashmir and other choice territory. Richard Attenborough also comes under attack because Ahmed, who is also making a film about Jinnah, resents the portrayal of his subject as a cold fish in Attenborough's 1982 movie ''Gandhi.''
The spleen vented in this book is one of its problems. So is its disorganization. An editor should have pulled this often repetitious and fragmented work together and pointed it in one direction or another. And does the author really want to make so much of Saladin? Is a 12th-century Muslim Emperor who beat back the Crusades relevant to what Pakistan needed and to what Jinnah, had he not died in 1948, might have been -- a wise leader of a modern nation?
Those drawbacks aside, ''Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity'' virtually explodes with provocative ideas and new ways of looking at partition, at Jinnah, at Pakistan and at South Asia as a whole. Ahmed, a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, is, like Jinnah, a man with subcontinental roots and an outsider's perspective. He is passionate about his subject, but also able to stand back when necessary, especially in analyzing where Pakistan and the larger Islamic world are going.
Should there have been a Pakistan at all? On this point Ahmed has no doubt, and in answering that question he raises an explosive issue rarely discussed in the subcontinent. ''What if Jinnah were to come alive to see the mess that is his Pakistan?'' he asks, and then he answers: It would still look better than Muslim life in Hindu-dominated India. With Hindu fundamentalism on the rise, there is ample evidence to back his assertion that pogroms, poverty and prejudice have dogged those Muslims who stayed behind after partition. Though still a rough work in progress, Ahmed concludes, Jinnah's Pakistan was worth the fight.
(Barbara Crossette, author of the forthcoming ''Great Hill Stations of Asia,'' is United Nations bureau chief of The Times and a former correspondent in Pakistan and India)