Shaikh Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) was a man of great many ideas - sublime and serene, dynamic and romantic, provocative and profound. He was both a great poet and a serious thinker at the same time; but in his poetic works lay enshrined most of his thought.
By his very vocation a poet is, first, a man of moods, enjoying a sort of poetic licence, which is, of course, scrupulously denied to a prose-writer. Second, he is usually extremely sensitive to his environment and happenings around him, which are ever in a state of flux, and these largely shape his sensitivities and thinking.
Third, his utterances and outpourings are more spontaneous than deliberate, and usually charged with a measure of emotion, dominant at the time. After all, bereft of a modicum of emotional dimension, they would hardly belong to the poetic genre.
Along with these attributes of a poet, a blend of eternal verities and topical themes constitutes the fourth dimension. And all of them serve as constraints when it comes to founding consistency and compatibility in his utterances and ideas over a period of time. Such was the case with Iqbal as well.
During his poetic career, spanning some four decades, Iqbal had imbibed, approved, applauded and commended a great many ideas - ideas which occupy various positions along the spectrum at three different levels: the philosophic, social amid political.
Thus, at one time or another, he commended or denounced nationalism: propagated pan-Islamism and advocated multi-nationalism in Islam; admired the West for its ceaseless and wide-ranging activities, energy and initiative but was disenchanted by its materialism, cut-throat competition and values, condemned capitalism, while preaching "a kind of vague socialism; and applauded the East, its spiritualism and its concern for the soul but upbraided it for its docility, passivity, resignation and lack of vision.
While advocating "the freedom of ijtihad with a view to rebuild the law of Shari'at in the light of modern thought and experience", and even attempting somewhat to reformulate the doctrines of Islam in the light of twentieth century requirements a la St. Augustine, he also defended the orthodox position and the conservatism of Indian Islam on some counts.
Though "inescapably entangled in the net of Sufi thought", he yet considered popular mysticism or "the kind of mysticism which blinked actualities, enervated the people amid kept them steeped in all kinds of superstitions" as among the primary causes of Muslim decline and downfall.
Prior to the paradigmatic shift that Iqbal had undergone during his sojourn in Europe (1905-08), his thought and poetic outpourings, beginning with his maiden presentation of Nala-i-Yatim to an attentive Lahore audience at the Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam's annual moot in 1899, were dominated by the triad philosophies of mysticism, romanticism and nationalism.
This early phase was characterised by three categories of poems - (i) gazals and lyrics (eg, Gul-i-Pashmurdah), (ii) romanticist and nature - poems (eg, "The Himalayas", "Kashmir" and "On the Bank of Ravi"), and patriotic and nationalistic poems.
It were, however, the last set of poems that had made Iqbal famous. Propagandistic in nature for the large part, they were meant to arouse and inspire his fellow countrymen of all denominations. To this category belong Hindustan Hamara, Hindustani Bachoon Ka Qaumi Geet, Naya Shiwala, and Taswir-i-Dard. To Iqbal Singh, a renowned biographer of Iqbal, Hindustan Hamara "remains to this day [1947] the best patriotic poem written by an Indian poet in modern times".
More important, the shift from gazal to nationalistic poetry was not merely a change of subject; it represented a radical shift in Iqbal's tone and tenor. From an obsessive preoccupation with subjective feelings, he had moved on to a wider horizon. This shift from the poet's individual mood to the people's collective mood of the people enlisted Urdu poetry to perform a higher function - such as the criticism of the people's life-style, and a critical dissection of their ideas and myths that had brought them to such a sorry pass.
To an abrupt end, however, did this nature-lover and nationalist phase come during Iqbal's watershed European sojourn.
During his sojourn Iqbal had pursued his studies seriously, specialising in philosophy and law, earning a degree in philosophy from Cambridge, a doctorate from Heidelberg, and a law degree from Lincoln's Inn in 1908.
There was, of course, nothing unusual about it because students from the subcontinent had gone to England and earned degrees, both before and after Iqbal. But what puts him in an altogether different category was that unlike other students and visitors, he refused to be overwhelmed by the overpowering glitter and awe-inspiring grandeur of the West.
Unlike others, he went beyond and behind its facade. His sensitivity as a poet, his penchant for keen observation and his grounding in Western philosophy enabled him to study the West, its pros and cons aspects, rather seriously and critically.
In particular, he was struck by three things, which were at the heart of European life, and thought and civilisation. First, he realised the vast potentialities of science whose mastery had given Europe its eminence and mastery over the world, and led it to a fruitful life of ceaseless effort and progress.
Second, he was immensely impressed by the Europeans' restless activity, relentless energy, unparalleled initiative, their immense capabilities for innovation and invention, and their resolute will to work for the cultural enrichment and economic progress of the society as a whole.
Third, he found the Western life infected with the credo of capitalism and nationalism, both individually and collectively, heading to incorrigible cut-throat competition between man and man, nation and nation.
While he admired and applauded the first two aspects, he was irretrievably dismayed by the third one. This came to be compounded when he found that racial prejudice was, historically and culturally, a dominant feature of European life.
In any case, Iqbal's live contact with Western life, his grounding in Western philosophy, and his initiation into modern Western thought served as a catalyst, enabling him to perceive things in a wider perspective and in more critical terms.
From the vantagepoint of an European base, he could easily see that the onward march of nationalism had bred racialism in several Muslim countries. Under the impact of nationalism and in order to build up their own separate nationalistic altars, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Iranians and the Arabs had tended to emphasise their particular racial origins and strains, and, worse, their racial separation from one another.
This, in turn, had rivened the Islamic ummah concept, enfeebled the Muslim world, and had laid it all the more open to Western aggression, exploitation and designs.
And this, above all, disillusioned Iqbal with the nationalist credo beyond repair. Not only the political misfortunes of the Muslim peoples, but also their civilizational decline goaded his thinking towards pan-Islam. In this ideal did Iqbal see the salvation of the Muslim world, even as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1896) had a few decades earlier.
Thus, Iqbal, who had left India as a staunch nationalist, returned to it in 1908 as a firm believer in Islam and in an integrated ummah.
And, for now, Iqbal's world was the Muslim world - the vast swathes of territory, stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia, and inhabited by scores of peoples and races, but spiritually linked with each other, with a common moral consciousness and ethical code, cultural ethos and civilizational mores, indeed with a distinct weltanschauung.
He, thus, stepped onto the threshold of pan-Islamism, the enchanting and enthralling concept which the Muslims the world over had aspired to actualise and enthrone, especially since the decline of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire/caliphate for over a century and more.
And this Iqbal himself would eloquently and passionately preach for the next two decades.
Despite his passionate advocacy of pan-Islamism, Iqbal was yet a keen and insightful observer of Muslim affairs. Hence he could not escape perceiving the harsh fact that his enchanting panacea of pan-Islam in its idealistic and classical form was not propitious or relevant to his own age - ie to the nationalist ridden world of the 1920s.
For one thing, several Muslim countries had opted for nationalism, and were preoccupied with raising nationalist altars, to base their nationhood and politics on sheer asabiyat - ie, racial and/or linguistic unity.
For another, they were seeking nationalist solutions to their respective problems within the parameters of a nation-state. Indeed, nationalism was a fact of life, albeit a harsh fact, in almost all the Muslim countries.
Iqbal could not have possibly ignored all this - and much more. "True statesmanship", he told his audience at the Allahabad (1930) League session, "cannot ignore facts, however unpleasant they may be.
The only practical course us not to assume the existence of a state of things which does not exist, but to recognise facts as they are, and to exploit them to our greatest advantage."
Hence it was but logical that deeply concerned as Iqbal was to see the Muslim people remain firmly anchored to their pristine Islamic legacy and heritage, he tried to resolve the inherent conflict between nationalism, the stark fact of life, and pan-Islamism, the ideal towards which he would like to see Muslims strive.
Thus, Iqbal, like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1896), arrived at the concept of "Islamic" - but, more accurately, Muslim - nationalism.
Iqbal, the ideologue, who had diagnosed the malaise of the Muslim world in his famous Reconstruction (1930), finally came to the conclusion that 'For the present every Muslim nation must sink into her own deeper self, temporarily focus her vision on herself alone, until all are strong and powerful to form a living family of republics.
A true and living unity, according to the nationalist thinkers, is not so easy as to be achieved by a merely symbolical overlordship. It is truly manifested in a multiplicity of free independent units whose racial rivalries are adjusted and harmonised by the unifying bond of a common spiritual aspiration.
It seems to me that Islam is neither Nationalism nor Imperialism but a League of Nations which recognises artificial boundaries and racial distinctions for facility of reference only, and not for restricting the social horizon of its members." (italics ours)
To conclude, then, In adroitly adjusting his position vis-a-vis nationalism and pan--Islamism, in seeking to resolve the conflict between them in the world of Islam, he evolved a synthetic concept of Muslim nationalism, thereby giving nationalism an inherently Islamic direction, and opting for multi-nationalism in Islam, a concept which Musttapha Kemal Pasha (1881-1938) had first propounded in a message to the Central Khilafat Committee, Bombay, on March 10, 1922.
And in opting for this concept, Iqbal had traversed a good deal of ground on the pan-Islam-nationalism continuum. He had gone in for a paradigmatic shift - from a universal, indivisible caliphate to a multi-national neo-pan-Islamism.
In any case, in doing all this and much more, Iqbal personified pragmatism, statesmanship, and, above all, creativity of the highest order, Iqbal is often called an idealist, but he was an idealist that tempered his idealism in the dull fire of experience. Hence, he could come up with a viable concept like Muslim nationalism.
(The writer was Founder-Director of the Quaid-i-Azam Academy (1976-89), and authored "Jinnah: studies in interpretation" (1981), the only work to qualify for the President's Award for best books on Quaid-i-Azam).
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