Iqbal, the ideologue of Pakistan

Men like Iqbal are born but in centuries. Indeed, Iqbal was the foremost Muslim philosopher of the twentieth century. Amir Shakib Arsalan went a step further: he felt that the world of Islam had not thrown up a thinker of his caliber during the last few centuries. And what is most remarkable about Iqbal was that he was supremely conscious his significance for Muslims and the world of Islam. This explains why and how barely half an hour before his death on April 21, 1938, he recited a quatrain which could well be his epitah. It read:
The melodies bygone may come again, Or nevermore! The zephyr from Hijaz may come again, Or nevermore! The days of this Faqir are ended now, For evermore!
And yet another seer may come or not, For evermore!
Born in 1877 in an intensely religious family of Kashmiri stock at Sialkot, Iqbal and had ample opportunities to assimilate both Eastern and Western thought. His formal education included a study of Arabic, English literature, and philosophy, besides social sciences.
His quest for knowledge took him to Europe where he also became familiar with the groundwork of Western civilisation and with the current Western philosophic thought. He also taught philosophy for some years, and later earned his living through practice.
Iqbal made his debut as a rising poet in 1899, when he recited the Nala-i-Yatim ("The Cry of the Orphan") at the annual session of the Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam in Lahore.
In the first phase of his poetic career, Iqbal was potently influenced by sufistic, romanticist and nationalist ideas, but it were his patriotic poems epitomised by his Tarana-i-Hindi ("The Indian Anthem") that made him famous. To Iqbal Singh, his biographer of yesteryears, it "remains to this day the best patriotic poem in modern times".
To Iqbal, the poet's prime role in the society is the same as that of the eyes in the human body. "The eye cries if any limb is hurt, what a friend of the whole body it is!", he said once. And Iqbal wept at the calamities facing India, mirrored his people's troubles and translated their moods in his poems.
He, thus, became not merely a champion of Indian nationalism. More important, he became a critique of life and existing conditions. He thus came to be hailed as the "National Poet of India".
His studies and sojourn in Europe opened new vistas for him, enabling him to turn his back upon his previous orientation. First, his study of the development of metaphysics in Persia, the topic of his doctorial dissertation, showed him that tasuwwuf (mysticism) has no place in Islam. Sufism preached a life of negation: a passive, in place of an active life, resignation in place of endeavour. And, for now, Iqbal influenced by European thought, was all for endeavour, initiative, and action.
Second, certain aspects of European life had a tremendous impact upon his sensitive and brilliant mind. He joyously admired the tremendous vitality and creativity of European life, the initiative, inquisitiveness and confident restlessness of the people everywhere, to make the world a better place to live in all the while. He also readily realised the tremendous possibilities before man, possibilities opened up by science, possibilities which were nevertheless undreamt of by people in his own county.
But he also found that Europe's undiluted capitalism, aggressive nationalism and blind radicalism had undermined the very foundations of Western civilisation. He, therefore, sounded a note of warning six years before the outbreak of the First World War:
O, dwellers of the cities of the West, This habitation of God is not a shop. And that which you regard as true coin. Will prove to be only a counterfeit.
Of course, he admired the West for its initiative, ceaseless endeavour and spectacular progress. At the same time, the prevalent European concepts of capitalism, nationalism and reacialism disgusted and despaired him beyond repair. After all, did they not divide mankind? Did they not spawn endless competition and jealousy. And that at all levels: between nation and nation, race and race, individual and individual?
What, then, was the remedy? To Iqbal, it lay in Islam. After all, more than anything else, Islam had envisaged a world brotherhood. A brotherhood which cuts across racial, national and class affiliations. A brotherhood which, moreover, was not merely preached from the pulpit but, more importantly, was also practised in day-to-day life.
This becomes evident by a reference to early Islam. During that period Umar, a proud Quraysh, Bilal, a freed Negro slave, and Salman, an Iranian, had stood on an equal footing, no matter what their race, colour, language or country of origin. Islam also preached a sort of socialism - the greatest good of the greatest number. Its various injunctions worked towards levelling down, rather than exacerbating, economic inequalities. No wonder, Iqbal came to embrace the Islamic ideal.
Thus, Iqbal who had left India in 1905 as a nationalist and pantheist, returned to it in 1908 completely transformed. For now, he was a pan-Islamist and almost a puritan.
The Prophet (PBUH) had once said, "The whole of this earth is a mosque (unto me)". Iqbal would now say, "Every country is my country because it is the country of my God".
The fatherland to which he now owed supreme allegiance was the Muslim World - that vast belt that stretches from Mauritania to Indonesia and far beyond. And he took upon himself the immense task of a poet-prophet, to quote Dr Nafisy, the learned Iranian intellectual. For now, his poems shifted ground, if only to keep inline with his thinking; he now sang the glories of Islam and Muslims.
The first poem reflecting this stage of Iqbal's intellectual and spiritual development was on Sicily. When the ship carrying him back to India passed near Sicily, the sight of the island reminded Iqbal of its glorious past under the Arabs, and he broke out into a touching elegy.
Even as Sadi had cried over the destruction of Baghdad, Ibn-Badrun on the despoliation of Granada, and Dagh on the sack of Delhi, Iqbal would now lament the desolation of Sicily. And he would do it as movingly and as magnificently as these three great bards.
And with the years, Iqbal's poems came to reflect increasingly the troubles of the Muslim world, they also mirrored the agitated mood of the Indo-Pakistani Muslims over these troubles. To quote Hamilton A.R. Gibb, the famed orientalist, "... Iqbal... reflected and put into vivid words the diverse currents of ideas that were agitating the mind of the Indian Muslims.
His sensitive poetic temperament mirrored all that impinged upon it.... Every Indian Muslim, dissatisfied with the state of things - religious, social or political - could and did find in Iqbal a sympathiser with his troubles and his aspirations and an adviser who bade him seek the way out by self expression."
Perhaps, nothing reflected his new ideological orientation as his soul-stirring poem on Trablas (Algeria), and his famous Tarana-i-Milli ("Islamic Anthem"), composed in the same metre and rhyme as the Tarana-i-Hindi.
Iqbal wanted the Muslims and the people of the East to come into their own. He felt that warmth had disappeared from the soul of the East: "It knows not what is the task of living". "I found the lands [of the East] lacking in the spirit of life. I berthed my own spirit into thee," he proclaimed in one of his poems.
Simultaneously, Iqbal stirred the Indian Muslims to their depths; he inspired them to a new consciousness of their inherent potentialities. Not only did he fill them with his own dynamism and faith. He also envisioned for them a new horizon, a new destiny. And that was the concept of a Muslim homeland in the subcontinent.
Iqbal's claim to be the foremost Muslim philosopher of the present age rests chiefly on his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930). Herein he tried "to re-think the whole system of Islam without completely breaking away with the past". Actually, in these lectures, he tried to do what St. Augustine had done for Catholicism several centuries ago.
His significance as a poet and thinker apart, Iqabl was also the ideologue of Pakistan. Even to this day, his presidential address to the Allahabad (1930) League session stands out as the foremost intellectual justification for a separate Muslim nationhood in the subcontinent.
In one of his prophetic moments he had prognosticated that "men with vision would create new worlds", and in 1973 he went on goading the Quaid-i-Azam to create a new world (nai/basti) for the Indian Muslims. It was a man with vision goading a man of action to endow his fellow Muslims with a destiny.
In his chastisement of Muslims of his day, in his pleading for a return to the lofty Islamic ideals and in his advocacy of a new elan, Iqbal had set for himself the role of an awakener: "In the darkness of the night/I will lead my wary caravan, My sighs will emit sparks.
And my breath will raise flames."
And he did.
(The writer was founder-Director, Quaid-i-Azam Academy and authored "Jinnah: Steadies in interpretation", - 1981.)