By Randeep Purewall

Let the magic of your song wake the sleeping
minds
Singe the barns of falsehood with your burning
rhymes

As Shakespeare shaped English through his verse and Kant brought the European Enlightenment to its height, so too did Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) become architect of modern India and Islam through poetry and philosophy. Ironically, for a man who once decried the nation state as the devil’s creation, Iqbal Himself has become caricaturized as the intellectual property of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, his iconoclastic legacy submerged under quasi-divine epithets of “Spiritual Founder of Pakistan” and “Hakeem-Ul-Umaah” (the ‘Sage of the Umaah’).

Sixty years of communalized histories have posited a man like Iqbal as either the spiritual founder of Pakistan for which he is revered or the man whose hideous dream split the subcontinent as he is vilified. For the Pakistani Nationalist, and the Indian communalist, the story of Pakistan begins with Iqbal’s sacred utterance:
“I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan, amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated Northwest Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of Northwest India”.

Lest we forget, Pakistan is the legacy of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Iqbal did not so much speak of an independent country for Muslims of South Asia, as he did of an autonomous Muslim (majority) state in northwest of India. Jinnah gave Pakistan a concrete legal sovereign nationhood. Iqbal was later added to the Pakistan story, because only some one of his depth and stature could turn Pakistan into the stuff of romance, legend, a vision to be realized.

Arise, and soar with the sun’s new-born rays,
to breathe new life into dying nights and days.

Hindi-Urdu poetry aside, the legacy of Iqbal resides in championing the idea of regional autonomy, federation and respect for minorities, something lost today in India and Pakistan alike. His true epithet however is that which people both inside and outside the subcontinent can agree on, as the “Poet of the East,” which befits his efforts to transform modern India and Islam from helpless fatalism and spiritual apathy toward renewed cultural vigour and social progress. Perhaps no community was more in urgent need of being shaken and slapped into its senses than India’s vast Muslim community, which at over twenty percent of the population, was too substantial a minority to be effectively ignored but which lacked the wealth or intellectual capital of the Hindu majority or even the smaller Jain, Sikh and Parsi communities. It was necessary for Iqbal to rouse that community through whatever metaphors – thunderous claps of horse beats, slashing swords and toppling idols – he thought would arouse in it the virility which had made it great, if occasionally belligerent, in its days of yore; but a communalist, a jehadi, an Islamist, as Iqbal stands accused by some is not only farfetched but too at odds with the Iqbal who derided the Pharisee and strove to save society from the jaws of the Mullah and Pandit.

Anyone post-911 would do well to read a few verses of Iqbal to settle the question of whether Islam and Modernity are compatible. Intellectuals and statesmen in India and Pakistan struggling with issues of national unity and managing diversity would do well do consider Iqbal’s opinion on regional autonomy and federation. That Iqbal through the sheer force of his poetry and philosophy could set aglow once more the spirit of a vanquished East, should serve as a message that whenever the sense of defeat, resignation or complacency threatens to numb humanity into apathy or listlessness, the flame of human inquiry, wonder and creation, thankfully not snuffed by India or Pakistan, deserves to be rekindled.

Sources:

Sources of Indian Tradition: Modern India and Pakistan
Poems of Iqbal (V.G. Kiernan)
The Ardent Pilgrim (Iqbal Singh)
Pakistan: Nationalism without a Nation?
Temptations of the West (Pankaj Mishra)
The Clash of Fundamentalisms (Tariq Ali)