Iqbal’s Thoughts
on State & Society
By Murtaza Razvi
It is seldom that a newspaper
article on intellectual giants like Allama Iqbal,
especially on Iqbal Day, gives more than a general
biographical account of the man of his stature.
The standard eulogizing poured out on such occasions
tends to belittle the poet-philosopher’s achievements
by obscuring the more important facets of his intellect,
namely, his contribution to Muslim religious and
political thought in our times.
So on this Iqbal Day, let us not speak of him as
we have been conditioned to speaking of many lesser
men passing off as leaders in our midst. Iqbal’s
contribution to furthering Muslim thought goes far
beyond the political sloganeering for which he has
been used by successive governments in this country.
The most recent examples were those of Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto and General Ziaul Haq.
During the former’s premiership, Iqbal’s
line ‘Uttho meri dunya ke gharibon ko jagado’
became a slogan that galvanized and moved the teeming
millions. It was left to General Zia to undo that
populist appeal by hammering in before Khabarnama
on PTV every night ‘Juda ho deen siyasat se
to reh jati hai changezi’ as an instrument
of supporting his own obscurantist brand of Islam.
While Z.A Bhutto and Zia will find their place among
the dead rulers of this country, Iqbal will continue
to keep company with living academics and students
of literature, philosophy and politics.
Iqbal’s intellect, as deduced from his concept
of Khudi (self) and the series of lectures on the
reconstruction of religious thought in Islam, was
very much the product of the socio-political realities
of his time. The concept of Khudi (as put forth
in the Persian masnavi Asrar-i-Khudi, published
1915) and the lectures delivered in Madras in 1928,
were Iqbal’s earnest attempts at seeking a
meaningful place for Muslims among the then emerging
comity of nation states.
The change engulfing the world in the aftermath
of the dismantling of the Ottoman empire, Europe’s
espousal of modern knowledge and the Industrial
Revolution, the emergence of the communist Soviet
Union, having a popular appeal among colonized peoples,
and impending decolonization, all made Iqbal’s
a rapidly changing world. Muslims spread across
Asia and Africa, with most living under western
colonial rule or in protectorates, appeared least
prepared to take their reins in their own hands.
Iqbal had no ready solutions to tackle the multifaceted
challenges facing the Muslims. But that did not
stop him, like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Jamaluddin Afghani
and Mohammed Abduh before him, from trying to stir
a debate and seek an indigenous Muslim response
to change. This was despite knowing that what was
endorsed as his scholarship by western academia
and enlightened sections of his own community could
well become his handicap with the Muslim religious
establishment. But his own thorough understanding
of religion propelled him to seek to bridge the
gap that was seen to exist between religion and
modern knowledge.
His call for
reinstating Ijtihad, as proposed in the Madras lectures,
for instance, met with fatwas and allegations of
blasphemy from some quarters. The populist appeal
of his poetry - prophetic, nationalist and spiritual
and devotional by turns - saved him from outright
condemnation by the self-proclaimed guardians of
faith. The latter day Persian masnavi ‘Pas
che bayad kard aye aqwam-i-sharq’ (so what
should be done, nations of the East?) has all three
elements woven into its poetic eloquence.
As time has shown, the post-colonial Muslim experience,
Iqbal’s primary concern, has not been a particularly
happy one. He was well aware of the Muslims’
shortcomings and the lack of modern intellectual
acumen that was needed to counter western civilization’s
onslaught against them. This was manifest in the
form of direct colonization of Muslim peoples or
forced military or political intrusions into Muslim
countries on the pretext of countering the threat
from communism or fascism.
Today, although under different circumstances, Iqbal’s
prognosis, outlining the then impending misery he
believed would be Muslims’ lot in a rapidly
changing and modernizing world, has largely come
true. In a country believed to be of his own ideological
conception, the scourge of resistance to new ideas
from the outside world and our failure to bridge
the gap between the modern and the spiritual ways
of life have rendered us socially, politically and
intellectually almost dysfunctional.
This state of static living has been compounded
over the years. This is because the world today
has gone much further and deeper in scientific knowledge
than was thought possible in Iqbal’s lifetime.
But it remains just as dangerous a jungle where
the survival of the fittest is still the norm.
The arm twisting and the vanquishing of the weak
and the meek has continued, whether it is in Palestine,
Iraq or as seen in the cat-and-mouse game being
played out between the US and al Qaeda terrorists
throughout the world. That Iqbal should have been
the last of the great Muslim thinkers is a measure
of our self-imposed socio-political and economic
apathy and ineptitude.
How often do we take stock of such facts? Not even
on occasions like the Iqbal Day. The aim here is
not to give ready solutions; for that we have the
generals who, in the absence of anyone more worthy,
have donned that mantle. Iqbal suggests that a possible
solution of Muslims’ dilemma lies in the re-opening
of the doors of Ijtihad (interpretation).
Separation of the eternal and temporal aspects of
the faith, as in Ibadaat (obligatory prayer, the
fast, Hajj and Zakat) and Muamelaat (everyday decision-making,
including legislation and governance) is another
remedy - as has been deduced from Iqbal’s
Madras lectures by Justice Javid Iqbal, Iqbal’s
son and a scholar in his own right.
In a published
interview with this writer in 1990s Justice Iqbal
dwelled at length on the latter aspect of his father’s
thought. While the Allama believed that there should
be no alteration in the way the Ibadaat are performed,
the Muamelaat, which directly relate to change as
a continuing process, will have to be dealt with
in accordance with the demands placed by society.
We know from the Madras lectures on the reconstruction
of religious thought that Iqbal was not in favor
of the traditional madressah-qualified scholars
as being the sole guardians of faith entrusted with
giving authoritative rulings on Muslims’ everyday
problems. Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer, in
his recent paper on the Madras lectures, quotes
Iqbal as saying, “...state in Islam is theocracy,
not in the sense that it is headed by a representative
of God on earth who can always screen his despotic
will behind his supposed infallibility.”
This also puts in perspective the latter-day Allahabad
Address to the All India Muslim League session (1937),
in which the Allama gave the idea of the creation
of an independent Muslim-majority state in India,
and which became the basis for the Muslims’
demand for Pakistan.
This, and his correspondence with the Quaid while
the latter was practicing law in England, urging
him to come back and lead the Muslims of India,
explain the solution that Iqbal sought for his community’s
social and political uplift. There was no dearth
of religious scholars among the community and Iqbal
was on very good personal terms with many of them,
but he refrained from giving them the center stage
of Muslims’ affairs.
Though essentially very conservative and careful
with interpreting religion, Iqbal, both at the political
and intellectual levels, managed to present a possible
confluence between modern sensibilities and the
role of divine injunctions in public life of our
times. At the academic level, this was made possible
through his informed interpretation of the religious
dogma.
We know that Ijtihad undertaken by Muslim scholars
before the sack of Baghdad in 1258 was done under
the guidelines then having been established by the
four learned Imams, - Hanbal, Malik, Shafe’i
and Abu Hanifa. Iqbal insisted that the scholars
who undertook the task of interpreting the Shariah
under the Abassids were well versed in temporal
knowledge of the day as well as the divine injunctions,
as decreed by the Qur’an and Sunnah.
The doctrine of Ijtihad, which itself flows from
the Shariah as ruled by the learned Imams, is all
about interpreting and reinterpreting the two basic
sources of Islamic jurisprudence in accordance with
change taking place in society. The Shariah does
not place a time limit on the practice of Ijtihad.
This is because as human society evolves and socio-political
and economic realities change, the spiritual need
to seek guidance from faith remains a constant,
and Iqbal held that the ulama alone could not be
made the sole arbiters on that score.
It may sound anathema to today’s more assertive
ulama, but the fact remains that Iqbal was an ardent
admirer of Kemalist Turkey, and there are several
references to this in his Madras lectures. This
is despite the fact that he never denied the emotional
and symbolic importance the Ottoman caliphate had
for Muslims everywhere, including the subcontinent.
However, Iqbal’s
absence from the Khilafat Movement, which by default
fell to the lot of the Congress and the Muslim religious
establishment in the former’s bid to enlist
the latter’s support for its brand of politics,
also remains a fact.
It is ironic that textbooks promoting Pakistan ideology
and written during Gen Zia’s time should have
tried to lump Iqbal’s thought with that behind
the Khilafat Movement or that espoused by the ulama
and mashaaikh belonging to the traditional madressah
establishment of the period. It is intellectual
dishonesty of this kind that must be exposed and
disowned as a crude aberration. The traditional
mullah and the scholar equipped with both religious
and modern knowledge remain poles apart in Iqbal’s
perception.
Justice Javid Iqbal sums up the Allama’s concept
of a modern Muslim state, saying that members of
parliament in a given nation state, who should be
well versed in both religious and modern knowledge,
could be entrusted with making laws in line with
modern demands and enshrining the faith’s
spirit of justice and equity.
This was Iqbal’s blueprint for a desirable
Muslim government in modern times. While we may
have achieved the nation state we claim he had conceived,
his real dream of running that state effectively
has remained unfulfilled. This, unfortunately, is
the truth today as it has been all these years.
