Allama Iqbal and the Muslims of Bengal
By Mohammad A Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“Asl hai Lakho Sitaroo ki Ik Wiladat-e Mihr: Finaa ki Need Mai Zindigi ki Hasti Hai’
(Nations do not get annihilated; they regenerate themselves through their progeny in a far better way. It is just like the stars who do not die when they disappear; they leave behind their trace in the form of a full Moon, far brighter than they were themselves”)
This has reference to Professor Nazir Ahmed’s insightful series of articles written under the title of “Giants and Myths: Milestones on the Road to Partition), and in specific to the one published in Pakistan Link on May 20, 2011. Prof. Nazir is, by all accounts, a very balanced and clear-headed writer.
My personal interactions with him qualify me to state that in Professor Nazir all forms of knowledge - religious, scientific, social and historical - not only meet and blend happily but also willingly, and they joyfully complement each other with a view to bringing clarity to matters that are otherwise foggy and are hard to understand.
Dr. Nazeer presents one view about Allama Iqbal with relation to the Bengali Muslims in his article published on May 20, and he raises a logical question about the absence of the mention of majority Bengali Muslims in the East Hind. “Allama Iqbal left some questions unanswered. His address (Allahabad 1930) called for the establishment of a state in the northwestern portion of British India consisting of Punjab, NW Frontier, Sindh and Baluchistan. In 1931 the Muslim population of these areas was only 25 million in a total Indian Muslim population of 70 million. What was to become of the other 45 million Muslims? Iqbal was silent on this issue. Noticeably, Bengal was absent in his address”.
My attempt here is to explain that this omission was deliberate, as that there were circumstances that warranted it to be so. But that does not mean that Bengali Muslims were, in any way, irrelevant to him or that he was any less mindful of them. As we will see, he was more popular among them than perhaps he was in his own Punjab where a year earlier he had been dubbed as a “kafir”, and where in 1927 a Lahori on an election campaign had dropped his “dhoti” when Allama Iqbal courteously had approached him to offer him his customary salutation, “Aslama-o-Alaikum”. Poet Hafiz Jullundhi reports that Allama got so disappointed that he felt constrained to say, “Why the Muslim Umma has become so bereft of some basic social decency”. Hafiz cheered him up saying, “The Umma showed you what it had”.
Prof. Nazeer has also contended that Iqbal, a follower of Maulana Rumi and a person much influenced by Tasawwuf (Sufism)…. “does not offer alternate perspectives on how to live an Islamic life as a Muslim minority.
“Tho’ I am but a mote, the radiant sun is mine:
Within my bosom are a hundred dawns,
My dust is brighter than Jamshid’s cup,
It knows things that are yet unborn in the world…
I am born in the world as a new sun…. Asrar-i-Khudhi 1915
Iqbal was ‘a poet of renaissance’, ‘a poet of re-awakening’, and according to Prof. Kabir Chaudhry of Dacca, Bureau of National Reconstruction, Iqbal was for revitalizing ‘a decaying people with his inspiring messages through the medium of powerful poetry’.
Iqbal was not a Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who could keep telling Muslims to learn to be good subjects. Sir Syed was right in his own peculiar times. What was very right in his times, say in the later part of the 19 th century, was now not enough. Iqbal appeared on the horizon in entirely different times when political activity and rivalry between the majority Hindus and the minority Muslims had reached its full circle.
Political events after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and a hundred years later, the debacle of the war of independence in 1857, had proved that Muslims were destined to become an ‘endangered specie’, if they would continue wrapping themselves in the shroud of dejection and despair in a country where realities of life had changed and where they had existed in a very unique and unnatural position - which being that as a minority they had ruled over a majority for over a millennium.
Iqbal, all his life had struggled to revive in the dispirited, dejected, disgruntled, crushed and down-trodden Muslims, the missing but vital element of hope, not through a magic wand, but through rekindling in them the flame of human initiative, creativity and potential, by almost whipping them through the power of his verses to make them realize what they were once, and what they are now. He was urging them to realize that they had the potential to regain their lost pride as Muslims, as humans; he was attempting to revitalize in them their lost self-confidence, by urging them to feel that they still had the ability to not only make the skies as their limit, but also to take control of their own destiny.
He was tiring himself to make the Muslims realize that they were not pre-fated to suffer the humiliation and degradation. It was a working of their own designs. Muslims must wake up and take charge of their own lost self. To expect from such a person to guide and to teach the Muslims how to “live an Islamic life as a Muslim minority” at a time when the situation was so fluid, when the time was so ripe to either make oneself or to mar oneself forever,; when the opportunity of carving out a homeland for themselves was knocking just at the door. It was now or never. It was so rare an opportunity for them at such a juncture of history that people for such a moment often aspire for centuries.
Those who then missed the train - the Sikhs, the Kashmiris, the Tamils, they still are “homeless” in a real sense. It was just last week that about 25,000 Sikhs in London took out a procession, protesting against the hegemony of the majority in India, raising slogans for an independent Sikhistan, and demanding that the culprits who had desecrated the Golden Temple in 1984 to be punished. The world heard them demanding punishment for the culprits who had massacred 20 thousand Sikhs in Delhi at the time Indra Gandhi was murdered. Kashmiris are still bleeding. Why do these Sikhs and Kashmiris and Tamils not learn to live “peacefully”, in a country that is making progress by leaps and bounds? I make here a strong statement that those who have never tasted the fruit of freedom by living in a country where they make the majority (in other words, in a free country), they unfortunately, but naturally can never appreciate how freedom actually tastes.
Pakistan is passing through the worst times of its history, and it will not be wrong to admit that it is almost very close to being declared a failed state. But, ask any Pakistani even in these circumstances, you will not find even one person showing regret that its birth was an aberration. They will invariably and rightfully underpin the cause or causes of its present plight by clearly and candidly stating that it were their leaders and their bad governance and their slip-shod policies that brought Pakistan to this abject state. Having a country of your own is a blessing of God because it is like having your own home for the first time.
At the end of the 19 th Century there were only 71 countries in the world; by the year of Partition in 1947, their number arose to 76. Now they are 194. The latest being East Tamur and Georgia. It has never irked the majority Hindus in India to ponder why so many countries since 1947 have made way to the world map. They appear to have frozen in time as they refuse to read the trend and mood of the world once Muslims got Pakistan as a country of their own.
This should never have happened, and now that it has happened, what on earth can be done to make it undone. The same mindset can be found in some fanatics on the Pakistani side as well. There is no shortage of India-specific people in Pakistan who will not sneeze without accusing India. And the discussion still goes on about the validity of the two-nation theory.
Dr. Nirad C. Chaudhuri shows rare insight and impartiality when he honestly analyzes the sentiments of the Hindus towards Muslims. “In the first place, we felt a retrospective hostility towards the Muslims for their one-time domination of us, the Hindus. Secondly, on the plane of thought we were utterly indifferent to the Muslims as an element of contemporary society; thirdly, we had friendliness for the Muslims of our own economic and social status with whom we came into personal contact, and our feeling was mixed concern and contempt for the Muslim peasant, whom we saw in the same light as we saw our low-caste Hindu tenants, or, in other words, as our livestock”.
Nirad Chaudhuri, “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,” Berkeley, California, 1951, pp 10-11.
So to expect from Iqbal to give a piece of advice to the Muslims of Bengal in specific or the Muslims of India in particular on how to live as a minority was like asking a Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, or Bernard Shaw to provide guidance to the Irish people, telling them how to learn to behave and live like a good, docile and obedient people under the hegemony of London. Bengal was always tough to handle or control because of its un-mitigating poverty and because of the bitterness of its people. It was to the Mughals what Ireland used to be to the Elizabethans, or in our recent times, what East Pakistan used to be to the West Pakistani bureaucrats. India’s process of colonization started and ended here. There is no universal formula for a minority on the theme of how it should behave or act in a land. It is the majority that determines its contours and specifies the code of conduct for it. It may sound bitter, but this is the only reality.
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