Is Imran Khan Inspired by Allama Iqbal?
By Riaz Haq
CA
Speaking at the recent launch of his book “Pakistan: A Personal History”, Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan referred to Allama Iqbal as the ideological father of the nation, and added that “Iqbal’s teachings have inspired me to a great extent”. In the book, Imran calls Islam a “comprehensive blueprint for how Muslims should live in accordance with the highest ideals and best practices of Islam.”
Analyzing Imran Khan's comments, Indian author and journalist Pankaj Mishra says that Iqbal felt "democracy and capitalism had empowered a privileged elite in the name of the people". It seems to me that "Occupy Wall Street" protesters also appear to be inspired by Iqbal's thoughts about the extraordinary power of the elite in democracy and capitalism as practiced in the West.
In a recent Businessweek piece titled "Islam Offers a Third Way in Pakistan and Tunisia", Mishra compares Imran Khan with the "democratic Islamist" Tunisian leader Rashid Ghannouchi.
Here are selected excerpts from Mishra's article:
Confronted with extreme inequality and corrupt Westernized elites, many Muslim thinkers had already begun to present Islam as a guarantee of social justice. Setting up the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, Hassan al-Banna advocated the redistribution of wealth, and a crackdown on venal politicians and businessmen.
Like al-Banna, Iqbal believed that the Prophet had transmitted the blueprint for a just society centuries before Marx -- “the wise Jew” -- worked it out in the British Museum. And he remained confident that after the ruling elites of capitalism and socialism had lost credibility, “the message of the Prophet might appear again.”
Iqbal considered the idea of a classless society, in which the rich were custodians rather than owners of property, to be morally superior to socialism as well as capitalism:
Protector of women’s honor, tester of men A message of death for all sorts of slavery Undivided amongst kings and beggars Cleans the wealth of all its filth Makes the rich the custodians of riches What could be greater than this revolution? Not to kings but to God belongs the land.
I have been thinking of Iqbal’s lines in recent weeks as the Islamist democrats of Rashid Ghannouchi’s Ennahdha party triumphed in Tunisia’s first free elections in years, and the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan -- declared by Pew Research Center to be the most popular political figure in Pakistan -- staged a huge rally in Lahore, staking his first serious claim to power."
"Like many leaders and thinkers in Islamic countries, both traveled through secular ideologies and lifestyles -- Ghannouchi as a Nasserite socialist, Khan as a denizen of London’s social scene -- before arriving at a worldview grounded in Islam.
More importantly, their respective countries have stumbled through many failed postcolonial experiments with Western political and economic systems, resulting in wayward elected governments and uneven economic development, before arriving at their current rendezvous with political Islam.
It may seem more understandable that a majority of Tunisians, who have suffered from a secular and kleptocratic despotism, want to experiment with a more Islamic polity. But why would Pakistanis, who felt the coercive power of an Islamic state for almost a decade under the military dictatorship of Mohammad Zia Ul-Haq, want to do the same?
Perhaps because -- and this is not sufficiently recognized -- every generation brings to political life its own ideas, hopes and illusions. Too young to remember Zia’s regime, many Pakistanis invest their faith in the born-again Khan out of disgust with the modernizing military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who was president from 2001 to 2008, and interchangeable civilian politicians Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, who all share an appalling record of corruption and ineptitude.
Whether liberal and secular elites like it or not, there are a large number of socially conservative Muslims who wish to see the ethical principles of Islam play a more active role in public life. The mind-numbing division between “moderates” and “extremists” that often passes for profound understanding of Islamic societies in the West simply fails to account for this invisible majority of Muslims, who are unlikely to plump for secular liberalism either now or in the near future.
For many nationalist and reflexively conservative Pakistanis, Imran Khan’s belief that “if we follow Iqbal’s teaching, we can reverse the growing gap between Westernized rich and traditional poor that helps fuel fundamentalism” is not the empty rhetoric it may sound to a Westernized Pakistani."
Back to Pakistanlink Homepage
