The renowned poet and philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal has been transformed by Pakistan’s ideological transformation into a supporter of its hardening worldview. His state-approved and clerically-backed status as an orthodox thinker opposed to every modernist revision makes it dangerous to review how he has been “reinterpreted” into an ideological platitude. He is occasionally labelled as “orthodox” by secular pundits who want for an identity regression while hailing Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as the ultimate modernist. However, consistent evidence from his life contradicts this conventional categorization.
On December 25, 1986, about 48 years after Iqbal’s passing, the friendship between Pakistan and Iqbal reached its peak. On the anniversary of the birth of the state’s founder, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, it took place at a national seminar presided over by General Ziaul Haq in Karachi. What Is Pakistan’s Primary Issue? was the seminar’s subject. The son of Allama Iqbal, who was then serving as a judge on Pakistan’s Supreme Court, was present among the invited guests. During his statement, Justice Javed outlined his father’s reasons for opposing the Hudood (Quranic punishments) that Gen. Zia had imposed in Pakistan.
In his book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Allama Iqbal used the contentious phrase: “The Shariat values (Ahkam) resulting from this application (for example, rules relating to crime penalties) are in a sense specific to that people; since their observance is not an end in itself, they cannot be strictly enforced in the case of future generations.”
Gen Zia’s response was contemptuous of Allama Iqbal rather than the Hudood he had put in place to placate his sizable clerical hinterland.As stoning to death (Rijm), which is not stated in the Quran, cannot be a Hadd, that is, a punishment in the Penal Code, he had run afoul of the clergy after his Federal Shariat Court made that determination. To keep Rijm, he needed to alter the Court.
However, despite Rijm being on the books, Iqbal was right on the money: neither has Pakistan been able to chop off hands for stealing, nor has it stoned a single woman to death. The horrifying Rijm practise was abandoned in 2014 by the more literalist Iran. As riba (usury), which is clearly stated in the Quran as well as by Aristotle in his Nicomachian Ethic, is a violation of Islamic law, Pakistan is troubled today by the continued use of bank interest after it was outlawed by the Federal Shariat Court in 1991. Islamic banking genuinely forbids the acquisition of Riba, and does so in accordance with a convoluted self-admitted Heela policy (subterfuge).
Iqbal explained and firmly accepted bank interest as the lifeblood of commerce in Ilmul Iqtisad (1904), his first book written in Urdu and intended to serve as an introduction to how a modern economy functioned. He did this despite the fact that it was regarded as forbidden by the clerics and accounted for a very small percentage of Muslims in India’s commercial sector. In order to do this, he agreed with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s assertion that “interest-banking was not the same as Riba/usury.”
IJTIHAD AND HUDOOD
Much like Jinnah himself after he stated his choice for the Lockean state on August 11, 1947, Iqbal could not have found acceptance in the Pakistan of today. Iqbal also criticised the Fiqh (case law), which favoured the Law of Evidence and discriminated against women and non-Muslim state residents, to further his point. His arguments in the Lectures attest to his dissatisfaction with and fear of the traditionalist Ulema, and there is evidence that in the new state, he was inclined toward a more “liberal” interpretation of Islam.
He was gathering information for a book on fiqh toward the end of his life and had been communicating with the traditionalist ulema to clarify topics he likely wanted included in his forthcoming work. He believed himself to be qualified to create a work of Ijtihad despite not being an educated scholar (Aalim) and being rejected as one by the Ulema (reinterpretation). The late Justice Javed Iqbal, his son, stated in a letter about shariah that “the Jinnah-Iqbal correspondence points to the establishment of a state based on Islam’s welfare legislation; it does not propose that in the new state any laws pertaining to cutting of the hands (for theft) and stoning to death (for fornication) would be enforced.”
LIKE NO OTHER
He was a prodigy, Allama Iqbal. He started receiving Persian and Arabic tutoring in a mosque in 1885 after taking first place in grade one at Scotch Mission School, Sialkot. He started writing his young adult poetry in Urdu while he was a teen and in class nine. With a medal and scholarship, he graduated from high school in the top quarter. He began composing verse under the alias Iqbal in his first year at Scotch Mission College, and his verse was later included in literary magazines.
He received awards in Arabic and English and passed his BA test in first division. Even though he earned his MA in philosophy in third division three years later, he was the sole student to pass and be awarded the gold medal. He was picked by Professor Thomas Arnold, the British orientalist who wrote a book establishing that Islam was spread in the subcontinent not by the sword but by humanist preaching, who became his patron, and made professor of philosophy at the Government College, Lahore.
In addition, Iqbal received a monthly salary of 72 rupees and one anna for his work as the Macleod Arabic Reader at Oriental College in Lahore. Later, he left Oriental College for a while to work as an English teacher at the Government College.
FIRST IN SEPARATION
Iqbal was revered in Lahore as the city’s foremost thinker and poet, capable of mesmerising listeners in a Mushaira while also penning scholarly works on mystics like al-Jili, whose idea of Insan al-Kamil was revived in him with the aid of Nietzsche’s “superman” and “will to power,” but without Nietzsche’s rejection of morality or his catchphrase “not goodness but strength.” This was before he travelled to Europe (1905–08), where he completed his Master’s and Bar at Cambridge and his PhD at Munich University with his thesis, “The Evolution of Metaphysics in Iran,” and within three months, he had become extraordinarily fluent in German.
He wrote some of his greatest Urdu works during the years 1908 to 1925 while he was a practising lawyer at the Lahore High Court, back in Lahore. He transitioned from his pluralist view of India to a “preservative posture” in response to Hindu revivalist movements, advocating separate electorates and creating the first map of the Muslim communities in the northeast and southeast of the subcontinent. In 1930, at the All-India Muslim League’s Allahabad session, he was courted as the foremost Muslim talent and his “separatist” argument was heard.
ON THE SAME PAGE AS JINNAH
Iqbal was qualified to speak on behalf of Muslims at all three Round Table Conferences in London because of his legal education, ability to write scholarly tracts, and abandonment of the extended poem or masnavi by most notable poets after him. He gave a learned overview of the nature of the modern state as envisioned by Western philosophers like Rousseau in his Allahabad address to the All-India Muslim League conference in 1930, which most Muslim League members who were still basking in the glow of the failed Khilafat Movement were unable to understand.
The Quaid-i-August Azam’s 11, 1947, message at the Constituent Assembly: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques, or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan,” Dawn editorialised on August 11, 2017, noting that Pakistan’s non-Muslims observe Pakistan’s Independence Day three days earlier. You are free to identify with any religion, caste, or creed. That is unrelated to the government’s business.
Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah was not the only state founder Pakistan has repudiated; Allama Mohammad Iqbal is also no longer regarded as a legitimate state philosopher. One of the main reasons the state’s authority has shifted to non-state actors 70 years after its founding is that the state is failing. On the basis of a forceful interpretation of religion, human rights are denigrated, particularly those of minorities and women. So much so that friction amongst state institutions as a result of the faith-based yet untested constitutional requirements in Articles 62 and 63 has finally led to the destabilisation of government.
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