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On November 9, the world celebrated the 129th birth anniversary of poet, Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal. To Iqbal, the task before the modern Muslim was to re-think the whole system of Islam without breaking with the past.
Multi-dimensional are Iqbal’s thoughts, as are his intellectual forays and philosophical shifts at various times in his four-decade long active career as a poet and philosopher.
This means that despite being a creative thinker, Iqbal was addressing the situation at hand. The ideas he enunciated, though intrinsically creative in themselves, and abiding in appeal beyond a particular time and place, were yet primarily meant to salvage the bleak Muslim situation in India and the world at large. This makes Iqbal, in a sense, oriented towards the Indian Muslim psyche and situation.
Iqbal was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilisation across the world, but specifically in India. A series of famous lectures he delivered to this effect were published as, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.
These lectures dwell on the role of Islam as a religion as well as a political and legal philosophy in the modern age. In these lectures, Iqbal firmly rejects the political attitudes and conduct of Muslim politicians, whom he saw as morally-misguided, attached to power and without any standing with Muslim masses. Iqbal asserted that secularism as a guiding principle for the government was a mistake and must be abandoned by the Muslim polity.
After all, Iqbal regarded India, if only because of the Muslim numerical strength, as “the greatest Muslim country in the world”, to quote his own words. These tasks, both critical and onerous as they were, he fulfilled squarely. His emotional and soul-lifting poetry was the medium Iqbal chose to bring to his people a new awareness of the depths of degradation to which they had fallen, to diagnose their ailments, their predicament and the prime cause of their decline, and to warn them of the dire consequences if they failed to mend themselves in good time. A more effective medium he could not have possibly chosen.
For one thing, poetry is the most powerful medium for touching the deepest emotions of people and for driving a message into their sub-conscious. For another, the Indian Muslims had been among the most poetry-oriented people in the world, with a long tradition of readily taking to heart what was written in verse. Political orations may stir an audience into action, but their impact is bound to be restricted to a particular audience, and dissipate with time and events. In contrast, a poetic message seeps through the ethos of a nation, working on its psyche all the while.
Besides being a poet of extraordinary merit, Iqbal was a thinker of a high order. Thus, while Syed Ahmed Khan and Jinnah provided political leadership to Muslims, Iqbal took upon himself the task of setting the intellectual tone for Muslim thought and action. In addressing himself to this task, Iqbal brought a revolution in Muslim thinking at various levels. He also made a significant contribution to keeping them anchored to their pristine ideology and historical legacy.
Iqbal sailed to Europe in 1908 for higher studies. His European sojourn had acted as a catalyst, enabling him to look at events and developments in a wider perspective. What pained him most was the impact of nationalism on various Muslim countries, eroding the pan-Islamic concept, enfeebling the Muslim world and laying it open to European aggression, and exploitation. To the ailments the Muslim world was afflicted with, Iqbal found the solution in Islam and its message. In order to reach the innermost recesses of their consciousness, he invoked the past glory of Islam, telling Muslims of the accomplishments of their ancestors. In doing so, he raised the drooping spirit of Muslims and replacing it with a sense of soaring confidence.
Next, he gave them a message of hope. He told them that they could still redeem themselves if they could only recapture their soul and regain their pristine moral and spiritual values. He emphasised the imperative need to develop human qualities and the right type of character. He attributed their degeneration to their taking to a life of passivity and resignation, for several generations. That debilitating trend could be reversed by opting for initiative and endeavour which, he believed, Islam stood for. To him, an active, struggling non-believer was preferable to a sleeping Muslim.
But if Muslims were to be beckoned to a new destiny, they must first be confirmed as Muslims and they must own up their pristine values. This was all the more necessary in the context of the rise of positivism and skepticism, which posed a serious challenge to the modern Muslim.
To Iqbal, “the task before the modern Muslim was to re-think the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past”. And this crucial task he undertook in a series of lectures, since compiled as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930). In these, he argued that Islam represented a philosophy of action, for faith without action was a life bereft of any significance.
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