Allamah Muhammad Iqbal: The Theorist of Muslim Modernity

Something decisively shifted on October 7th for Muslims globally, as we began to realise that our pointless pursuit of personal progress was a dead end. It was not going to give us a vision that offered purpose beyond ourselves – a vision that would unite our individual efforts into a collective movement for Muslim liberation. In this moment, if we do not reach back into our heritage to give our communal despair a firmly rooted, Islamic vision of re imagination, we will, as a people, either lose hope entirely or gravitate towards movements that will isolate us from our own selves – that will save Muslims but sacrifice Islam.

One of the most important figures in our history who did develop such a vision is the highly influential philosopher-poet of British India, ʿAllāmah Muhammad Iqbāl (d. 1938). His thought offers us a basis for building a civilisational movement rooted in the love of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, inspires aspiration for personal achievement, unites us in the vision of communal development of the ummah, and imbues us with an ethos that perpetuates the spiritual, material, communal, and personal flourishing of all humanity in this world and the next.

His Life and Works

 ʿAllāmah Iqbāl was born in the city of Sialkot in 1877 to a Kashmiri shopkeeper who had migrated from Kashmir due to the political instability in the region. He was a third generation Muslim, as his grandfather converted to Islam from Hinduism. This motif would play continuously in ʿAllāmah Iqbāl’s poetry, as he would often refer to himself as “the son of Brahmins.”¹ His father took a keen interest in philosophical discussions, earning him the moniker “unparh falsafī” (the illiterate philosopher).² Iqbāl would inherit love of philosophical discussions from his father, as well as his proclivity for mystical experience.³

Iqbāl attended a Quran school at a young age, where he studied under Sayyid Mir Hassan,⁴ followed him to Scotch Mission College, and subsequently continued his education in Lahore at Government College University – where he met his mentor, Sir Thomas Arnold – and the University of Punjab. In 1905, with his mentor’s encouragement, Iqbāl continued his education in England at the Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, and received his PhD from Ludwig Maximillion University in Munich, Germany.⁵ By the time Iqbāl returned to Lahore in 1907, he was well read in the literary, theological, and philosophical traditions of English, German, Urdu, and Farsi. The extent of his reading in Arabic is unknown, but he himself defended his knowledge of the language and theological traditions in that language as well.⁶

Iqbāl is known as a philosopher-poet because his primary concern was philosophy but his primary medium of expression was poetry. He only published one work of philosophical prose, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, which was delivered as a series of lectures in 1930. All his other major publications were in poetic form, with the major works and their languages listed below:

•  Asrār-i-Khudī (1915, Persian)
• Rumūz-i-Bekhudī (1917, Persian)
• Bāng-i-Darā (1924, Urdu)
• Payām-i-Mashriq (1924, Persian)
• Zabūr-i-ʿAjam (1927, Persian)
• Javidname (1932, Persian)
• Bāl-i-Jibril (1936, Urdu)
• Pas Che Bāyed Kard (1936, Persian)
• Zarb-i-Kalīm (1936, Urdu)
• Armaghān-i-Ḥijāz (incomplete, written in both Urdu and Farsi and posthumously published in 1938)⁷

Iqbāl was a prominent part of the Indian Muslim intelligentsia and literary circles in Lahore from a young age; he presented poems at the celebrated departure of Munshī Maḥbūb ʿĀlam journey from India to England as well as being a regular presenter at the poetry circles in Lahore.⁸ Upon his return from England, Iqbāl was an important part of the Indian Muslim intellectual and political scene, fostering friendships with figures such as the founder of Pakistan and leader of the Indian Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as well as engaging in public debates with Mawlāna Ḥussayn Madanī on the issue of Indian nationalism, and writing to Jawaharlal Nehru on the status of the Ahmadi community in Islam.

By the time of his passing, Iqbāl was considered the most prominent Muslim intellectual in India, and his thought influenced important Muslim intellectuals around the world, including Mawlāna Mawdūdi, Sayyid Quṭb, and ʿAlī Shariātī.

A Basic Outline of His Methodology and Thought

 The fundamental question that animated Iqbāl’s thought was that of colonial domination. Iqbāl was born in the British Rāj, a territory manifolds larger and more populous than its ruling empire. If the Indian population was to rise up and resist British domination together, British rule would become entirely unsustainable.⁹ The question for Iqbāl, then, was the nature of British methods of control and the framework for resisting them.

Iqbāl’s inquiry led him to the conclusion that the British dominated India in general – but Indian Muslims in particular – through an intertwined system of economic, intellectual, spiritual, and political control. Economically and politically, the British purchased Indian Muslim subservience for cheap economic favors:  

 The mark of sujūd which used to shine like the moon,
The British have purchased that Muslim-ness from you.¹⁰

Intellectually, the British had convinced the Muslim of their civilizational inferiority:

From blindness, man became a slave of man:
He gave away his precious pearl to kings;
Meaning: servitude is worse than being a dog,
For I’ve never seen a dog bow to another dog.¹¹

Spiritually, the vibrant traditions of taṣawwuf in India, which had once guided emperors and commoners alike, had begun to spiritualise their despair – an attitude that he viciously attacked in his poetry:

“This heavenly wisdom, this divine knowledge –
If it isn’t a cure for what ails the kaʿbah, then it is nothing”¹²

Iqbal’s basic understanding of the causes of Muslim subjugation are best articulated in what are most likely his most famous poems in Urdu: Shikwah and its response, Jawāb-i-Shikwah. Written and presented prior to any of his major Persian works, the two poems are written in the musaddas form and explore similar themes as those in the seminal poem Musaddas-i-Madd-o-Jazr-i-Islam by a poet Iqbāl greatly admired, Alṭāf Ḥusayn Ḥālī.¹³

The first poem, Shikwah, was first presented at a poetry recital known as a mushāʿirah in Lahore, and the second, Jawāb-i-Shikwah, was presented at the Badshāhi Masjid to raise funds for aiding Turkish soldiers wounded in the Balkan Wars in 1912.¹⁴

For the remainder of his life, Iqbāl would explore the solutions to the problems outlined in Jawāb-i-Shikwah. While the core of his thought can be distilled into three concepts – that of khudi, bekhudī, and khilāfat – the intertwined, layered, and multifaceted nature of the concepts requires considerable flattening in order to provide a succinct presentation.

Khudī, Bekhudī, and Khilāfat

To those familiar with his work, the concept of khudī is almost synonymous with Iqbāl. While it is perhaps his most important contribution, it makes up only one third of Iqbāl’s basic framework. Perhaps the best way to understand Iqbāl’s framing is through the three interrelated concepts of khudī, bekhudī, and khilafat, which can be understood more as an ethos than a set of practices. They represent the core personal, social, and communal values he believed to be logical consequences of uttering the shahādah.

Khudī

Literally meaning “selfness,” khudī is derived from the word for “self” in Persian. Iqbāl spent considerable time deliberating on the name of the foundational concept of his philosophy. The term itself has a long history in the Persian tradition of taṣawwuf, where it comes to denote the self-absorption of the unexamined self. In the Persian Sufi tradition, khudī denotes the ego that is unbroken, unaware of the preponderance of God, and unacquainted with the practices of examination, self-reflection, and mystical bonding. It is an entirely unflattering station for the wayfarer on the spiritual path, the launching point of complete heedlessness.

It might strike some as curious, then, that Iqbāl chose this concept to denote the basic building block of his entire theory – but, as someone deeply immersed in the Persian mystical tradition, the choice was not accidental. Embedded in the choice is a critique of the mystical tradition’s emphasis on fanāʾ – or, mystical annihilation in the person of the Divine Beloved – and a repudiation of the self-effacing and self-diminishing tendencies associated with it. Rather, to Iqbāl, true understanding of the self inevitably leads one to an encounter with God, and true faithfulness to oneself can only be understood in context to an understanding of God. He says in one of his most famous poems:

The hidden secret of khudī is lā ilāha illā Allah
Khudī is a sword; the whetstone is lā ilāha illā Allah¹⁵

While other communities and peoples can have a strong and vibrant concept and sense of self, it is only a mystical understanding of and encounter with Allah that can truly allow man to reach the height of his potential. The role of the sharīʿah in this process is that of breaking the hold of one’s base desires on the self and forcing one to overcome one’s own weaknesses through the sheer power of the will for divine love.

Once this emboldened self has conquered its own weaknesses and encountered the divine, it is then ready to take on its true purpose in this world, which is understood through the interrelated concepts of bekhudī and khilāfat.

Bekhudī and Khilāfat

The realisation of the self and its connection to Allah is only one third of the equation despite its core as the foundational element in Iqbāl’s thought. The other two concepts – that of bekhudī and khilāfat – are core to understanding his framework for a Muslim modernity. The first, bekhudī, which translates to “selflessness,” was understood in the Persian Sufi tradition as the loss of one’s entire being in the person of God – that is, fanāʾ. This was contrasted with a competing notion, one proposed by more “sober” Sufi strains such as that of the great mystic al-Junayd al-Baghdādī, that of baqāʾ. Iqbāl borrows the interplay between fanāʾ and baqāʾ and applies them in two dimensions: the divine and the human.

As was previously mentioned in the earlier section on khudī, the interplay between man, God, and love is that man ascends to his true self through the love of God, and, instead of being annihilated in His divine presence, remains an active agent in the world. This interplay is repeated on a horizontal level, that of humans with other humans. Iqbal says in his most important Persian work on bekhudī, Rumūz-i-Bekhudī:

Men grow habituated each to each,
Like jewels threaded on a single cord;
Succors each other in the war of life
In mutual bond, like workmen bent upon
A common task. Through such polarity
The constellations congregate, each star
In several attraction keeping each
Poised firmly and unshaken.¹⁶

Just as man rises through love and achieves baqāʾ with God, he rises through love and achieves baqāʾ with his community as well. A person might be an individual in his own right, but that individuality is not one that stands in opposition to communality and communal purpose – rather, it is the building block upon which healthy and prosperous societies are built. Thus, man imagines himself simultaneously as one as well as many; as individual as well as society. This society, however, has a purpose that is divinely ordained onto it. It is man’s role is to act as God’s vicegerent on earth, and, likewise, it is the role of the Muslim community to collectively act as Allah’s vicegerents on earth. This is his conception of khilāfat:

Appear, O rider of Destiny!
Appear, O light of the dark realm of Change!
Illumine the scene of existence,
Dwell in the blackness of our eyes!
Silence the noise of the nations,
Imparadise our ears with thy music!
Arise and tune the harp of brotherhood,
Give us back the cup of the wine of love!
Bring once more days of peace to the world,
Give a message of peace to them that seek battle
Mankind are the cornfield and thou the harvest,
Thou art the goal of Life’s caravan.¹⁷

This khilāfat is not necessarily a political organization; rather, it is the role the collective Muslim community plays on this earth. The ethos of this community is that of mercy, which is most powerfully embodied by the perfect personhood of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him: “as he was raḥmatan (mercy for the worlds), so are the Muslims which are related to him ‘the sign of Mercy for the people of the worlds.’”¹⁸  It is the role of the Muslim community to be embodiments of mercy in every way, and, through that embodiment, to become the leaders of mankind as the vicegerents of Allah.

Iqbāl and 20th Century Nationalisms

It’s quite easy to see the overlap between Iqbāl and the nationalist movements that arose across the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, a common retort against both the importance of Iqbāl as a philosopher and Islamist movements in general is that they simply Islamize extra-Islamic conceptions of nation, state, “national spirit,” and Nietzsche’s “Will to Power.” It would be futile to deny the conceptual overlaps in Iqbāl’s thought and the basic Zeitgeist of the late 19th/early 20th centuries – but similarities only ever tell half the story. The true distinction is always in contrasts.

For his own part, Iqbāl was acutely aware of the extra-Islamic nature of nationalist discourse. Indeed, he was a fervent critic not just of nationalism as a communitarian concept but the nation state as a political unit. In one of his most famous debates, Iqbāl contested the conception of nation and state put to use by Mawlāna Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madani, who sought to find Islamic justification for Indian nationalism. To Iqbāl, the unexamined regurgitation of extra-Islamic concepts dressed with an Islamic veneer was antithetical to his project.

What one finds in close examination of his thought is an urgent desire to reconcile the tension between what he believes to be Quranic priorities and modern realities – not at a granular level but rather at a core, conceptual level. Domination, power, communal competition – while these were realities of the modern world, the true priority of the Quran for all of humanity in general but Muslims in particular is the ethos of khilāfat – that Muslims are placed on this earth to be its stewards as representatives of God.

As such, for Iqbāl, Islam is not simply a communal religion destined to be just another community in a sea of other communities. Rather, Islam is an unstoppable force for human flourishing, both in the dunyā and ākhirah, and the role of Muslims is to shepherd the spiritual, moral, intellectual, economic, and political flourishing of all humanity. He is less an anti-modern decolonial thinker and more a creative theorist of fashioning a truly authentic and spiritually founded Muslim modernity.

Iqbāl and the Making of a Muslim Modernity

Perhaps the most important contribution of Iqbāl is a formidable attempt – as imperfect as it was – to reconcile between the core values of the Quran and the realities of modernity. To him, there is much that is distasteful about the hegemonic Western modernity that dominates global affairs today. He was keen, however, to not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Muslims today are confronted with the reality of their situation as plainly as they were in the mid-20th century. They have watched helplessly and desperately as the most recorded genocide in history is perpetrated against their kin in Palestine, knowing full well that the entire ummah stands powerless to stop it. That powerlessness does not stem from complete lack of capability – rather, it stems from the same economic subjugation and political fragmentation and domination that has characterised the Muslim world for centuries.

We are, as we were over 86 years ago, once more faced with a choice: do we choose powerlessness and hopelessness, announce the imminent advent of the end of days, and retreat into our mountain enclaves in eschatological anxiety? Or do we hoist the weight of grief upon our backs, lift up our sleeves, and undertake the crippling journey towards the possibility of our eventual emancipation? Do we risk disappointment, loss, and defeat once more; or do we resign ourselves to subjugation, call it fate, and descend into a spiritualised despair?

Iqbāl calls us to imagine our value within our love of Allah and to take up the divinely ordained role of Islam and Muslims in the world. He calls us to cast off desperation and despair and don the cloak of hope in Allah’s majestic mercy. As he says in a famous couplet:

The mind’s your armor; love’s your blade!
Dervish! Your rule holds the world in gaze!
Your call sets all but God ablaze!
Your fate is only what you’ve made!
Be true to Muḥammad, We are yours
What’s this world? The pen and slate are yours!¹⁹

Find M. Saad Yacoob on Substack.

Bibliography

1. Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wings: A Study Into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963), 35 ↩︎
2. Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16 ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Syed Mir Hasan was awarded the title “Shams al-Ulamāʾ” ↩︎
5. Iqbal met two important figures in Cambridge: the neo-Hegelian Bradley McTaggart and the Persian poetry specialist, Reynold Nicholson, who also translated Iqbāl’s first Persian work, Asrār-i-Khudī, into English. He studied under the renowned German orientalist, Friedrich Hommel. Iqbal would continue to be in conversation with imminent scholars and philosophers of the West, for example, meeting and conversing with the celebrated French orientalist Louis Massignon and the important French philosopher Henri Bergson. ↩︎
6. Schimmel, 37 ↩︎
7. He also wrote a work on economics in Urdu called ʿIlm al-Iqtiṣād, and his PhD dissertation is also published in English under the name The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. ↩︎
8. Munshī Maḥbūb ᶜĀlam, Safarnāma-e-Europe (Lahore: Khadimut-Talim Steem Press, 1908): 12. His first published poem was Himāla, which was written for a poetry circle in Lahore and published at the behest of his friends. See the introduction of Kulliyāt-i-Iqbāl published by the Lahore Iqbal Academy in 1990. ↩︎
9. A fact the British had already anticipated and still experienced shortly after his death. ↩︎
10. Muhammad Iqbāl, “Sulṭānī,” Zarb-i-Kalīm, Kuliyāt-i-Iqbāl (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1990), 544 ↩︎
11. Muhammad Iqbāl, “Ghulāmī,” Payām-i-Mashriq ↩︎
12. Muhammad Iqbāl, “Taṣawwuf,” Zarb-i-Kalīm, Kuliyāt-i-Iqbāl (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1990), 547 ↩︎
13. Colloquially, it is more commonly known as Musaddas-i-Ḥālī ↩︎
14. M. Naeem Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics (Leiden: Brill, 199), 58 ↩︎
15. Muhammad Iqbāl, “Lā Ilāha Illā Allah,” Zarb-i-Kalīm, Kulliyāt-i-Iqbāl (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1990), 27 ↩︎
16. Muhammad Iqbāl, Mysteries of Selflessness, trans. Arthur J. Arberry (London: John Murray), 8 ↩︎
17. Muhammad Iqbāl, Secrets of the Self, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Macmillan and Co, 1920), 83 – 84 ↩︎
18. Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wings, 165 ↩︎
19. Muhammad Iqbāl, “Jawāb-i-Shikwa,” Bang-i-Darā,  Kulliyāt-i-Iqbāl (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1990), 211 ↩︎