Mr

Consider the work of Sir Mohammad Iqbal,

with reference to his idea of the Islamic community.

Mohammad Iqbal was widely known as poet, philosopher, lawyer, jurist and spiritual Godfather of Pakistan. He was the founder of Muslim politics in the Indian subcontinent. Iqbal created an ideological platform for Muslim national movement in India and created conceptual base for creation of Pakistan. Iqbal received his higher education in Europe, from where he struggled to harmonise western philosophies with Islamic culture and beliefs. He studied philosophy in Cambridge and took a doctorate in Munich His political view was that in theory a Muslim state wasn't desirable, as he held to the ideal of a world-wide Muslim community; nevertheless, he held that, at least in the short and medium terms, the only way for Indian Muslims to be able to live according to the tenets of Islam was in such a state, and he campaigned accordingly. Iqbal's philosophical work involves bringing various philosophical influences, including Liebniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche, to his Islamic scholarship, thus holding out the promise of a revival of genuine Islamic philosophical thought - a return of Islam to its place in the philosophical world.

His philosophical position was articulated in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1958), a volume based on six lectures delivered at Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh in 1928-29. He argued that a rightly focused man should unceasingly generate vitality through interaction with the purposes of the living God. The Prophet Muhammad had returned from his unitary experience of God to let loose on the earth a new type of manhood and a cultural world characterised by the abolition of priesthood and hereditary kingship and by an emphasis on the study of history and nature. The Muslim community in the present age ought, through the exercise of ijtihad - the principle of legal advancement - to devise new social and political institutions. He also advocated a theory of ijma'-concensus.

This essay will attempt to show some backgrounds to Iqbal's idea of community. These backgrounds include his public and political involvement in the Muslim community of the sub-continent, and his poetic and philosophic works. Then Iqbal's concrete idea of the Muslim community will be summarised as laid out in one of his lectures in India (Vahid 1964:376ff).

There was a rising middle class of the Muslim community in the sub-continent, particularly the new intelligentsia of the Aligarh Movement. This new middle class and its intelligentsia were deeply conscious of the separate entity of Muslims as a minority community. The feeling of separate entity had its foundations not only in religion and culture but also in history because Muslims generally identified themselves as inheritors of the traditions of Muslim supremacy for more than 700 years. The Hindus who constituted the majority community organised themselves politically under the banner of the Indian National Congress, and developed the concept of composite nationalism which was supposed to be broadly Indian embracing all religious communities: Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and the rest. However, Muslim separateness in the cultural sphere was recognised even by the so-called nationalist Muslim who accepted the theory of composite Indian nationalism at the political level. Iqbal was perhaps the single major influence in sharpening the feeling of Muslim separateness in the basis of religion, history, tradition and culture. He gave his community a message of faith, hope and struggle. He believed in a dynamic rather than static view of life. Activism, which was the corner stone of Iqbal's philosophical thinking, had a direct relationship with the aspirations of the rising middle class of the Muslim Community. As the years passed by the conflict between the Hindus and Muslims became the central problems for the Muslim community. Iqbal felt bound to give a lead to the Muslim community. Iqbal began to explain that the creation of a separate Muslim State was in the best interests of India and Islam (See presidential addresses in Vahid 1964). For India it meant security and peace resulting from a balance of power. For Islam, it was an opportunity to mobilize its law, its educations, its cultures and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times (ibid).

What is apparent is that the purpose for the creation of a separate Muslim state was two-fold. One was to the end the Hindu-Muslim conflict and the other was to enable Islam to play its role as a cultural force. For Iqbal, as evident in his lecture on "The principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam" (1958: Ch. 6), Islam had a commitment to history. For the fulfilment of this commitment Muslim community must stop mechanical repetition of its old values and begin to re-evaluate its intellectual inheritance. Iqbal believed, after serious consideration of the Shariat law of Islam, that true Islamic community could not be established in the caste-driven society of Hindu sub-continent (Vahid 1964:161ff.). Also Iqbal understood that the psyche of the Muslim community was such that it was not ready to live under the Hindu majority rule. Iqbal understood that the communal group of Muslim society gave people "its religion, its literature, its thought, its culture and thereby recreated its whole past as a living operative factor in their present consciousness." (A presidential address in Vahid 1964:169) Iqbal's very political foundation is therefore said to be his religious beliefs of Islam. In fact, like most Muslims, Iqbal held that politics are not to be divorced from Islamic faith since it was the very basis and structure of life. As he states in one of his presidential addresses, "Politics have their roots in the spiritual life of man. It is my belief that Islam is not a matter of private opinion. It is a society... a civic church." (Vahid 1964:196ff) It is evident that even with his western education Iqbal's political outlook remained completely modelled with Islamic concept of governance. He further deplores western materialism in the same address. "I see in [western ideology] the germs of atheistic materialism which I look upon as the greatest danger to modern humanity." (ibid.)

Iqbal's poetic and philosophical works portray well his rationale behind his political activism. Comparing the democracy of Europe to that of Islam, he observes that European democracy is originated mainly from the economic opportunities, demonstrating their selfish opportunistic ambitions prior to respect for humanity (Vahid 1964:83ff). However, he claims that Islamic democracy grew out of the principle that every human being is the centre of