Hina Khalid
Hina Khalid completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge.
More About this Author
Hina Khalid completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge.
More About this Author
Hina Khalid completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge.
More About this Author
As human beings, we are embedded in multiple relational fabrics and social ecosystems—beginning with our immediate ties of kinship, extending to our cultivated bonds of friendship, stretching to our fellow neighbors and townsfolk, and ramifying further to embrace those with whom we share a religious affiliation. Indeed, we derive and sustain our senses of selfhood and modes of meaning-making from these intricate webs of belonging. Thus, my family imparts moral values to me that I may one day appropriate as my own; my interactions with neighbors teach me what it is to be neighbor-ly; and, if I’m Muslim, the horizon of the ummah can provide a stable and sacred milieu of global fellowship. A relatively recent configuration of such patterns of human belonging is the nation-state—a model of territorial sovereignty that, over the course of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, became the reigning political paradigm.
By the twentieth century, the status quo of trans-regional kingdoms and empires had been displaced by the tenet that each nation, or “peoples,” was entitled to its own autonomously governed territory. Recalling this history underscores the contingency of our modern cartographies: while many nation-states today cleave to a myth of timelessness (as though their geographic borderlines were providentially arrayed in the cosmic order of things), in actuality, they emerged at particular moments as the culmination of particular projects of self-determination and particular dissolutions of imperial structures.
Many of today’s nation-states, including Muslim-majority ones, were forged from the postwar erosions of empire. After WWI, the victorious Allies (the UK and France) apportioned the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and thus states including Iraq and Syria were born. In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan, marking the end of almost two centuries of British colonial rule. Since their inception, many of these nation-states have sought to articulate and advance a robust nationalist consciousness in order to elevate the community of the so-called nation above other affective ties of belonging (be they regional, religious, or otherwise).
Think, for instance, of the brutal state suppressions of various separatist movements around the world, or indeed of the proscription of public displays of religious identity in certain European countries. How might Islamic teachings engage with such nationalist sensibilities, anxieties, and mobilizations? Put differently, does the Islamic vision of a hospitable community align with the majoritarian logic of the nation-state? Is nationalism merely an iteration of our natural urge toward sociality? Is it a benign capitulation to the politically dominant order? Or does it betoken something more sinister?
One Muslim figure who gave these questions serious and sustained attention is renowned poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938). Through his work in varied languages and genres—which includes richly mystical verses in Urdu, elaborate poetic discourses in Persian, and a wide-ranging philosophical treatise in English—Iqbal sought to sketch the outlines of a rejuvenated Islamic faith that he called Muslims to. This renewed or “reconstructed” faith would be equipped to respond dynamically to the flows of social change with a spiritual and intellectual maturity of vision. Today, we remember Iqbal as the spiritual father of the modern nation-state of Pakistan, which is a rather curious inheritance given he was fervently critical of nationalism. Indeed, exploring the literary afterglows of Iqbal and his contemporary Rabindranath Tagore (d. 1941), Ali Khan Mahmudabad notes the irony that these great poets have been claimed as “powerful symbols of the nation state,” even though they both “saw nationalism as anathema to their particular worldviews.”1
In what follows, I want to look closely at why and how Iqbal viewed nationalism as the antithesis of Islamic ideals of selfhood and community. In a world where forms of nationalist aggression become ever more rampant and militant, Iqbal’s reflections may reacquaint us with Islam’s fertile paradigm of nurturing human affinities beyond the strictures of race and place.
To properly appreciate Iqbal’s critiques of nationalism, it is necessary first to understand his foundational conception of the universe in general, and of the human person in particular. This is because Iqbal’s political philosophy flows organically from his metaphysical and anthropological commitments: for Iqbal, the Islamic model of community intertwines with and reflects the very nature of the created world and the individual self. Iqbal’s metaphysical starting point is that the universe is intimately related to God in that it continually discloses the divine reality in new ways at each moment. In presenting this vision of a creatio continua, Iqbal weaves together the Qur’anic concept of tawhid (divine unicity), the cosmology of French philosopher Henri Bergson (d. 1941), and his understanding of certain facets of quantum physics.
By drawing on these multiple strands, Iqbal elaborates his account of God as the “Great I Am” or the “Ultimate Ego”2—that is, the One in whom the perfection of selfhood is transcendentally complete. God alone is the true, utterly unified “Self,” for God alone has no constituent parts or internal fragmentation. Now, inasmuch as the universe is the “self-revelation of the Great I Am,”3 all finite beings are also distinctive “selves,” or egos, for the character of creation reflects the nature of its infinite divine source.
In his Persian and Urdu works, Iqbal employs the term khudī (self/selfhood) to articulate the integrity and vitality of all creatures: every entity is a khudī and embodies the divine plenitude in its own distinctive way. Thus, the plant reflects God according to its own mode of selfhood, and the bird according to its own—neither mode is purposeless or dispensable, for the creaturely chorus of divine praise (Qur’an 17:44) requires the unique contribution of all of its members. Crucially, the human person fulfills this cosmic continuum of khudī—the freedom of selfhood attains its “relative perfection” in human beings, and thus they stand closest to the divine reality, in whose “creative life” they alone are capable of “consciously participating.”4 So, if God is constantly unfolding a “fresh glory,”5 the telos of human life is to be similarly dynamic, moving onward to ever-new ends: fallibly on earth, as perfectly in heaven. For Iqbal, this processive anthropology is intimated in Qur’an 84:16–19, which affirms that the human being perpetually proceeds from one stage to another.6
Khudī thus constitutes a vibrantly unfinished reality—as Iqbal puts it in his Urdu poem Sāqīnāma (Book of the cupbearer), the true stability7 of the self rests, paradoxically, in its continuous journeying.8 Through this dynamic crafting of our selfhood,9 by which we set forth and move toward new creative possibilities, we reflect something of divinity10—namely, of the eternally active God whose self-revelations can never be exhausted. For Iqbal, the existential “motor” by which one arrives at this perfected human (non-)summit is the force of love (¢ishq). ¢Ishq is that fire with which one fortifies one’s self (khudī), for it ignites the “creation of values and ideals and the endeavour to realise them.”11 More specifically, Iqbal notes, the values and ideals by which the human person’s khudī is strengthened are the divine attributes, in accordance with the prophetic injunction to “create in yourselves the attributes of God” (takhalluqū bi akhlāq Allāh).12 ¢Ishq denotes that dynamism of desire that propels the individual to cultivate and embody these divine qualities, thus keeping the human being in a state of continuous creative pursuit. Expressing this ¢ishq-infused imperative of motion in a poetic idiom, Iqbal writes that to love is “to live with a fire under one’s feet.”13 The human person’s khudī, when illuminated by the light of love, thus resists fixity and closure: we arrive only to journey once more; we come to rest only to depart again.
Crucially, this khudī that imbues each individual with his or her own power of creative striving exists also on the sociopolitical plane—each community possesses its own distinctive selfhood that it longs to realize and express in the outer world. It is with respect to this communal khudī that Iqbal’s criticisms of nationalism are most forcefully articulated. Scholars of Iqbal have noted that his time in Europe from 1905 to 1908 was formative in shaping his views on the destructive force of nationalist allegiances. In a strident Urdu poem written shortly after his return from Europe, Iqbal presents a world of nation-states as an inevitable cauldron of hostilities in which even quotidian ventures like commerce14 are devoid of integrity and goodwill.15 Iqbal here condemns the idol16 of territorial attachment as the desecrator of spiritual commitments, declaring the garment of nationalism the shroud of religion.17 Put differently, where nationalism lived, religion would die. Indeed, in the same poem, Iqbal evocatively describes nationalism as the plunderer18 of the prophetic path.19
These rather uncompromising statements reflect a recurring insistence in Iqbal’s work that the styles of territorial nationalism then sweeping Europe (and increasingly adopted by contemporaneous Indian nationalists) stood diametrically opposed to Islam’s supra-territorial ideal of the ummah. In contrast to nationalist attachments that reify (and, in Iqbal’s idiom, idolize) racial distinctions, the collectivity of the ummah transcends tribal and territorial exclusivities and anchors human beings in a resolute spiritual fraternity. Islam is oriented to the universal, whereas nationalism remains immured in the particular. Indeed, the cultivation of a universal spiritual community beyond race and nation is inseparably part of what Iqbal calls the “ever vitalizing idea embodied in [Islam]”20—the ummah “vitalizes” our loftiest socio-moral potential by lifting us out of our parochial fixations, while nationalism is content to sacrifice the racial other at the altar of chauvinistic pride.
Iqbal further contrasts the expansivity of the ummah with the insularity of nationalism by distinguishing between, and differentially deploying in his poetry, the key terms qawm (nation) and millat (religion)—the former suggesting the particularistic formation of the nation-state and the latter suggesting the supra-territorial momentum of the ummah. Thus, in his Urdu poem Mazhab, Iqbal entreats the Muslim not to compare his or her millat, bound and animated by the power of a universal religion,21 with the nations of the West,22 whose unity rests on the parochial delimitations of country and race.23
In 1938, Iqbal engaged in a debate with renowned Muslim scholar and principal of the Muslim seminary at Deoband Hussain Ahmad Madani (d. 1957)24 on the theological legitimacy of Western styles of nationalism and their applications in the realm of India’s own nationalist politics. The substance of Iqbal’s divergence from Madani (who argued for the compatibility of Islam and nationalism) rests again on the conceptual distinctions between qawm and millat. The former, Iqbal affirms, is a sociocultural configuration anchored in a shared racial, linguistic, territorial, or ethical identity. While the qawm is thus tethered to, and emerges from, particular “natural distinctions,” the millat is a community characterized by its reception of, and rootedness in, the divine law.25
Iqbal grounds his analysis of the distinctive valences of qawm and millat in the Qur’anic contexts in which these terms are varyingly used. He notes that while the Qur’an uses qawm to describe an essentially national arrangement (or a particular tribe/peoples), millah appears in its discussions of the decisively universal and, crucially, divinely guided character of the Muslim community. Thus, while we find the expressions “qawm of Moses” and “qawm of Pharaoh” (demonstrating that qawm is equally applied to the “guided and the unguided”), millah highlights the specifically religious nature of the Muslim community in its submission to divine revelation.26 Therefore, when the Qur’an calls its hearers to the truth of Islam, the persistent injunction is to join not a tribally structured or territorially bounded nation (qawm) but rather the universal spiritual fellowship of the millah or the ummah. Thus, the millah can embrace various nations (aqvām), but it can never be “merged in them.”27
Elsewhere, in elaborating the revelatory mission of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Iqbal writes that had Muhammad ﷺ simply turned a blind eye to the aberrations of the Arab pagans in the name of preserving an overarching “Arabian unity,” thus forfeiting propagating the message of Islam so as to sustain national bonds with his tribesmen, he would have been remembered as a patriot but not as a prophet.28 In other words, the prophetic way entailed precisely the elevation of universal divine truth over and above the pull of national belonging. Iqbal saw Islam’s universalist enterprise as a liberating antidote to the idolatrous sway of the “race-idea.”29 In a rather profound assertion, Iqbal claims that this “work” of directing us beyond mere territorial loyalties is the very work of “humanization”30—to the extent that we are slavishly bound to territory and tribe, we are somehow less humanly ourselves, and insofar as we can disavow such parochializing sensibilities, we attain to the fullness of what it is to be human. To thus make us properly human in this way is the precise telos of Islam’s “system of life and conduct.”31 On this isomorphism between Islam and the project of “humanization,” Iqbal declares,
Islam does not aim at the moral reformation of the individual alone; it also aims at a gradual but fundamental revolution in the social life of mankind, which should altogether change its national and racial viewpoint and create in its place a purely human consciousness.32
In an aspirational vein, Iqbal gives us a hint of what this “human consciousness” consists in:
All [human beings] and not just Muslims are meant for the kingdom of God on earth, provided they say good-bye to their idols of race and nationality, and treat one another as personalities.33
Only by renouncing the hold of racial and national affectivities can we truly see all human beings in the particular fullness of their individuality—that is, as “personalities.” Indeed, Iqbal’s notion of khudī confers an inviolable, individual integrity on all creatures, such that even our relationship with nonhuman animals should subvert the logic of instrumentality. In the social sphere, this noninstrumental orientation to the other acquaints us with their vibrant particularity—as Iqbal asserts, the goal of all interpersonal encounters is to reach the “inmost individuality” of the other.34 However, in our everyday interactions, we habitually treat others as “mere functions” and attend only to “those aspects of their identity which are capable of conceptual treatment.”35 We reductively assimilate the other’s khudī into our own internal frames of reference and thus “see” them only to the extent that they fit within our existing schemes of representation. However, when we widen our narrow lenses (especially, in this case, beyond the filters of nation and race), we see the other not as an object that we can control or domesticate but as an individual with a living, particular plenitude of his or her own.
If, then, Iqbal so fervently positions the universalizing and humanizing vocation of Islam against the tribal straitjacket of nationalism, how is it that he has come to be regarded as the ideological pioneer of the nation-state of Pakistan?36 Iqbal owes this projection to his 1930 presidential address to the All-India Muslim League, in which he famously argued for the creation of a “Muslim India within India”—the amalgamation of “the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan... into a single State.”37 Yet, Iqbal emphatically does not seek another nation-state among nation-states in this proposal. Indeed, throughout the address, he retains his characteristic claim that nationalism as a political project is irreconcilable with Islam’s aspiration of the ummah. His criticisms of nationalism here rest on three key motifs, which we will explore in turn: the all-embracing ethos of Islam (which, Iqbal insists, brooks no distinction between spirit and matter), the self-realization of the communal khudī, and the affirmation of difference as a precondition of true unity.
The first key motif is closely intertwined with Iqbal’s idea, indicated earlier, that shedding nationalist attachments is the precondition for treating one another as “personalities.” If nationalism breeds a fundamentally false orientation to other persons (by instrumentalizing the racial and national other), this is because it rests on an erroneous conception of the world itself, one which separates matter from spirit and, by extension, the life of religion from the life of the state. In the imaginary of the nation-state, religion is rendered an individual affair without bearings on one’s sociopolitical consciousness and activity. This relegation of religion to the private domain is, Iqbal insists, firmly at odds with the Islamic vision, which regards (a) the material world as reflective of its divine origin (or, in Iqbal’s colorful idiom, matter as “the self-realization of spirit”38) and therefore (b) one’s outer engagements with that world as an integral aspect of one’s spiritual fulfillment.
Developing this point, Iqbal affirms that while the nation-state could germinate in Europe (owing to both the Reformation and its “individualization of religion,” and also to the division of matter and spirit that Iqbal believed Christianity had inherited from Manichean thought), its vision of a profane cosmos and a bordered territory as the primary marker of identity stood radically “opposed to the standards of Islam.”39 In medieval Europe, Christianity was understood as a “purely monastic order,” which, though evolving into a “church organization,” nonetheless lacked a cohesive “polity” of the sort that typifies the comprehensive outlook of Islam.40 Islam, unlike Christianity, affirms no such distinction between the spiritual and the material; indeed, its “worldly” system of law and ethics is always already oriented toward, and enveloped in, a spiritual telos.41
So, because Islam does not divide the world into “an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter,” a spiritually grounded, and also spiritually directed, imagination of the political is seamlessly braided into its theological fabric.42 For this reason, the formation of the nation-state can offer nothing to the lifeworld of Islam that it does not already possess—the principles of Islamic law and morality already situate the human being in an organic relationship to the political.
Lucidly summarizing his position, Iqbal declared in a 1932 address to the All-India Muslim Conference in Lahore:
I am opposed to [nationalism] because I see in it the germs of atheistic materialism which I look upon as the greatest danger to modern humanity. Patriotism is a perfectly natural virtue and has a place in the moral life of man. Yet that which really matters is a man’s faith, his culture, his historical tradition. These are the things which in my eyes are worth living for and dying for, and not the piece of earth with which the spirit of man happens to be temporarily associated.
43
Note that Iqbal describes patriotism as a “perfectly natural virtue” that even has a role in our “moral life”; the issue, then, is not with one’s natural love for one’s country but with the specific political ideology of nationalism, which bifurcates elements of life and reality that are, in the Islamic conceptual universe, deeply interwoven.
Quit India Movement, Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, 1954