llama Muhammad Iqbal was a leading Urdu poet of the first half of Twentieth Century when India was still a colony of the British. His father, Sheikh Nur Muhammad, was a descendant of Kashmiri Brahmins who had converted to Islam. Iqbal’s mother, Imam Bibi, was a Punjabi Muslim. He was educated and reared in Persian, Arabic and indigenous Hindustani tradition early on but later studied in institutions of colonial modernity such as Scotch Mission High School, Sialkot, and Government College, Lahore.

Since the Punjab was the last province annexed by the British, the colonial influence had not yet overtaken the Punjab when Iqbal was born and got his early education. He thus belonged to the ‘lost Hindustani milieu’ as argued and explained in detail in Manan Ahmed Asif’s The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (2022).

It is worth noting, argues Tahir Kamran in his Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan (2024), that the reformers who emerged at the turn of Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries were influenced by three factors: “socio-cultural traditions embedded in history; religion and its reinterpretation within a theological framework; and modernity, drawing on the principles of Enlightenment.” Iqbal and his philosophy can be understood in this framework. He was rooted in indigenous religio-philosophical traditions and then he imbibed influences of colonial modernity.

During his days at college and higher studies, Iqbal was influenced by the British colonial and European institutions of learning. He completed his doctorate in Germany. Iqbal understood the transformation that had taken place in Europe resulting from industrialisation and modernisation that empowered the leading European countries and allowed those to colonise and selectively modernise the colonies. The process is referred to as colonial modernity. How colonialism impacted the local and indigenous worldview of knowledge as well as state and society in myriad ways can be understood by reading a reflective article by Tahir Kamran titled What Colonialism Does (published in TNS on June 12, 2016).

Iqbal knew that colonialism had debased every aspect of the life of Hindustanis. He expressed these feelings in several poems. In 1904 in Lahore, a famous young revolutionary and anti-colonial firebrand activist Har Dayal organised a gathering of likeminded students at Forman Christian College. He invited his friend, Muhammad Iqbal, who was then teaching at Government College, to address the gathering. Iqbal inaugurated this meeting by singing his newly composed poem, Hamara Des (Our Homeland) with the rousing first line, saray jahan say achha Hindustan hamara (better than the whole world, our Hindustan). It was wonderfully received and got published in Urdu weekly, Ittehad. It soon became a song of the masses, an anthem, says Carlo Coppola in Urdu Poetry, 1935-1970: The Progressive Episode (2017).

Many social and political scientists argue that Pakistan, throughout its history, has been a neo-colonial, not post-colonial country. We need to indigenise and decolonize. We can take potent inspiration from ideas and ideals of Allama Iqbal for de-colonising various institutions of the state and the society.

Soon after beginning studies at Cambridge University, he chanced upon a fund-raising campaign by a Christian missionary who spoke about India and depicted it as the home of ignorance and poverty. Agitated, Iqbal rose up, sought permission to speak and for the next twenty-five minutes, passionately described pre-colonial India as prosperous and cultured, rich in traditions and knowledge. He argued that India had been reduced to servitude and destitution by its colonial masters. His audience burst into applause and admirers surrounded him in support of his persuasive arguments. Iqbal initially admired the remarkable vitality of the West, but it did not take him long to become a critic of colonial exploitation.

While travelling to Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh around the year 1929, he delivered a series of six lectures which were later published as Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, his major formulation on the need to re-conceptualise Islamic thought. He knew that medieval jurists’ interpretation of Islam was a human construct in a particular temporal context and argued that a radical re-interpretation or re-construction of religious thought was needed for its alignment with the changed context.

Iqbal’s political journey and contribution to conceiving a separate country for Muslim-majority areas of India is excellently articulated by Sikandar Hayat in his scholarly treatise A Leadership Odyssey: Muslim Separatism and the Achievement of the Separate State of Pakistan (2021). Elected in 1926 to a Punjab Legislative Assembly seat from Lahore, he pursued very active involvement in the provincial politics. Being elected president of the All India Muslim League in 1930, he set forth the idea of an autonomous Muslim state in his presidential address at Allahabad.

Iqbal’s idea that “the Indian Muslims are not a political minority, but constitute a separate political nationality, and as such have no other option except either to demand full autonomy in the Muslim majority provinces within a very loose federal structure or to carve out a separate sovereign Muslim state” was an intellectual synthesis of the concept of statehood in peculiar Indian conditions where Muslims were in a predicament. Since the British had introduced electoral politics and representative institutions, the Indian Muslims had been inherently pushed to the margins in a game of numbers and there was no going back to the days of kingdom. The Indian Muslims needed a way forward.

“The creation of Pakistan was the final embodiment of Iqbal’s ideals of Islam in the difficult, distressful conditions of India” for Muslims under the colonialism of the British Raj, says Hayat. Many social and political scientists argue that Pakistan, throughout its history, has been a neo-colonial, not post-colonial country. We need to indigenise and decolonize. For this we can take potent inspiration from ideas and ideals of Allama Iqbal for de-colonising the institutions of state and society.

Dr Muhammad Abrar Zahoor heads the History Department at University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1