Islam: Power and Destiny

"To address this session of the All-India Muslim League you have selected a man who is not despaired of Islam as a living force for freeing the outlook of man from its geographical limitations, who believes that religion is a power of the utmost importance in the life of individuals as well as states, and finally who believes that Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer a destiny."

Presidential address delivered at the 25th session of the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad on the 29th December, 1930.

Respect for Mankind

"Remember, man can be maintained on this earth only by honouring mankind, and this world will remain a battleground of ferocious beasts of prey unless and until the educational forces of the whole world are directed to inculcating in man respect for mankind.

Only one unity is dependable and that unity is the brotherhood of man, which is above race, nationality, colour or language. So long as this so-called democracy, this accursed nationalism and this degraded imperialism are not shattered, so long as men do not demonstrate by their actions that they believe that the whole world is the family of God, so long as distinctions of race, colour and geographical nationalities are not wiped out completely, they will never be able to lead a happy and contented life, and the beautiful ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity will never materialize."

New Year's Message Broadcast from the Lahore Station of the All India Radio on the 1st January 1938.

The Flame of Life and the Fire of Faith

"The flame of life cannot be borrowed from others; it must be kindled in the temple of one's own soul.

Let then, the fire of youth mingle with the fire of faith, in order to enhance the glow of life and to create a new world of actions for our future generations."

Presidential address delivered at the annual session of the All-India Muslim Conference at Lahore on the 21st March, 1932.

Wisdom and Power

"Through wisdom alone comes power; and when power abandons the ways of wisdom and relies upon itself alone, its end is death."

The Palestine Report

Islam: A Rationalistic Religion

"The crux of religion is faith. Can man's research get at the root of its doctrines? I will reply in the affirmative. Faith is greater than ordinary belief. Man’s inner thoughts and manifest deeds are determined only by faith. It is, therefore, impossible to change the truth inculcated by religion. In physical sciences if we are told of some thing we do not know, we can dispute or disbelieve it. We can even refute it after experimenting. But we cannot do so in religion. The knowledge gifted to man by nature and the subsequent experiences gained by him are interrelated. From a study of the Islamic religion it would become clear that it is a rationalistic religion and as shown by our Prophet Muhammad its formulae could be practiced in every day life. The philosophy of ancient Greece could not make much headway in metaphysics. Greek philosophers believed in mysticism – the obscure and the abstract. But Islam teaches that one should believe only in what is rational and empirical."

Letters and Writings of Iqbal, edited & compiled by B.A. Dar, 1967, pp. 49-53.

Islam: Ethical Ideal and Polity

"It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity – by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal – has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.

I have already indicated to you the meaning of the word "religion", as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a Church. It is a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism."

Presidential address delivered at the 25th session of the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad on the 29th December, 1930.

The Faith of the Muslim

"...a wholly political civilization which has looked upon man as a thing to be exploited and not as a personality to be developed and enlarged by purely cultural forces. The peoples of Asia are bound to rise against the acquisitive economy which the West has developed and imposed on the nations of the East. Asia cannot comprehend modern Western capitalism with its undisciplined individualism.

The faith which you represent recognizes the worth of the individual, and disciplines him to give away his all to the service of God and man. Its possibilities are not yet exhausted. It can still create a new world where the social rank of man is not determined by his caste or colour or the amount of dividend he earns, but by the kind of life he lives; where the poor tax the rich, where human society is founded not on the equality of stomachs but on the equality of spirits, where an untouchable can marry the daughter of a king, where private ownership is a trust and where capital cannot be allowed to accumulate so as to dominate the real producer of wealth.

This superb idealism of your faith, however, needs emancipation from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists. Spiritually, we are living in a prison-house of thoughts and emotions which during the course of centuries we have woven round ourselves ... The whole community needs a complete overhauling of its present mentality in order that it may again become capable of feeling the urge of fresh desires and ideals. The Indian Muslim has long ceased to explore the depths of his own inner life. The result is that he has ceased to live in the full glow and colour of life, and is consequently in danger of an unmanly compromise with forces which, he is made to think, he cannot vanquish in open conflict. He, who desires to change an unfavourable environment, most undergo a complete transformation of his inner being. God changes not the condition of a people until they themselves take the initiative to change their condition by constantly illuminating the zone of their daily activity in the light of a definite ideal. Nothing can be achieved without a firm faith in the independence of one's own inner life. This faith alone keeps a people's eyes fixed on their goal and saves them from perpetual vacillation. The lesson that past experience has brought to you must be taken to heart. Expect nothing from any side. Concentrate your whole ego on your self alone, and ripen your clay into real manhood, if you wish to see your aspirations realized. Mussolini's maxim was: "He who has steel, has bread." I venture to modify it a bit and say: "He who is steel, has everything." Be hard and work hard. This is the whole secret of individual and collective life."

Presidential address delivered at the annual session of the All-India Muslim Conference at Lahore on the 21st March, 1932.

Is Religion a Private Affair?

"If you begin with the conception of religion as complete other-worldliness, then what has happened to Christianity in Europe is perfectly natural. The universal ethics of Jesus is displaced by national systems of ethics and polity. The conclusion to which Europe is consequently driven is that religion is a private affair of the individual and has nothing to do with what is called man's temporal life. Islam does not bifurcate the unity of man into an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter. In Islam God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State, are organic to each other. Man is not the citizen of a profane world to be renounced in the interest of a world of spirit situated elsewhere. To Islam, matter is spirit realizing itself in space and time.

Europe uncritically accepted the duality of spirit and matter, probably from Manichaean thought. Her best thinkers are realizing this initial mistake today, but her statesmen are indirectly forcing the world to accept it as an unquestionable dogma. It is, then, this mistaken separation of spiritual and temporal which has largely influenced European religious and political thought and has resulted practically in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European states. The result is a set of mutually ill-adjusted states dominated by interests not human but national. And these mutually ill-adjusted states, after trampling over the moral and religious convictions of Christianity, are today feeling the need of a federated Europe, i.e. the need of a unity which the Christian church organization originally gave them, but which, instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christ's vision of human brotherhood, they considered fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther.

Is religion a private affair? Would you like to see Islam, as a moral and political ideal, meeting the same fate in the world of Islam as Christianity has already met in Europe? Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical ideal and to reject it as a polity, in favor of national polities in which religious attitude is not permitted to play any part? This question becomes of special importance in India, where the Muslims happen to be a minority. The proposition that religion is a private individual experience is not surprising on the lips of a European. In Europe the conception of Christianity as a monastic order, renouncing the world of matter and fixing its gaze entirely on the world of spirit, led, by a logical process of thought, to the view embodied in this proposition.

The nature of the Holy Prophet's religious experience, as disclosed in the Quran, however, is wholly different. It is not mere experience in the sense of a purely biological event, happening inside the experient and necessitating no reactions on his social environment. It is individual experience creative of a social order. Its immediate outcome is the fundamentals of a polity with implicit legal concepts whose civic significance cannot be belittled merely because their origin is revelational. The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim."

Presidential address delivered at the 25th session of the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad on the 29th December, 1930.

There is nothing mysterious, esoteric or secret in the Quran

"Remember that Islam was born in the broad daylight of history. ... There is absolutely nothing esoteric in his (the Prophet's) teachings. Every word of the Quran is brimful of light and joy of existence. Far from justifying any gloomy, pessimistic Mysticism, it is an open assault on those religious teachings which have for centuries mystified mankind. ... Do not listen to him who says there is a secret doctrine in Islam which cannot be revealed to the uninitiated. "

The Aim of Islam

"If the purpose of human society is to ensure peace and security for the nations and to transform their present social organism into a single social order, then one cannot think of any other social order than that of Islam. This is so because, according to my reading of the Quran, 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. The history of religion was national as in the case of Egyptians, Greeks and Iranians. Later on, it became racial as that of the Jews. Christianity taught that religion is an individual and private affair. Religion having become synonymous with private beliefs, Europe began to think that the State alone was responsible for the social life of man. It was Islam and Islam alone which, for the first time, gave the message to mankind that religion was neither national and racial, nor individual and private, but purely human and that its purpose was to unite and organize mankind, despite all its natural distinctions."

Islam and Nationalism

The Main Endeavour of Islam

"The world is also thinking today in terms of race, an attitude of mind which I consider the greatest blot on modern civilization. I apprehend that the birth of a race-problem in Asia will lead to most disastrous results. The main endeavour of Islam as a religion has been to solve this very problem and if modern Asia wishes to avoid the fate of Europe, there is no other remedy but to assimilate the ideals of Islam and to think not in terms of 'race' but in terms of 'mankind'."

Statement on the Rebellion in Chinese Turkestan, published on the 16th May 1933. Source: Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by A. R. Tariq, First Edition, 1973, p. 195.

The Ultimate Purpose of Prophethood

"The ultimate purpose of the prophetic mission of Muhammad (may peace be upon him) is to create a form of society, the constitution of which follows that divine law which the Prophet Muhammad received from God. In other words, the object purify the nations of the world of the abuses which go by the name of time, place, land, nation, race, genealogy, country, etc., although the differences of nations, tribes, colours and languages are at the same time acknowledged. It is thus to bestow upon man that spiritual idea which at every moment of his life remains in constant contact with Eternity. This is where Muhammad stands and this is the ideal of the Muslim community. How many centuries will it take man to reach these heights, none can say, but there is no doubt that in removing the material differences between the nations of the world and in bringing about harmony among them in spite of their differences of nations, tribes, races, colours and languages, Islam has done something in thirteen hundred years what other religions could not do in three thousand years."

Islam and Nationalism

Deracialisation of Man

"Islam is much more than religion. Peace internal and external ... It is deracialisation of man (external peace); It aims at economic equality (internal security)."

The Book that Iqbal Planned to Write

Nationalism: Atheistic Materialism

"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, or if you like, a civic church. It is because present-day political ideals, as they appear to be shaping themselves in India, may affect its original structure and character, that, I find myself interested in politics.

I am opposed to nationalism, as it is understood in Europe, not because, if it is allowed to develop in India, it is likely to bring less material gain to Muslims. I am opposed to it 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 traditions. 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."

Presidential address delivered at the annual session of the All-India Muslim Conference at Lahore on the 21st March, 1932.

The Concept of Nationalism

"I have been repudiating the concept of 'nationalism' since the time when it was not well-known in India and the Muslim world. At the very start, it had become clear to me from the writings of European authors, that the imperialistic designs of Europe were in great need of this effective weapon – the propagation of the European conception of 'nationalism' in the Muslim countries – to shatter the religious unity of Islam to pieces.

Love of one’s native land is a natural instinct and requires no impressions to nourish it. In the present-day political literature, however, the idea of 'nation' is not merely geographical: it is rather a principle of human society and as such, it is a political concept. Since Islam also is a law of human society, the word 'country', when used as a political concept, comes into conflict with Islam. It was Islam and Islam alone which, for the first time, gave the message to mankind that religion was neither national and racial, nor individual and private, but purely human, and that its purpose was to unite and organize mankind, despite all its natural distinctions.

So far as the Muslims are concerned, simple-minded as they are, they are not fully aware of the consequences of this view of 'nationalism'. If some Muslims have fallen into the error that religion and nationalism can go hand in hand as a political concept, then I want to give a timely warning to the Muslims that this course will ultimately lead to irreligiousness. And if this does not happen, Islam will be reduced to an ethical ideal, with indifference to its social order, as an inevitable consequence!"

Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by A. R. Tariq, First Edition, 1973, preface viii-ix.

Bolshevism plus God almost identical with Islam

"I do not myself believe that the Russians are by nature an irreligious people. On the contrary, I think that they are men and women of strong religions tendencies and the present negative state of Russian mind will not last indefinitely, for no system of society can rest on an atheistic basis. As soon as things settle down in that country and its people have time to think calmly, they will be forced to find a positive foundation for their system. Since Bolshevism plus God is almost identical with Islam, I should not be surprised if, in the course of time, either Islam would devour Russia or Russia Islam."

Letter to Sir Francis Younghusband, published in the "Civil and Military Gazette" on the 30th July 1931. Source: Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by A. R. Tariq, First Edition, 1973, pp. 163-164.

Ego and Immortal Life

Personally I regard immortality as an inspiration and not something eternally achieved. Man is a candidate for immortal life, which involves a ceaseless struggle in maintaining the tension of the Ego.

McTaggart's Philosophy

The Needs of the People - Islam stifled by crust

"...I feel that the needs of the people as a whole are far more pressing than the needs of a private individual, even though his works may have been a source of inspiration to most people. The individual and his needs pass away; the people and their needs remain.

The creation of a chair for Islamic research on modern lines in the local Islamia College, is the crying need of the country. Nowhere in India has the ignorance of Islamic history, theology, jurisprudence and Sufism been so successfully exploited, as in the Punjab. It is high time to show to the people by a careful genetic study of Islamic thought and life, what the Faith really stands for, and how its main ideas and problems have been stifled under the pressure of a head crust, which has grown over the conscience of modern Indian Muslim. This crust demands immediate removal, so that the conscience of the younger generation may find a free and natural expression. Even now Muslims will find much of interest in this institution, for Islam is and has been a very important phase in the life of Asiatic peoples and has played a great role in the religious and intellectual evolution of mankind."

Statement urging the creation of a chair for Islamic research published on the 10th December 1937. Source: Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by A. R. Tariq, First Edition, 1973, pp. 224-225.

The Muslim Demand for the Creation of Muslim India

"The life of Islam as a cultural force in the country very largely depends on its centralisation in a specified territory. … The Muslim demand [for the creation of a "Muslim India"] … is actuated by a genuine desire for free development which is practically impossible under the type of unitary government contemplated by the nationalist Hindu politicians with a view to secure permanent communal dominance in the whole of India."

Presidential address delivered at the 25th session of the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad on the 29th December, 1930.