Allama Muhammad Iqbal in Politics of the Indian Sub- continent (original) (raw)
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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO ALLAMA MUHAMMAD IQBAL'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
2021
In Iqbal's political philosophy and practice, parliamentary spiritual democratic system is universalistic and particularistic in its range. Global in nature, it is anchored in the religion of Islam that gives it a universal look. In 1926, when he entered politics to realize this ideal in practice, his ideas started to reflect the political scenario of the subcontinent. Besides Islam, Iqbal had made use of a good deal of western political concepts of nationalism, democracy, secularism, sovereignty, ethics of politics and communism. But he neither fully appreciates nor discards out rightly all these concepts. On the other hand, he has expounded his own political ideals of Tauhid, Khudi, Marde Momin, Islamic democracy, Millat, etc. Through these patterns of thought, Iqbal t r y t o train an individual, a society and a global Islamic order. This universal order as it is construed from the concept of ummah will strive for the promotion of pan-humanism, i.e., freedom, brotherhood, and equality of humanity. In this paper Iqbal's political philosophy, his concept of Khudi, how he perceives an ideal society will be analyzed. It will also be highlight that how his political philosophy changed from one stage to another.
Allama Muhammad Iqbal, Indian Environment And The Muslims
Journal of Positive School Psychology, 2022
The Muslims of India under the British colonial rule faced great discrimination particularly after 1857 but some leaders like Allama Muhammad Iqbal who were the product of that suffocating environment played a pivotal role to rescue the Muslims. After 1857, the British started segregating and targeting the Muslims. At this juncture, the politico-cultural movements of Deoband and Aligarh sparked an inner fire in many Muslims including Allama Iqbal. The Hindus also developed a sense of their separate identity. In this research a qualitative analytical method is employed to highlight the contribution of Allama Muhammad Iqbal in awakening the Muslims of Indian Subcontinent because as a poet, thinker and philosopher, Iqbal struggled against Muslim stagnation through the power of his poetic and philosophical genius later on and had greatly influenced the politics of the Subcontinent. His metaphysical philosophy gave the Muslim community a sense of revolution and purpose in life. It was the result of his efforts that the Muslims clearly started a journey towards their destination. The question that will be dealt in this research work is that how the Indian environment shaped the personality and thinking of Allama Iqbal and how he utilized his poetry and philosophy to serve the Muslims of India?
Iqbal: An Analysis on his Life, Works and Mission
Journal of Islam in Asia (E-ISSN: 2289-8077)
The Islamic world has witnessed the emergence of great number of Muslim scholars. The names of those who made positive contributions are mentioned till to these days. The poet-philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal is one of those great scholars who have left a legacy behind to be followed by other scholars particularly in the area of how to deal with the West. His own reconciliatory approach in dealing between the West and the Islamic world should be an interesting one. Within the confines of this paper, the researcher would like to explore and analyze the life, works and mission of Iqbal, focusing on his philosophical approach to Muslim ummah.
Iqbal and the Reconstruction of Islamic Thought
We have defined Islamic Revolutionary thought as the imperative to remove the dichotomy between Divine Revelation and state authority, or between the religious and the secular domains of human existence, and to establish the unconditional and unqualified ascendancy of the Qur'an and the Sunnah over all spheres of life, so that the Islamic System of Social Justice can be established in its totality and, as a consequence, all forms of political repression, economic exploitation, and social discrimination can be eliminated from human society. The achievement of this goal in 7th century Arabia was the greatest accomplishment of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), and it is this triumph of the Prophet which is acknowledged by historian Dr. Michael Hart in these words: "he [Prophet Muhammad] was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels." The Islamic System of Social Justice, as established by Prophet Muhammad (SAW), continued in its ideal form for at least 30 years after his death, and then it started to decline. Gradually, however, the ideal unity between the religious and the secular gave way, and a dichotomy appeared in the Muslim society between the political rulers and the religious leadership, and then the latter themselves got divided into the scholars of the law (ulama) and the mystics who concerned themselves mainly with the purification of the soul (sufia); in this way, the "unity" gradually degenerated into a "trinity." The political and moral decay of the Ummah continued to worsen with each passing century. In the meantime, the development of physical sciences and technology in Europe under the influence of Renaissance and Reformation — which were themselves a result of Islamic influences reaching Central Europe through Muslim Spain — led to a power potential which resulted in the conquest of Muslim lands by the forces of Western Imperialism. The evolution of social sciences in Europe also accelerated, and French and Bolshevik revolutions gave fresh dimensions to the human thought, including the ideas of freedom, democracy, human rights, equality, and the need to eliminate all exploitation. In the Indian subcontinent, efforts to revive the authentic and pristine Islam began with Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, and gained momentum with Shah Waliyullah Dehlvi and Sayyid Ahmad Shaheed. The stage was thus set, at the beginning of the 20th century, for Allama Muhammad Iqbal to play his momentous role in laying down the intellectual foundations of Islamic Renaissance. The achievements of Allama Iqbal vis-à-vis the reconstruction of Islamic religious and revolutionary thought can be summarized as follows: In the first place, he proved that the intellectual and scientific progress that was achieved by the European man during the last few centuries was actually a manifestation and unfolding of the Qur'anic spirit. According to Iqbal, the birth of Islam was the birth of inductive intellect; it was the Qur'anic emphasis on observation and experience, as well as its stress on the concrete and the finite, which gave rise to the scientific method of inquiry. The scientific spirit was born as a result of the imperative by the Qur'an to give up all superstitious and fanciful beliefs, to rely on the senses and the faculty of reason for gaining knowledge of the material world, and to contemplate the physical and natural phenomena because these are signs of Almighty Allah (SWT). It was under the influence of such Qur'anic teachings that the inductive method of inquiry blossomed among the Arabs, before being carried through the universities in Muslim Spain into Europe, paving the way for the Renaissance. It was in this sense that Iqbal saw the intellectual side of the European culture as "only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam." Secondly, he proved that the concepts of political and economic rights of man, which seem to have been born and developed in the West, were actually derived and borrowed from the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). Thus, to say that all human beings are born equal, that every human being has certain inalienable rights (especially the provision of basic necessities of life) concerning which there must not be any discrimination on the basis of gender, race, color, caste, or creed, and that all forms of exploitation — whether political or economic — must not be allowed to continue in a decent and humane society, is to express the basic tenets of an ideal Islamic state as given by Prophet Muhammad (SAW), as well as to describe the most remarkable features of the era of Al-Khilafah Al-Rashidah. Thirdly, Iqbal brought to the fore the urgent need and the immense significance of developing a new ilm al-kalam, i.e., of reconstructing the Islamic theology in the light of modern knowledge and of rebuilding the edifice of religious belief on the basis of newly available scientific data. Iqbal paved the way
Studies in History, Sage, 2023
This paper argues that contrary to some popular perceptions, the ideological shift in Iqbal dates not from 1930 (when he apparently moved towards the acceptance of the two-nation theory at the Allahabad Session of the Muslim League) but to his stay in Europe from 1905 to 1908 (after which he made a complete and abrupt shift from Indian nationalism to revivalism and Pan-Islamism). This shift is powerfully expressed in the political and cultural imaginings of both his Urdu and Persian poetry. His poetry becomes suffused with the ideas of revivalism and Pan-Islamism in counter-position to those of composite nationhood and territorial nationalism on which the Indian national movement was premised. The shift is embodied in poetic imagery and metaphor incompatible with the modern idea of nationalism, especially the dominant idea of Indian nationalism. Iqbal's later thoughts concerning Islam's relations with non-Muslims in India and elsewhere promote an adversarial historical and cultural narrative of Islam. Though triggered by a passionate rejection of the West and its modernity, the shift manifested not just in a critique of the West but also of all non-Islamic cultures and civilizations. Iqbal's narrative of Islam is teleological and triumphalist. Far from being defensive about the charges of intolerance and aggression levelled against Islam by its critics, he proudly invokes imagery of the sword and the conquest in the history of Islam, while bemoaning the decline of its political power in the modern era. Iqbal's quest is for a supposedly pure Islam of the past and its revival in the twentieth century in the form of a redefined, reconstituted and revitalized Umma which cuts across boundaries of nations, continents and ethnicities. Few poets in the history of the modern world have had such influence as Allama Iqbal, and fewer still have made such fundamental shifts.