Iqbal's 1930 Allahabad speech.

The following is excerpted from Iqbal's address to the Muslim League in Allahabad in 1930.

Islam and Nationalism 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.

In that case, Islami spirituality has been of only secondary importance. Yet, devotional piety was a feature of Islam even in places in India where there was no Islamic polity- i.e. no 'social structure regulated by an Islamic legal system'.  

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.

Islam arrived in India with missionaries, traders & invaders. Indian people were already 'unified' by caste, region & language. That remains the case to this day for the vast majority of Pakistanis. It is estimated that 95 percent of the population know their own biradari.  

Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.

Which is why the British were ruling India. They weren't ruling Iran or Turkey or Saudi Arabia- probably because Islam wasn't a 'people-building force' in those countries 

In India, as elsewhere, the structure of Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal.

the structure of Islam is due to the working of Islam. Iqbal wasn't stupid at all.  

What I mean to say is that Muslim society, with its remarkable homogeneity and inner unity, has grown to be what it is, under the pressure of the laws and institutions associated with the culture of Islam.

Iqbal knew that some sub-continental Muslims retained a lot of their pre-Islamic customs or else conformed to the practices of their neighbours.  

The ideas set free by European political thinking, however, are now rapidly changing the outlook of the present generation of Muslims both in India and outside India.

India was somewhat laggard in this respect. Turkey's Tanzimat began in 1839. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1858- i.e. 110 years before the UK got round to doing so!  

Our younger men, inspired by these ideas, are anxious co see them as living forces in their own countries, without any critical appreciation of the facts which have determined their evolution in Europe.

Iqbal lacked such 'critical appreciation'.  

In Europe Christianity was understood to be a purely monastic order

Catholic priests were celibate. Monks and Nuns were separate. Orthodox and Protestant priests coud get married. Surely, Iqbal had noticed this in England?  

which gradually developed into a vast church organisation. The protest of Luther was directed against this church organisation, not against any system of polity of a secular nature, for the obvious reason that there was no such polity associated with Christianity.

It was called the Papacy. There were Papal States- i.e. territories whose monarch was the Pope. There were also a fair number of Archbisoprics with temporal power.  

And Luther was perfectly justified in rising in revolt against this organisation; though, I think he did not realise that in the peculiar conditions which obtained in Europe, his revolt would eventually mean the complete displacement of universal ethics of Jesus by the growth of a plurality of national and hence narrower systems of ethics.

There has been no such displacement. Christianity is the same in Germany as in Italy or England.  

Thus the upshot of the intellectual movement initiated by such men as Rousseau and Luther

who lived three centuries apart 

was the break-up of the one into mutually ill-adjusted many, the transformation of a human into a national outlook, requiring a more realistic foundation, such as the notion of country and finding expression through varying systems of polity evolved and national lines, i.e. on lines which recognise territory as the only principle of political solidarity.

This is nonsense. There were national crowns- e.g. of England, Scotland, France, Sweden etc.- before the Reformation.  

If you begin with the conception of religion as complete otherworldliness, then what has happened to Christianity in Europe is perfectly natural. The universal ethics of Jesus is displaced by national system of ethics and polity.

No. Different nation-states or multi-ethnic Empires enshrined Christian teachings into their own legal codes.

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.

No. Man's temporal life was affected by laws made for religious reasons- e.g. the criminalization of bigamy, buggery & blashphemy.  

Islam does not bifurcate the unity of man into an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter.

Surah Al-Isra (17:85), when asked about the spirit, the Quran states: "Say: The spirit is from the affair [or command] of my Lord, and you have not been given of knowledge except a little". We may have a lot of knowledge about the material body of a man, but still know little about the spirit which gives him life. 

In Islam God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State, are organic to each other.

In which case, Shiahs are heretics if the State is Sunni.  

Man is not the citizen of a profane world to be renounced in the interest of a world of spirit situated elsewhere.

Many of the pleasures of this world- wine, silk clothes, sodomy- must be renounced. 

To Islam matter is spirit realising itself in space and time.

No. That's Hegel for whom matter is not an independent or ultimate substance; rather, it represents Spirit (Geist) in a state of externalization or self-alienation (Äußerlichkeit), projecting itself into the forms of space and time on its way to self-consciousness.

The rūḥ (spirit) is explicitly classified in mainstream Islamic doctrine as a created thing (makhlūq). In death, the pious Muslim hopes his spirit will return to its Creator. 

Europe uncritically accepted the duality of spirit and matter probably from Manichaean thought.

There were plenty of pantheists in Europe. 

Her best thinkers are realising this initial mistake today, but her statesmen are indirectly forcing the world to accept it as an unquestionable dogma.

Very true. Churchill was constantly badgering Coolidge on this point.  

It is, then, this mistaken separation of the spiritual and the 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.

Iqbal, being as stupid as fuck, didn't get that Europe was ruling most of the world. It is smart to imitate successful people. Don't do what they don't do.  

The result is a set of mutually ill-adjusted States dominated by interests not human but national.

Said the guy famous for wanting a nation for the Muslim majority areas.  

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 organisation originally gave them,

It didn't. England kept fighting France even when both were Catholic. Iqbal truly had no clue about European history.  

but which, instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christ's vision of human brotherhood, they considered it fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther.

The Roman Empire wasn't Christian when it united much of Europe and the MENA. Christianity had its own early schisms just like Islam.  

A Luther in the world of Islam, however, is an impossible phenomenon;

the Wahhabis had prevailed in the Hejaz. Some European scholars spoke of  Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab  as the Arab Luther. 

for here there is no church organisation, similar to that of Christianity in the Middle Ages, inviting a destroyer.

Catholicism was opposed to Orthodox Christianity before there was a Protestant Reformation.  

In the world of Islam we have

Sunnis of different Mazhabs & Shias of various stripes. Iqbal had a particular hatred of Qadianis.  

a universal polity whose fundamentals are believed to have been revealed but whose structure, owing to our legists' want of contact with the modern world, stands today in need of renewed power by fresh adjustments.

Egypt and Afghanistan had gained full independence in 1922. Iraq would become independent in 1932.  

I do not know what will be the final fate of the national idea in the world of Islam.

The number of independent Muslim nations would continue to rise.  

Whether Islam will assimilate and transform it, as it has assimilated and transformed before many ideas expressive of a different spirit, or allow a radical transformation of its own structure by the force of this idea, is hard to predict.

Islamic countries would modernise at their own pace and to the extent that they wished to do so.  

 You are a Muslim assembly and, I suppose, anxious to remain true to the spirit and ideals of Islam.

The Muslims in the Congress party are your rivals.  

My sole desire, therefore, is to tell you frankly what I honestly believe to be the truth about the present situation. In this way alone it is possible for me to illuminate, according to my light, the avenues of your political action. 

Try to win elections and get Ministerial portfolios.  

What, then, is the problem and its implications? Is religion a private affair?

Under the British- yes.  

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?

Yes. Europe ruled lots of Muslim countries. Turkey had lost its non-Muslim subject population. To maintain its independence it was imitating Europe to the extent of getting rid of the Arabic script in favour of the Roman alphabet.  

Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical ideal and to reject it as a polity in favour 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 in a minority.

They were the majority in some regions. 

The proposition that religion is a private individual experience is not surprising on the lips of a European.

There is congregational worship in Europe. Many European countries had an Established Church. Perhaps, Iqbal was thinking of 'separation of Church & State' in the US.  

In Europe the conception of Christianity as a monastic order, renouncing the world of matter and fixing its gaze entirely on the world of the spirit, led, by a logical process of thought, to the view embodied in this proposition.

Yet, it was Protestant countries- where there were no monks- which first embraced Secularism. Incidentally, the East India Company's rule in India was quoted as an example of secular government establishing itself quite cheaply over a vast territory. The Mutiny was blamed on Christian missionaries.  

The nature of the Prophet's religious experience, as disclosed in the Quran, however, is wholly different.

It is similar to that of the other Prophets.  

It is not mere experience in the sense of a purely biological event, happening inside the experient and necessitating no reactions on its social environment.

This was true of all the preceding prophets as well.  

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 policy on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principles of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.

Yet, this was the direction then being taken by the Turks, the Iranians and even the Afghans (briefly).  European dress was being made compulsory. Beards and turbans were out. Moustaches and hats were in.  

This is a matter which at the present moment directly concerns the Muslims of India. "Man," says Renan, "is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation."

This is the case even if some are atheists or belong to opposing religious sects.  

Such a formation is quite possible, though it involves the long and arduous process of practically re-making men and furnishing them with a fresh emotional equipment. It might have been a fact in India if the teaching of Kabir and the Divine Faith of Akbar had seized the imagination of the masses of this country. Experience, however, shows that the various caste units and religious units in India have shown no inclination to sink their respective individualities in a larger whole.

Indians were happy enough to serve foreign masters with a kick-ass army & navy. Iqbal clung to his knighthood.  

Each group is intensely jealous of its collective existence. The formation of the kind of moral consciousness which constitutes the essence of a nation in Renan's sense demands a price which the peoples of India are not prepared to pay.

Plenty of Muslims and Christians followed the Mahatma.  

The unity of an Indian nation, therefore, must be sought, not in the negation, but in the mutual harmony and cooperation of the many.

This could be done for purely secular ends. As Jefferson said 'in matters of religion, divided we stand, united we fall' (i.e end up fighting each other over religious shibboleths) 

. It is, however, painful to observe that our attempts to discover such a principle of internal harmony have so far failed. Why have they failed?

Because the Muslim League existed.  

And as far as I have been able to read the Muslim mind, I have no hesitation in declaring that, if the principle that the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian home-lands is recognised as the basis of a permanent communal settlement, he will be ready to stake his all for the freedom of India.

Muslims should be allowed to kill kaffirs. Kaffirs should not be allowed to retaliate.  

 Even the authors of the Nehru Report recognise the value of this higher aspect of communalism. While discussing the separation of Sind they say:"To say from the larger viewpoint of nationalism that no communal provinces should be created,

e.g the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon? 

is, in a way, equivalent to saying from the still wider international viewpoint that there should be no separate nations. Both these statements have a measure of truth in them. But the staunchest internationalist recognises that without the fullest national autonomy it is extraordinarily difficult to create the international State. So also without the fullest cultural autonomy, and communalism in its better aspect is culture, it will be difficult to create a harmonious nation."

Sindhi is a language separate and distinct from Gujarati or Punjabi.  

 Communalism in its higher aspect, then, is indispensable to the formation of a harmonious whole in a country like India. The units of Indian society are not territorial as in European countries,

Yes they are. Sindhis speak Sindhi and live in Sindh.  

India is a continent of human groups belonging to different races, speaking different languages and professing different religions.

But Indians didn't want linguistic nationalism. Hindus wanted to stick together to avoid Muslim salami tactics.  

Their behaviour is not at all determined by a common race-consciousness. Even the Hindus do not form a homogeneous group. The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognising the fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified.

As was the creation of a Hindu India where Muslims would lose any sort of affirmative action.  

The resolution of the AllParties Muslim Conference at Delhi is, to my mind, wholly inspired by this noble ideal of a harmonious whole which, instead of stifling the respective individualities of its component wholes, affords them chances of fully working out the possibilities that may be latent in them.

Sadly, the biggest of those possibilities was ethnic cleansing.  

And I have no doubt that this House will emphatically endorse the Muslim demands embodied in this resolution. Personally, I would go farther than the demands embodied in it. I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

It would have to fight Afghanistan- at least that is what seems to be happening now.  

The proposal was put forward before the Nehru Committee. They rejected it on the ground that, if carried into effect, it would give a very unwieldy state. This is true in so far as the area is concerned; in point of population the State contemplated by the proposal would be much less than some of the present India provinces. The exclusion of Ambala Division and perhaps of some districts where nonMuslims predominate, will make it less extensive and more Muslim in population—so that the exclusion suggested will enable this consolidated State to give a more effective protection to non-Muslim minorities within its area.

Hilarious!  

 The truth is that Islam is not a Church.

In Islam, Church, State, and Civil Society were simultaneously created such that every Muslim man was an equal member of all three. In England, Common Law is of Anglo-Saxon origin, Kings Equity was Norman French, and Canon Law was Latin. In Islam, all three had a common origin and terminus- more particularly if Arabic was the mother tongue. 

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.

It was territorial. Muslims go on hajj to Mecca not Manchester.  

The character of a Muslim state can be judged from what the Times of India pointed out sometime ago in a leader on the Indian Banking Inquiry Committee. "In ancient India," the paper points out, "the State framed laws regulating the rates of interest; but in Muslim times, although Islam clearly forbids the realisation of interest on money loaned, Indian Muslim states imposed no restrictions on such rates."

There were work-arounds.  

I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam.

So that usury could be banned? But the workarounds were well known.  

For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power;

Sadly, States go to war with each other. Pakistan's military adventures would prove burdensome to the economy. Moreover, the military would usurp power from barristocrats like Iqbal.  

for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.

Arabian Imperialism was justified as jihad. Was Iqbal against the concept?  

Federal States Thus it is clear that in view of India's infinite variety in climates, races, languages, creeds and social systems, the creation of autonomous States, based on the unity of language, race, history, religion and identity of economic interest, is the only possible way to secure a stable constitutional structure in India.

It would mean endless war. Pakistan broke up. Hindu India has not done so.  

The conception of federation underlying the Simon Report necessitates the abolition of the Central Legislative Assembly as a popular assembly, and makes it an assembly of the representatives of the federal States. It further demands a redistribution of territory on the lines which I have indicated. And the Report does recommend both. I give my wholehearted support to this view of the matter, and venture to suggest that the redistribution recommended in the Simon Report must fulfil two conditions. It must precede the introduction of the new constitution and must be so devised as to finally solve the communal problem. Proper redistribution will make the question of joint and separate electorates automatically disappear from the constitutional controversy of India.

The creation of majoritarian states would do so but might they not go to war with each other over contested borders? Perhaps, Iqbal believed that Europe's nation-states would be able to achieve collecive security under the League of Nations. Sadly, by the time he died, it was obvious this was a pipe-dream. 

 One lesson I have learnt from the history of Muslims.

It is the same lesson that all history teaches. Do sensible things. Don't listen to stupid shitheads even if they write good poems.  

At critical moments in their history it is Islam that has saved Muslims and not vice versa.

Which is why southern Spain was still Muslim ruled.  

If today you focus your vision on Islam and seek inspiration from the ever-vitalising idea embodied in it, you will be only reassembling your scattered forces, regaining your lost integrity, and thereby saving yourself from total destruction.

Nothing can save any created thing from going to destruction. The point about Religion is that union with the Godhead is possible after death.  

One of the profoundest verses in the Holy Quran teaches us that the birth and rebirth of the whole of humanity is like the birth and rebirth of a single individual.

There is no metempsychosis (re-birth) in Islam.  

Why cannot you who, as a people, can well claim to be the first practical exponents of this superb conception of humanity, live and move and have your being as a single individual?

Why can't you all fit into the same pair of underpants?  

I do not wish to mystify anybody when I say that things in India are not what they appear to be.

British aren't ruling. I think the real Viceroy is my neighbour's cat.  

The meaning of this, however, will dawn upon you only when you have achieved a real collective ego to look at them.

Also, you should all fit into the same pair of underpants 

In the words of the Quran, "Hold fast to yourself; no one who erreth can hurt you, provided you are well guided" (5:104)

Politics is about solving collective action problems of an economic type. Don't be guided by nutters like Iqbal.