Special report: The enduring vision of Iqbal 1877-

1938
www.dawn.com /news/1368130/
Allama Muhammad Iqbal was a distinguished poet, a brilliant scholar and a gifted philosopher,
but, above all
else, he was a true visionary. Pakistan was fortunate to have him as its ideological founder. It
was at the
Allahabad session of the Muslim League in 1930 that Iqbal became the first politician to
articulate the two-nation
theory that ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan on August 14, 1947. | Photo: The Allama
Iqbal Collection in
the possession of Muneeb Iqbal
The name, not the philosophy, lives on
By Khaled Ahmed
PAKISTAN’S ideological journey has reshaped the great poet-philosopher Allama Muhammad
Iqbal into a patron
of its hardening worldview. Reviewing how he has been ‘reinterpreted’ into an ideological
platitude is now
hazardous because of his state-approved and clerically-backed identity as an orthodox thinker
opposed to all
modernist revision. At times, secular commentators longing for an identity rollback consign him
to the category of
‘orthodox’ while praising Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as the true modernist. There is, however, steady
evidence from
his life that defies this orthodox labelling.
The climactic moment in Iqbal’s relationship with Pakistan came on December 25, 1986; some
48 years after his
death. It happened during a national seminar presided over by General Ziaul Haq in Karachi on
the birth
anniversary of the founder of the state, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The topic of the
seminar was, What
is the Problem Number One of Pakistan? Present among the invitees was the son of Allama
Iqbal, then a sitting
judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In his speech on the occasion, Justice Javed explained
why his father
was opposed to Hudood (Quranic punishments) which Gen Zia had promulgated in Pakistan.
The controversial phrasing from the Sixth Lecture in Allama Iqbal’s book, The Reconstruction of
Religious
Thought in Islam, was: “The Shariat values (Ahkam) resulting from this application (e.g. rules
relating to
penalties for crimes) are in a sense specific to that people; and since their observance is not an
end in itself they
cannot be strictly enforced in the case of future generations.”
The reaction from Gen Zia was dismissive of Allama Iqbal rather than the Hudood he had
imposed to appease
his vast hinterland of clerical support. He had gotten into trouble with the clergy when his
Federal Shariat Court
decided that since stoning to death (Rijm) was not mentioned in the Quran it could not be a
Hadd, that is, a
punishment in the Penal Code. He had to change the Court to retain Rijm.
But Iqbal was prophetic: Pakistan has not stoned a single woman to death despite Rijm being
on the statute
book, nor has it been able to chop off hands for stealing. More literalist Iran gave up the ghastly
practice of Rijm
in 2014.
Pakistan is disturbed today by the continuing practice of bank interest after the Federal Shariat
Court banned it
in 1991 as Riba (usury) specifically mentioned in the Quran as also by Aristotle in his
Nicomachian Ethic. Islamic
banking which actually excludes the taking of Riba does so under a policy of complex self-
confessed Heela
(subterfuge).
In his publication Ilmul Iqtisad (1904), Iqbal’s first book in Urdu as an introduction to how a
modern economy
worked, he explained and clearly accepted bank interest as the lifeblood of commerce, knowing
that it was
considered banned by the clerics and accounted for so few Muslims in India’s commercial
sector. He did so by
accepting Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s view that “interest-banking was not the same as Riba/usury”.
HUDOOD AND IJTIHAD