Iqbal Singh Sevea. The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xix + 234 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-00886-1.

Reviewed by Thierry DiCostanzo (University of Strasbourg)
Published on H-Nationalism (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Eric H. Limbach (University of Rochester (from Fall 2015))

Moderately Communal Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal is much misunderstood by the hagiographic history of South Asia, so any new and serious scholarly work focused on the life and achievements of one of India’s major intellectuals of decolonization, that major event of the twentieth century, is truly welcome. Among the recent books written on poet-philosopher Iqbal (1877-1938), only few have deliberately considered the man as a major political actor and thinker. Javed Majeed has interestingly revisited Iqbal in relation to postcolonial theory in Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2008) and Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal (2007). Souleymane Bachir Diagne has shown a keen interest in philosopher Henri Bergson’s rapport with postcolonial studies in Bergson postcolonial: l'élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (2011). Heidelberg historians like Gita Dharampal-Frick have vigorously synthesized Iqbal’s philosophy, poetry, and political ideas in Revisioning Iqbal as a poet and Muslim political thinker (2010). All these works are excellent, but we can add a new work to that list where Iqbal is carefully examined as a political thinker in his own right: The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. The author, a namesake of the poet, is Iqbal Singh Sevea, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Not only will his book help our understanding of the famous historical figure, but it will also respond to the need to study the political ideas held by the last generation of colonized Indian Muslims. 

Sevea’s work moves from the following questions: Why and how did Iqbal reject European and Indian concepts of nationalism, liberalism, and the democratic ideology so common at the time among the colonized elite? Why did Iqbal desire to find a new way for any future decolonized “nation,” in particular the Indian Muslim nation, which would be independent from Western standards and norms? 

Beginning with a clear introduction surveying the history of Muslims between 1857 and 1919, Sevea gives a brief biography, and more interestingly, a history of the scholarly work on Muhammad Iqbal and the poet’s views on Islam and politics. Sevea sets forth the main body of his argument in five chapters. The first presents a most welcome chronological account of Muslim political debate between the 1857 uprising and the Pakistan Lahore Resolution of 1940, focusing on the evolution of Indian Muslim political thinking since the “political humiliation of Islam” both in the Middle East and India at the end of the eighteenth century. Sevea devotes the remaining chapters to Iqbal’s political thinking present in his poetry and philosophy, enucleating his opinions on Islam, nationalism, and the idea of nation. Sevea’s conclusion ties together the main themes of his book by referring to Iqbal’s influence in Iran and Pakistan on such varied political thinkers such as Ali Shariati, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and Abul A'la Maududi. He supplements his study with a rather comprehensive bibliography listing the key works on the topic. 

The four principal chapters of Sevea’s book deserve further discussion. Chapter 2, “Iqbal's Roles as an Intellectual and Poet,” traces the influences of communalism on Muhammad Iqbal’s political history and philosophy. While rightly stressing that Iqbal did not resemble other Muslim thinkers like Syed Ahmad Khan, Sevea insists on presenting Iqbal as an avant-garde anticolonial militant, who was also anti-authority and anti-tradition. Chapter 3, “Reconstruction of Islam,” shows Iqbal’s rejection of both Indian nationalism and Marxism. Iqbal saw his own Islamism as a system fabricating liberation from alienation through the myth of recuperated superiority over the imperialist side. Chapter 4, “Rejecting Nationalism, Relocating the Nation,” argues that Iqbal rejected the norms of the modern state, which he considered atheistic and incompatible with Islam. For him, the nation was religious and could not be territorial, writes Sevea. The last chapter, “Development of the Nation,” is a clear summary of all the Muslim political schemes of the 1930s that provoked controversy in India and that were in a way influenced by Iqbal. It is enough to say that Sevea does not put Iqbal into either the separatist or the federalist camp. Rather, he does his best to clarify the interplay between Iqbal’s deeply held religious convictions and his political values and commitments. 

All told, Sevea’s Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal is rather concise, complete, and consistent. The book clarifies two major aspects of Iqbal’s political thought: the need to adapt to the new situation in the world and the idea of cultural federations. Sevea deliberately insists that Iqbal was not just a poet and philosopher, but also a major political thinker of his time, and one can only agree here. Sevea rightly argues that the reason why Iqbal has achieved greatness in the eyes of all South Asians and others ouside the subcontinent was mainly his gift for poetry, not divisive politics. Therefore Iqbal can be considered the Whitman, Yeats, or Tagore of Pakistan. But the result is that the core of Iqbal’s political philosophy has been left aside and is not well known. So Sevea sets out to demonstrate in a very admirable fashion the ideas and principles which animated Iqbal’s thinking on politics. Also, Sevea puts to rest once and for all some unfair assertions which made the rounds after Iqbal’s death and came to dominate the historians’ assessments of his political role. There were many who claimed that the word “Pakistan” had been coined by Iqbal, and not Chaudhury Rahmat Ali. They were wrong of course. There were others who claimed that C. R. Ali had borrowed the whole Pakistan scheme from Iqbal and they were equally wrong. Sevea is willing to make the case final that Iqbal was far more than the precursor of C. R. Ali or even Muhammad Jinnah and he is definitely right. 

Iqbal was respected and respectable: he interacted with Western political thinkers on an equal footing, being very well educated in Western concepts. Here Sevea could have said more about Iqbal’s Western experience, his joining the socially conservative Muslim League early in 1906, and his admiration not just of Nietzsche, but of Oswald Spengler, William James, and Henri Bergson too. Also, the author could have taken a firmer stand about the validity of Iqbalian political philosophy (compared to his literary work). Let us also disagree with Sevea, as Iqbal was neither a strong critic of colonialism nor a staunch anti-imperialist. Iqbal was a humanist, who occasionally saw the corrupt colonial system fabricating alienation and inferiority, not just among Muslims. However, Iqbal’s solution was rather elitist and communal, and never anticolonial. 

In his lifetime, Iqbal promoted communalism in South Asia. Iqbal could have been a defender of the Ottoman caliph who had issued a fatwa declaring jihad against the British at the beginning of the First World War. Although this fatwa greatly stirred Indian Muslims in general, Iqbal remained silent and never joined the Khilafat movement led by Gandhi and his Muslim associates in 1920. Not unconsequentially, Iqbal accepted a knighthood from the British in 1923, a decision which shocked his admirers. Emerging later as a member of various assemblies and a delegate to the London Round Table Conferences on the future of India, Iqbal also took the presidency of the Muslim League in 1930. In his famous presidential address, he said: “Communalism, in its highest aspect, is indispensable to the formation of a harmonious whole in a country like India.”[1] Of course, it is common knowledge that Iqbal’s vision of an autonomous (Indian) Muslim state might have been deliberately imprecise and contradictory. Iqbal probably wanted a Muslim India as much as the Burmese “Buddhists” demanded (and obtained) a “Buddhist India” within the Raj (Burma in 1937). Iqbal then was a communalist--no doubt a liberal one, but not so different from other communalist politicians such as Husain Shahid Suhrawardy, Sikandar Hyat Khan, Shahnawaz Khan Mamdot, or the leftist Leaguers. As a matter of fact--and unlike Abul Kalam Azad, Abdul Nazer Madani, or Rafi Ahmed Kidwai--he never opposed his very good friend Jinnah. Indian Hindu political equivalents of Iqbal are Shyama Prasad Mookherjee or Madan Mohan Malaviya, who never quite opposed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Mahasabha. As a communalist litterateur, Iqbal was akin to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Iqbal remained loyal to the British Empire in India, so nobody can agree with Sevea supporting the curious idea that, despite the fact that Iqbal cannot be claimed by Pakistanists (this is anachronistic, he says), the philosopher was the precursor of Third World theory, denouncing the totalitarian hegemony of the West. Iqbal is labeled by Sevea as a Gramscian combat-litterateur, akin to Trotsky, and a precursor of 1960s French theory champions like Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, or Jean-Paul Sartre. This is a bit hard to stomach! Iqbal the humanist had a darker side. It is a pity Sevea does not write much about the general Indian context in this otherwise good book. 

Iqbal was a great intellectual-cum-politician originating from the biggest European empire, the British Empire--the context being of course that half the population of the whole of the British colonial possessions was Muslim after all, and that Indian Muslims (a quarter of the population of British India) were aware of being the demographic center of the Muslim world. Through Iqbal’s 1930 book, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, which reads very much like an intellectual autobiography, one learns that Iqbal rejected a fatalistic acceptance of colonization by Muslims.[2] In his own manner, Iqbal was an innovative political thinker, and not just a poet and philosopher, and he desired his fellow Muslims to make a huge effort at reforming themselves in preparation for the big step towards full political independence. In that book of his, we also learn that he supported Atatürk, who definitely endorsed some form of nationalism, the idea of Muslim countries being united through a loose confederation not being incompatible with it. 

Through Iqbal, says Sevea, and rightly so, we have access to various common concerns and problems or thoughts which were in fashion just before the major event of twentieth century that is decolonization and which have long been neglected.

Notes

[1]. “Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930,” in Speeches, Writings, and Statements of Iqbal, ed. Latif Ahmed Sherwani, 2nd ed. (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 1977 [1944]), 3-26, available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html.

[2]. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Redwood: Stanford University Press, 2013), “Lecture 6: The Principle of Movement,” 116-142.

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Citation: Thierry DiCostanzo. Review of Sevea, Iqbal Singh, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. October, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41365

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