A former US Senate candidate and political commentator says the 1951 assassination of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, is a part of the conduct of the US foreign policy, which is driven by its financial and banking system.
Mark Dankof, a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas, made the remarks in an interview on Saturday while commenting on a Pakistan Todayreport which revealed on Friday that Khan was murdered by the US because of his refusal to use his office for securing oil contracts in neighboring Iran for US corporations.
“The Pakistan Today story, citing released American State Department documents, confirms the role of [former US President Harry S.] Truman and the CIA in the assassination of PM Khan in Pakistan in 1951, just as the released CIA-MI6 documents on the coup against [Prime Minister Mohammad] Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, confirm the details of ‘Operation Ajax’ authorized by [former US President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and carried out by Kermit Roosevelt,” Dankof said, referring to the CIA officer who coordinated the “Operation Ajax” — the 1953 joint CIA-MI6-sponsored coup d’état against Mosaddegh.
Mosaddegh’s overthrow led to the return of Iran’s former monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose regime turned increasingly oppressive until it was toppled by the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
W. Averell Harriman (left), former US President Harry S. Truman’s personal foreign policy adviser, conferring with former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1951. An interpreter sits between them. (AP file photo)
“All of this is a part of the conduct of the foreign policy of the American Empire in the 20th and 21st centuries, which is nothing more than the continuation of the foreign policy of its predecessor, the British Empire, a foreign policy driven by the House of Rothschild financial and banking dynasty,” he added.
Dankof said, “In the case of the United States, every move made in the foreign policy arena since the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913 is driven by the following considerations:
1) The Balfour Declaration; 2) the Sikes-Picot Treaty; 3) the 1944 Bretton Woods financial conference which replaced the British pound sterling with the American dollar as the reserve currency of the world; 4) the Nixon-Kissinger agreement with Saudi Arabia in August of 1971 that the continuation of the American dollar as the reserve currency of the globe would peg that dollar to all international oil transactions instead of the gold standard agreed to at Bretton Woods; 5) the establishment of a world central banking system under the aegis of the Bretton Woods system and such entities as the Federal Reserve Board, the World Bank, the IMF, the Import-Export Bank, et. al.; and 6) the employment of the American military, the CIA, NATO, and the like to insure cheap access to the raw materials of countries through the world, especially in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa.”
Quoting the declassified State Department documents, Pakistan Todayreported on Friday that the Pakistani prime minister said he would neither use his friendship with officials in Tehran for dishonest purposes nor interfere in personal affairs of Iran.
In addition, Khan also called on Washington to vacate air bases in Pakistan which the United States was using against the Soviet Union, upon which Truman threatened the PM with dire consequences.
Former US President Harry S. Truman
“No methodology is deemed too evil to employ in the ongoing development of this world system, including assassination, coup d’etat, economic and cultural subversion, and overt employment of military force,” Dankof said.
“This is the context in which we should understand the Khan assassination among many others, including the murder of John Kennedy in this country in November of 1963.
“Central Banking, Zionism, the Petrodollar, and the looting of raw materials throughout the globe are always the culprits in this scenario, as they are at present in the coup d’etat facilitated by the American, European, and Israeli elites in the Ukraine in February of 2014, and the continued reckless encirclement of Putin’s Russia by NATO and its military assets.
“This leads us finally, to the consideration of Harry Truman himself. The late father of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), General Curtis LeMay, confirmed for history that the atomic bombings of Japan had nothing to do with the surrender of that country to end World War II.
“Truman dropped those weapons to send the Soviet Union a message about American power in the Pacific and throughout the world, and our willingness to employ the atomic monopoly whenever necessary to secure that power.
“What does this say about Truman? That essentially the same man who ordered these horrific war crimes could and did easily approve the assassination of Khan in Pakistan in 1951, as his modern counterparts of the last 15 years continue to commit crimes for the usual agenda, while wrapping that agenda in the public spin of ‘democracy.’”
In his poetry, which was by his own admission only a tool to convey his ever evolving thought, Iqbal raised many a magnificent existential question: Who am I? What am I here to do? What is my role, for myself, my community, my people, and humanity as a whole, in the great scheme of the cosmos?
These are some of the fundamental questions with regard to the human condition that Iqbal struggled to answer. His peculiar existentialism predates the mid-20th century preoccupation of western thinkers like Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus; it is also a far cry from the inherently selfish strain of a very individualism-centric thought that we see in the 19th century Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; or the alienation witnessed in the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka right after them.
While European modern thought, a pre-cursor of post-modernist thinking, developed in industrialising societies, Iqbal’s thinking took shape under a dual influence exerted on him by his European education and travels and his experience of the human condition in a pluralistic India under the Raj, a pluralism which was historically ill at ease with itself.
In recorded human history, India was a place where the nobility, whether home grown or of foreign origins, practically enslaved the vast majority and their resources. Only a strong central authority gave India a semblance of being one, albeit a diverse, whole.
Democracy did not come naturally to the Indian soul; British colonial rule, despite its modernity, remained just that. The British not only refused to Indianise themselves, they also could not bring themselves up to calling India home.
This was very unlike the Muslim rulers who had ruled from Delhi or the Deccan before they were ousted.
Iqbal’s identification with and his concern over the fate of all colonised nations of the East—not India alone—by mighty powers of the West called for a wider shift in the entire power paradigm that was in place in his time. This he sought by transcending the relatively smaller canvas of India, which had historically shown itself to have been intellectually and militarily docile in the face of foreign aggression century after century.
With the entire Muslim world under virtual colonisation of the West after the debacle of the Turkish caliphate, and considerable weakening of the Persian Empire that struggled between Russian pressure exerted from the north and British protectorates to the south, it was the Muslim East—once a formidable power and a civilization—with a history and idiom of its own, that Iqbal invoked as a counterweight to western hegemony.
He did this for two reasons: one, better the devil you know, and two, in a bid to weave a parallel but indigenously sourced modern thinking, the wherewithal of which some from his generation had acquired through their western education, and by rebelling against the West’s Orientalism.
He was ready to travel further on the road that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had taken before him.
This was because the Indian National Congress’s Swadeshi politics and Bande Mataram-like trappings reeked too much of an idiom that increasingly became exclusionist of non-Hindus; likewise, the social change-centric Arya Samaj movement’s belief in the supremacy of a Hindutva-based mechanism (albeit in a milder form than the ideology later espoused by the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh and the like) as a counterweight to colonialism, left a Muslim thinker who was well versed in his own tradition and secular, western education with little choice.
A Troubled Pluralism
This was the troubled pluralism of India that Iqbal grew up in, and which practised communal segregation often bordering on apartheid: upper caste versus lower caste; ‘untouchability’ of the other in its many forms; food segregation; Persian, Arabic and Urdu education for Muslims, the fallen nobility; Sanskrit and Hindi for Hindus; Gurmukhi and Khalsa educational institutions for Sikhs; missionary schools for the Christian converts and modern natives, etc.
Then there was the caste/ biradari system that divided both Hindus and Muslims equally within their own respective creeds, virtually barring any meaningful social interaction, sharing of rituals, intermarriages even among the many sub-communities within the larger communities.
Secondly, Iqbal could only communicate in the languages and the idiom that he was comfortable with; he chose Urdu and Farsi for poetry and English for prose, but kept his idiom firmly rooted in the Muslim tradition of knowledge and philosophy, which despite being Islamic was secular enough to embrace non-Muslims.
It had a heart big enough to historically take in a very diverse cross section of humanity, from the desert Bedouin to the culturally refined Arab of the Fertile Crescent, to the sophisticated Persian to the warrior Turk, to the diverse North Africa of many tribes and tongues, to the Spanish, on the one hand, and the diverse peoples of the Far East on the other side of the spectrum.
This was Iqbal’s universe of the humanity, including India, that suffered either under direct colonial rule or its debilitating influence over their affairs, and which he tried to address.
A Wider Outreach
As for the outreach of secular Muslim learning as it developed in India despite the segregation and apartheid practised in society, Urdu and Farsi, as opposed to Hindi, appealed to a wider informed audience interested in the arts and literature.
It is a great historical contradiction that can only be resolved by taking into account the fact that the Muslim learning tradition and its cultural manifestations became secular under the great Mughals. The trend continued despite Aurangzeb’s half a century of intolerant rule which decisively weakened the latter day Mughals.
In Iqbal’s time it stood revived first through the Aligarh movement and later under a modern, secular, Fort William College, Kolkata, Oriental College, Lahore, Osmania University, Hyderabad, Jamia Millia, Delhi and many Anglo-Mohammadan colleges across the empire, to continue even after independence.
India churned out some of the finest non-Muslim Urdu writers and poets from across northern India, particularly from Uttar Pradesh, Kashmir and Punjab, whose idiom, like Iqbal’s (and even Pandit Nehru’s), remained very Muslim, if you like, in its cultural context.
One need only look at the works of the likes of Ratan Nath Sarshar, Munshi Premchand, Jagannath Azad (an Iqbal scholar of authoritative standing in his own right) and his father, Tilakchand Mehroom, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Firaq Gorakhpuri, etc.
In our own time there are ace critic/scholars like Gopi Chand Narang and the inimitable Bollywood lyricist, poet and writer (Sampooran Singh) Gulzar, along with the nearly entire pre-1990s Bollywood industry; even the prolific and much anglicised Khushwat Singh is Urdu-Farsi literate, for it stemmed naturally from their native cultural and learning milieu.
Iqbal’s Context
Then and now thus, Iqbal, by using a so-called Muslim idiom and symbolism, is by no means the poet/ thinker of Islam or of Muslims alone, although his idiom remains firmly rooted in Muslim lore via Urdu and Farsi sensibilities.
The appeal of his social thought, which takes precedence over his so-called religious thought, which was anathema to many of his contemporary Muslim ulema/ scholars, found ready admirers from among the progressive literati, including Faiz Ahmed Faiz. This was because Faiz never read Iqbal out of the context from which his thoughts flowed—and those thoughts are quite diverse when seen in their entirety as they progressed over the years.
It must also be noted that Iqbal was a poet and a thinker, and not a politician, much less a crystal ball gazer. The possibility of the miracle of democracy taking root in a post-independence India, which Nehru and Ambedkar, and Maulana Azad getting the pride of place, managed to pull off, eluded him.
It eluded him by what was to be the turn of events as they unfolded, and not because of a lack of vision on his part. Iqbal died in 1938, long before Britain would be exhausted of its military power in the Second World War to be able to hold on to India by the end of 1945, and seek rather hurriedly to pull out of India.
In the years that followed, India’s troubled pluralism decisively settled for a majoritarian and market-oriented socioeconomic paradigm; in the process of democracy taking root, Urdu was gradually but virtually wiped out from the place of its birth, and with it also died the all-inclusive Muslim secular sensibility.
The saving grace may be that secularism of the state, despite being under threat from the now electorally popular and now rejected Hindutva, has managed to survive, but it has extracted a heavy toll all the same: no Iqbal, not even an Abul Kalam Azad, will henceforth sprout from the Indian soil, because the Muslim sensibility in India that groomed such stalwarts has died an unsung death.
Only the likes of Darul Uloom or the integrated mainstream citizen, for whom being Muslim is just a personal statistic, and not an entire way of life and thought, remain.
His Peculiar Existentialism
While Iqbal rejected Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s self-serving individualism, he, like them, prodded one to rethink the human condition to seek answers that would serve the individual, thence a growing number of individuals and on to the collective whole of humanity.
Only such a growing and all-inclusive human chain of thought, of consciousness, to him, could lead to true intellectual freedom that would not be subservient to a colonial or any hegemonic mindset in any of its manifestations, be it under the garb of religion, western academia or military muscle, three forces which have now appropriated all power at the expense of humanity at large.
Falsafi se hai gharz mujh ko aur na mullah se/ Yeh dil ki maut, woh aqeeda-o-nazar ka fasaad (Neither the philosopher nor the priest I contend with/ One spells death for the heart, the other runs riot with his conflict of conviction and vision), he wrote.
Religion to Iqbal is morality and social justice that it ensures, as forming the basis of a humane society, a living spirit imbued with ‘Love’ for that elusive human ideal.
Religion is certainly not a bunch of rituals or a set of archaic tribal Arab customs that should be implanted in a soil where they do not belong; any morality thus implanted will never take root let alone bring peoples and cultures together under a set of values that apply universally.
Iqbal knew this well enough. ‘And what is that one value based in the refined realm of the human experience that can deliver humanity?’ he seemed to ask himself repeatedly; until he found the answer in Love, and cried out loud and clear:
Bande-ye-azaadam, ishq ast imam-e-man/ Ishq ast imam-e-man, aql ast ghulaam-e-man (I am a free man; Love leads me on/ Love leads me on; reason is my slave).
Here was a clear bid to alter the Nietzschean recipe for putting meaning in individual life through acquisition of sheer power, power of the ruthless variety, if it be so, by replacing it with Love as a natural, positive human sentiment and value that can empower the individual and through him more individuals until the fraternity grows into one vast sea of humanity.
Powered by Love that is so intrinsic in human nature, Iqbal then spoke of the individual regaining his self-esteem (khudi), which then widens its appeal to include the collective humanity, thus leading to temporal and spiritual fulfillment.
Likewise, Iqbal sees man’s Biblical fall from Paradise not through Milton’s lament of Paradise Lost; on the contrary, he considers it man’s call to action on Earth.
The ‘fall’ from Paradise is a descent on Earth, not man’s disgrace but his rightful and earned opportunity to exercise freedom of choice and of will, and do so responsibly, by which he proves his mettle and builds his self-esteem, individually and collectively. Then, he can even confront God:
Mujh ko jiddat ki talab hai, daal tarh-e-nau koi/ kyun mujhe sagashta-e-imroz-o-farda kardiya (Innovation I seek, start a new order/ Don’t let me be caught up between yesterday and tomorrow—Faiz’s translation from the Persian).
This is the renewed human spirit in action in Iqbal, of looking God (or the powers that be) in the eye as did the classical Greek heroes, with the difference that Iqbal is not into writing tragedies, but stories of triumph of human endeavour and dignity and inspiring improvement in the human condition.
References in his poetry to Biblical and Quranic anecdotes and phraseology could be seen in their symbolic, allegorical context and not always literally.
In that Iqbal has improved tremendously on the 16-century existentialism of Mulla Sadra (in theological Muslim thought), who had argued that all and any existence precedes all and any essence of all matter and mind, thus acknowledging change as a constant running factor defining man’s interaction with the divine and the cosmos; this theory altered the course of medieval philosophical thought in Europe as well as in the Muslim world.
This Iqbal Day, here’s some more food for thought:
Yeh gumabad-e-meenai, yeh aalam-e-tanhai/ Mujh ko to daraati hai iss dasht ki pehnaai (This vast grey dome, this world of solitude/ Sacred I am of delving in its wilderness) Bhatka hua raahi tu, bhatka hua raahi mein/ Manzil hai kahan teri, aye Laala-e-sehrai? (Of course you are, traveller, of course I am / Tell, your destination, O flower of the wild) Tu shaakh se kyun phoota, mein shaakh se kyun toota/ Ik jazba-e-paidaai, ik lazzat-e-yaktaai (Why did you sprout? Why did I break loose?/ A passion to be born? A taste for being unique?)
By Murtaza Razvi (This article was first published here)
The idea of Khudi (I-amness) is central to Iqbal’s system of thought. Self or Khudi, to Iqbal, is not reason but amr (direction). He defines khudi as directive energy – energy that is directed by God.
Man is a part of the universe that is larger than the whole. As heaven is contained by the cornea in the eye so is khudi larger than the whole. Khudi is an ocean that is concentrated in a drop. All modern capitalist thinkers from Kant to Habermas hold that reason/rationality is self-interestedness. Iqbal renounces self-interested rationality. In his renunciation of self-interested rationality he does not renounce logicality.
For the strengthening of khudi Iqbal’s advice is: be hard. Coal and diamond are both made of carbon atoms. The difference is that coal is soft whereas diamond is hard. Therefore, coal is ruthlessly burnt and turned into ashes whereas diamond is highly valued and survives. Being hard does not imply callousness.
It implies protecting oneself from the forces that disintegrate and destroy khudi. Individuals and nations that do not harden their khudi at the individual and collective levels fall easy victim to power hunger of others.
With the absence of khudi, life is merely biological existence – breathing, circulation of blood, reproduction and the such. Iqbal’s perfect man is not a biological product; it is the product of moral and spiritual forces. Life is not self-indulgence and pleasure seeking. There are no pain-giving and pleasure giving acts but only khudi-strengthening and khudi-weakening acts.
It is the forces of grief and fear that attack and tend to destroy and disintegrate khudi.
One cannot protect one’s khudi from the shocks of grief and fear without surrendering oneself to the Divine Law. One needs to pass through three stages to strengthen one’s khudi and to protect it from disintegration. These stages are: complete surrender to Divine Law, self-control and vicegerency of God.
Iqbal’s three stages bear some superficial similarity with Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses: camel, lion and child. The idea of a perfect man was given by sufi saint Al-Jili long before Nietzsche conceived ‘overman’. Al-Jili’s overman passes through three stages as well. At the first stage one assimilates the names of God, at the second stage the attributes of God, and at the final stage the essence of God. Iqbal has not drawn the idea of khudifrom Nietzsche.
Iqbal holds that it is likely that Nietzsche took his idea of overman from eastern literature and degraded it by his materialism.
Iqbal’s perfect man is a spiritual and moral force whereas Nietzsche’s overman is a biological product.
“Ethically the word “khudi” means self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence, self-preservation, even self-assertion when such a thing is necessary, in the interests of life and the power to stick to the cause of truth and justice even in the face of death,” as Riffat Hassan says in her piece on Iqbal.
Iqbal holds that he drew his idea of khudi from the Holy Quran:
O ye who believe! Ye have charge of your own souls. He who erreth cannot injure you if ye are rightly guided. (Al-Ma’idah: 105). And be not ye as those who forgot Allah, therefore He caused them to forget their souls. Such are the evil-doers. (Al-Hashr: 19).
Khudi demands self-control. In other words, self-control precedes self-possession. Strengthening of khudi is not possible without restraining of animal passions and instincts. One should not seek maximisation of freedom but strengthening of I-amness.
It is perhaps here that we can distinguish between capitalist liberty and Iqbal’s spiritual liberty.
For Iqbal, liberty is not negative or positive liberty as argued by Isaiah Berlin.
Liberty or freedom is attained by discovering the laws of God in one’s self. This signifies the fusion of the will of God and that of man. A radical form of capitalist liberty is argued and supported by Deleuze, a twentieth-century postmodernist French philosopher.
From Aristotle to Darwin to Deleuze many western philosophers view man essentially as an animal.
There is an interesting similarity as well as contrast between the views of Iqbal and Deleuze on freedom of expression. Deleuze suggests that man should seek to transform himself into what he originally is: animal.
According to Deleuze, an important tool that can help man to return to his so-called originality is freedom of expression.
According to Iqbal, freedom of expression without moral restrictions is the invention of the Satan which turns man into an animal. Both agree that man is turned into an animal through unbridled freedom of expression. The difference is that Iqbal rejects this metamorphosis of man into animal whereas Deleuze idealises it.
Capitalist liberty, to Iqbal, restrains the growth, expansion and fulfillment of khudi. It does not liberate but enslaves man. He becomes slave of his animal passions.
Capitalist liberty unleashes animal passions such as greed and aggressiveness whereas Iqbalian spiritual liberty promotes the values of love, mercy and sacrifice.
By Asad Shahzad
The author is an assistant professor of Philosophy at an educational institute in Karachi
The images used in this feature were made possible from the material obtained from The Citizens Archive of Pakistan
Iqbal couldn’t have found approval in the Pakistan of today, much like Jinnah.
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
Allama Muhammad Iqbal (front row; centre) at the Gokhale Hall in Madras (since renamed Chennai) in 1929 after he had delivered one of his several famous lectures. The hall was named after Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a close friend of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and a senior member of the Indian National Congress. | Photo: The Allama Iqbal Collection.
Iqbal couldn’t have found approval in the Pakistan of today, much like Jinnah himself after he declared his preference for the Lockean state on August 11, 1947. To extend the argument, Iqbal was also opposed to the Fiqh (case law) favouring the Law of Evidence that discriminated against women and the non-Muslim citizens of the state. That he was unhappy with and scared of the traditionalist Ulema is testified by his arguments in the Lectures; there is also evidence that he inclined to a ‘liberal’ version of Islam in the new state.
Towards the end of his life he was collecting material to write on Fiqh and had been corresponding with the traditionalist Ulema to elucidate points that he presumably wanted discussed in his new work. He was not a trained scholar (Aalim) and was not accepted as such by the ulema, but he thought himself qualified to produce a work of Ijtihad(reinterpretation).
His son, the late Justice Javed Iqbal, wrote: “The Jinnah-Iqbal correspondence, discussing shariah, points to the establishment of a state based on Islam’s welfare legislation; it does not propose that in the new state any laws pertaining to cutting of the hands (for theft) and stoning to death (for fornication) would be enforced.”
According to Javed Iqbal’s biography of Allama Iqbal, Zindarood (1989), Allama Iqbal read his first thesis on Ijtihad in December 1924 at the Habibya Hall of Islamia College, Lahore. The reaction from the traditionalist Ulema was immediate: he was declared Kafir (non-believer) for the new thoughts expressed in the paper. Maulavi Abu Muhammad Didar Ali actually handed down a Fatwa (edict) of his apostasy. In a letter written to a friend, Iqbal opined that the Ulema had deserted the movement started by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and were now under the influence of the Khilafat Committee from which he (Iqbal) had resigned.
Allama Iqbal’s intent in reinterpreting Hudood becomes clear when he quotes Maulana Shibli Numani, who had written Seerat-un-Nabi, his renowned multi-volume biography of the Holy Prophet: “It is therefore a good method to pay regard to the habits of society while considering punishments so that the generations that come after the times of the Imam are not treated harshly.”
LIKE NO OTHER
ALLAMA Iqbal relaxing at the residence of his friend Nawab Zulfiqar Ali Khan who was the chairman of the Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam, an organisation that aimed at promoting Islamic values through education and intellectual activities. | Photo: The Allama Iqbal Collection.
Allama Iqbal was a prodigy. In 1885, he stood first in grade one in Scotch Mission School, Sialkot, and began to be tutored in Persian and Arabic in a mosque. He was in class nine when as a teenager he started writing his juvenile poetry in Urdu. He passed matriculation in first division, winning a medal with scholarship. In his first year at Scotch Mission College, he started versifying under the pen-name of Iqbal and was published in literary journals.
He passed his BA exam in first division and won medals in Arabic and English. Three years later, though he passed his MA Philosophy in third division, he was the only one who passed and received the gold medal. He was appointed professor of Philosophy at the Government College, Lahore, chosen by Professor Thomas Arnold – the British orientalist who wrote a book proving that Islam was spread in the subcontinent not by the sword but by humanist preaching – who became his patron.
Iqbal was additionally appointed as the Macleod Arabic Reader at Oriental College, Lahore, on a monthly salary of 72 rupees and one anna. Later, he took time off from Oriental College to teach English at the Government College. His poems had started showing influence from Spinoza, Hegel, Goethe, Ghalib, Bedil, Emerson, Longfellow and Wordsworth.
He couldn’t disagree with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan whom he regarded as the Baruch Spinoza (d.1677) of Islam, rationalising and demystifying the scriptures. His job description at Oriental College included the teaching of Economics to the students of the Bachelor of Oriental Learning in Urdu, and translating into Urdu works from English and Arabic.
PIONEER OF SEPARATION
ELEGANTLY dressed in a suit, Allama Iqbal is seen having a lighter moment. | Photo: The Allama Iqbal Collection
Lahore lionised Iqbal as the thinker-poet of the city who could spellbind in a Mushairawhile publishing erudite papers on such mystics as al-Jili whose concept of Insan al-Kamil was reborn in him with the help of Nietzsche and his ‘superman’ and ‘will to power’ but without Nietzsche’s rejection of morality – his “not goodness but strength” slogan. This was before he went to Europe (1905-08) doing his Master’s and Bar at Cambridge and his PhD with his thesis, ‘The Evolution of Metaphysics in Iran’ at the Munich University, becoming unbelievably proficient in German within three months.
The period 1908-25, back in Lahore, saw him produce some of his Urdu masterpieces while practising law at the Lahore High Court. Reacting to Hindu revivalist movements, he journeyed from his pluralist view of India to a ‘preservative’ posture, advocating separate electorates and developing the first geographical map of ‘separation’ of the Muslim community in the northeast and the southeast within the subcontinent. All-India Muslim League courted him as the leading Muslim genius and listened to his ‘separatist’ thesis at its Allahabad session in 1930.
He contended that his idea of an autonomous Muslim state was not original but had been derived from the Arya Samaj Hindu revivalist vision of Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab who first recommended ‘separating’ the Muslims. The view he put forward in his address remained pluralist which Pakistan neglected in 1949: “… [N]or should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states”.
As for Iqbal’s Nietzschean yearning for self-empowerment, Jinnah was made a practical example of it, as noted oddly by none other than Saadat Hasan Manto in one of his sketches.
Jinnah said this at the 1937 Lucknow session of the League: “It does not require political wisdom to realise that all safeguards and settlements would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed up by power. Politics means power and not relying only on cries of justice or fair-play or goodwill.”
It was this separate empowerment of Muslims in the face of such Hindu revivalist movements as Shuddhi (purification) and Sangathan (unification) that made Iqbal disagree with the Deobandi scholar Husain Ahmad Madani over the idea of India as a nation-state where Muslims and Hindus would live as one nation.
Like Lala Lajpat Rai, another Indian genius, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution, wanted Muslims to be given a separate state and wrote his book Thoughts on Pakistan (1941) which was welcomed by Jinnah who then asked everyone to read it to legitimise the League’s campaign for Pakistan.
ON THE SAME PAGE WITH JINNAH
Iqbal’s legally trained mind and his ability to write scholarly tracts quite apart from his ability to write the long poem or masnavi – abandoned by most poets of note after him – qualified him for all the three Round Table Conferences in London to present the case of the Muslims. His Allahabad address at the All-India Muslim League conference in 1930 was actually a learned survey of the nature of the modern state as imagined by such Western philosophers as Rousseau and could not have been comprehended by most Muslim Leaguers still basking in the afterglow of a doomed Khilafat Movement.
Noting that Pakistan’s non-Muslims observe the Independence Day of Pakistan three days earlier, Dawneditorialised on August 11, 2017, on how Pakistan first tried to suppress, then set aside, the August 11, 1947, message of the Quaid-i-Azam at the Constituent Assembly: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
It is not only the founder of the state, Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah, that Pakistan has set aside; it is also the philosopher of the state, Allama Mohammad Iqbal, who has been rejected. Seventy years after its foundation, the state is malfunctioning and religion is a major cause of the shifting of its writ to the non-state actors. Denigrated are human rights – of the minorities and women – on the basis of a coercive interpretation of religion. So much so, that the faith-based but unexamined constitutional provisions in Articles 62/63 have finally destabilised governance by causing conflict between state institutions.
The writer is Consulting Editor at Newsweek Pakistan.
This story is the eleventh part of a series of 16 special reports under the banner of ‘70 years of Pakistan and Dawn’. Visit the archive to read the previous reports.
When the Mughal empire disintegrated, the provincial governors took advantage of the weakening central authority, became independent. Others also adopted royal titles.
With the collapse of authority, robbers, bandits and thugs became encouraged to plunder caravan processions passing through unprotected cities, towns and villages. Amid chaos, the common people hoped that a leader would emerge, come forward and protect them from marauders wandering freely from one place to another.
After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal empire was involved in continuous wars of succession, which divided the nobility and erased the political structure.
Anarchy led to rebellions by the disgruntled nobility who wished to access high offices in order to loot and plunder state resources. The result was a decline of moral values which plunged the whole society into disarray and turmoil.
Under these circumstances, Shah Waliullah raised his voice against the course of decline and suggested measures for revival of Muslim power in the subcontinent. His main concern was to improve the political, social and economic condition of the Muslims, while disregarding other communities who also confronted the same situation and needed support and guidance to survive. Failing to produce capable rulers to control state affairs and to ably administer the political and economic system, the Mughal Empire finally lost its energy and vitality. The decline reached a point where reformation seemed impossible.
In his narrow-minded approach, Waliullah believed that he was sent by God to save and lead the Muslims of India. He claimed to have dreamt that he was appointed by the divine authority to guide the Muslims. As a self-proclaimed leader of the Muslims, his major concern was to unite the Muslim community which was in a state of chaos and disorder. In order to achieve his goals, he decided to win over the nobility and implement reforms with their help. He firmly believed that only the Muslims were capable of ruling India and that if the Hindus were desirous of power, they would have to convert to Islam.
According to Waliullah, this was what had happened with the Turks who had accepted Islam after becoming rulers. He believed that Islam was a universal religion and therefore, all other religions should be eliminated and Islam imposed on everyone as the true faith. Waliullah exhorted the followers of Judaism and Christianity to adopt Islam and any refusal was regarded as an unpardonable denial of God.
To revive Muslim power in India, Waliullah decided to take a strong step against the Marathas, Sikhs, and the Jats. However, he failed to understand that it was not possible to recruit an army which purely consisted of Muslims, since the society consisted of many religions, communities, sects and ethnicities intermingled and inseparable from each other.
He wrote letters to Najib-ud-Daulah and Ahmad Shah Abdali, advising that Muslim property should not be looted by the army. In one letter he warned Ahmad Shah Abdali to watch out for some Hindus in his service whoappeared loyal to him but were actually insincere to Abdali’s cause. In his letters, he advised that Muslim soldiers could not fight against Muslim rulers as God would check their movement and prevent any action which could be harmful to Islam.
Waliullah believed that the main reason for the decline of the Muslims was that they shared their business, social and political affairs with non-Muslims.
Shah Waliullah did not realise the fact that the Hindus served in the army, the revenue and other government departments and the Muslim rulers relied on their services for running the state administration which the Muslim community alone could not have managed. His suggestion to exclude the Hindus and their welfare antagonised the two communities.
When the Muslim nobles did not respond to his appeal, he called upon Ahmad Shah Abdali to help materialise his scheme. He urged Abdali that it was his religious duty to help and save the Muslims when the Marathas attacked them. Consequently, the Marathas were defeated in the third battle of Panipat in 1762. It failed to revive the Mughal power in the subcontinent but helped the East India Company to gain power as Shah Waliullah had overlooked the growing influence of the British in the subcontinent.
According to Shah Waliullah, the subcontinent was not the real homeland for the Muslims and that they were mere strangers. He introduced the idea among the Muslims of India that they should embrace Arab culture and language and that God would help them to get out of the subcontinent.
Sadly, the ulema of the subcontinent led the Muslim community towards separation rather then integration with other communities.
In 1858, British Crown rule was established in India, ending a century of control by the East India Company. The life and death struggle that preceded this formalisation of British control lasted nearly two years, cost £36 million, and is variously referred to as the ‘Great Rebellion’, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ or the ‘First War of Indian Independence’.
Inevitably, the consequences of this bloody rupture marked the nature of political, social and economic rule that the British established in its wake.
It is important to note that the Raj (in Hindi meaning ‘to rule’ or ‘kingdom’) never encompassed the entire land mass of the sub-continent.
Two-fifths of the sub-continent continued to be independently governed by over 560 large and small principalities, some of whose rulers had fought the British during the ‘Great Rebellion’, but with whom the Raj now entered into treaties of mutual cooperation.
The ‘Great Rebellion’ helped create a racial chasm between ordinary Indians and Britons.
Indeed the conservative elites of princely India and big landholders were to prove increasingly useful allies, who would lend critical monetary and military support during the two World Wars.
Hyderabad for example was the size of England and Wales combined, and its ruler, the Nizam, was the richest man in the world.
They would also serve as political bulwarks in the nationalist storms that gathered momentum from the late 19th century and broke with insistent ferocity over the first half of the 20th century.
But the ‘Great Rebellion’ did more to create a racial chasm between ordinary Indians and Britons. This was a social segregation which would endure until the end of the Raj, graphically captured in EM Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.
While the British criticised the divisions of the Hindu caste system, they themselves lived a life ruled by precedence and class, deeply divided within itself. Rudyard Kipling reflected this position in his novels. His books also exposed the gulf between the ‘white’ community and the ‘Anglo-Indians’, whose mixed race caused them to be considered racially ‘impure’.
While there was a consensus that Indian policy was above party politics, in practice it became embroiled in the vicissitudes of Westminster.
Successive viceroys in India and secretaries of state in London were appointed on a party basis, having little or no direct experience of Indian conditions and they strove to serve two masters. Edwin Montagu was the first serving secretary of state to visit India on a fact-finding mission in 1917-1918.
1,200 civil servants could not rule 300 to 350 million Indians without indigenous ‘collaborators’.
Broadly speaking, the Government of India combined a policy of co-operation and conciliation of different strata of Indian society with a policy of coercion and force.
The empire was nothing if not an engine of economic gain. Pragmatism dictated that to govern efficiently and remuneratively, 1,200 Indian civil servants could not rule 300 to 350 million Indians without the assistance of indigenous ‘collaborators’.
However, in true British tradition, they also chose to elaborate sophisticated and intellectual arguments to justify and explain their rule.
On the one hand, Whigs and Liberals expounded sentiments most iconically expressed by TB Macaulay in 1833: ‘that… by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. … Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.’
On the other hand, James Fitzjames Stephen, writing in the 1880s, contended that empire had to be absolute because ‘its great and characteristic task is that of imposing on Indian ways of life and modes of thought which the population regards without sympathy, though they are essential to its personal well-being and to the credit of its rulers.’
What was less ambiguous was that it was the economic interests of Britain that were paramount, though as the 20th century progressed, the government in India was successful in imposing safeguards. For instance, tariff walls were raised to protect the Indian cotton industry against cheap British imports.
There were two incontrovertible economic benefits provided by India. It was a captive market for British goods and services, and served defence needs by maintaining a large standing army at no cost to the British taxpayer.
However, the economic balance sheet of the empire remains a controversial topic and the debate has revolved around whether the British developed or retarded the Indian economy.
Controversy remains over whether Britain developed or retarded India’s economy.
Among the benefits bequeathed by the British connection were the large scale capital investments in infrastructure, in railways, canals and irrigation works, shipping and mining; the commercialisation of agriculture with the development of a cash nexus; the establishment of an education system in English and of law and order creating suitable conditions for the growth of industry and enterprise; and the integration of India into the world economy.
Conversely, the British are criticised for leaving Indians poorer and more prone to devastating famines; exhorting high taxation in cash from an inpecunious people; destabilising cropping patterns by forced commercial cropping; draining Indian revenues to pay for an expensive bureaucracy (including in London) and an army beyond India’s own defence needs; servicing a huge sterling debt, not ensuring that the returns from capital investment were reinvested to develop the Indian economy rather than reimbursed to London; and retaining the levers of economic power in British hands.
The foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 as an all India, secular political party, is widely regarded as a key turning point in formalising opposition to the Raj.
It developed from its elite intellectual middle-class confines, and a moderate, loyalist agenda, to become by the inter-war years, a mass organisation.
It was an organisation which, despite the tremendous diversity of the sub-continent, was remarkable in achieving broad consensus over the decades.
Also split within Congress were those who advocated violence and those who stressed non-violence.
Yet it was not a homogenous organisation and was often dominated by factionalism and opposing political strategies. This was exemplified by its splintering in 1907 into the so-called ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ wings, which reunited 10 years later.
Another example were the ‘pro-changers’ (who believed working the constitutional structures to weaken it from within) and ‘no-changers’ (who wanted to distance themselves from the Raj) during the 1920s.
There was also a split within Congress between those who believed that violence was a justifiable weapon in the fight against imperial oppression (whose most iconic figure was Subhas Chandra Bose, who went on to form the Indian National Army), and those who stressed non-violence.
The towering figure in this latter group was Mahatma Gandhi, who introduced a seismic new idiom of opposition in the shape of non-violent non-cooperation or ‘satyagraha’ (meaning ‘truth’ or ‘soul’ force’).
Gandhi oversaw three major nationwide movements which achieved varying degrees of success in 1920-1922, 1930-1934 and in 1942. These mobilised the masses on the one hand, while provoking the authorities into draconian repression. Much to Gandhi’s distress, self-restraint among supporters often gave way to violence.
The British Raj unravelled quickly in the 1940s, perhaps surprising after the empire in the east had so recently survived its greatest challenge in the shape of Japanese expansionism.
The reasons for independence were multifaceted and the result of both long and short term factors.
The pressure from the rising tide of nationalism made running the empire politically and economically very challenging and increasingly not cost effective. This pressure was embodied as much in the activities of large pan-national organisations like the Congress as in pressure from below – from the ‘subalterns’ through the acts of peasant and tribal resistance and revolt, trade union strikes and individual acts of subversion and violence.
With US foreign policy pressurising the end of western imperialism, it seemed only a matter of time before India gained its freedom.
There were further symptoms of the disengagement from empire. European capital investment declined in the inter-war years and India went from a debtor country in World War One to a creditor in World War Two. Applications to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) declined dramatically from the end of the Great War.
Britain’s strategy of a gradual devolution of power, its representation to Indians through successive constitutional acts and a deliberate ‘Indianisation’ of the administration, gathered a momentum of its own. As a result, India moved inexorably towards self-government.
The actual timing of independence owed a great deal to World War Two and the demands it put on the British government and people.
The Labour party had a tradition of supporting Indian claims for self-rule, and was elected to power in 1945 after a debilitating war which had reduced Britain to her knees.
Furthermore, with US foreign policy pressurising the end of western subjugation and imperialism, it seemed only a matter of time before India gained its freedom.
The growth of Muslim separatism from the late 19th century and the rise of communal violence from the 1920s to the virulent outbreaks of 1946-1947, were major contributory factors in the timing and shape of independence.
However, it was only from the late 1930s that it became inevitable that independence could only be achieved if accompanied by a partition. This partition would take place along the subcontinent’s north-western and north-eastern boundaries, creating two sovereign nations of India and Pakistan.
The Muslim League failed to achieve the confidence of the majority of Muslims in the elections of 1937.
Muslims, as a religious community, comprised only 20% of the population and represented great diversity in economic, social and political terms.
From the late 19th century, some of its political elites in northern India felt increasingly threatened by British devolution of power, which by the logic of numbers would mean the dominance of the majority Hindu community.
Seeking power and a political voice in the imperial structure, they organised themselves into a party to represent their interests, founding the Muslim League in 1906.
They achieved something of a coup by persuading the British that they needed to safeguard the interests of the minorities, a demand that fed into British strategies of divide and rule. The inclusion of separate electorates along communal lines in the 1909 Act, subsequently enlarged in every successive constitutional act, enshrined a form of constitutional separatism.
While there is no denying that Islam and Hinduism were and are very different faiths, Muslims and Hindus continued to co-exist peaceably. There were, however, occasional violent outbursts which were driven more often than not by economic inequities.
Even politically, the Congress and the League cooperated successfully during the Khilafat and Non Cooperation movements in 1920-1922. And Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the eventual father of the Pakistani nation) was a Congress member till 1920.
Although Congress strove to stress its secular credentials with prominent Muslim members – for example, Maulana Azad served as its president through World War Two – it is criticised for failing to sufficiently recognise the importance of a conciliatory position towards the League in the inter-war years, and for its triumphant response to Congress’s 1937 election victory.
The Muslim League advocated the idea of Pakistan in its annual session in 1930, yet the idea did not achieve any political reality at the time. Furthermore, the League failed to achieve the confidence of the majority of the Muslim population in the elections of 1937.
The lack of confidence in the Muslim League among the Muslim population was to be dramatically reversed in the 1946 elections.
The intervening years saw the rise of Jinnah and the League to political prominence through the successful exploitation of the wartime insecurities of the British, and the political vacuum created when the Congress ministries (which had unanimously come to power in 1937) resigned en masseto protest at the government’s unilateral decision to enter India into the war without consultation.
The creation of Pakistan as a land for Muslims nevertheless left a sizeable number of Muslims in an independent India.
The rejuvenated League skilfully exploited the communal card. At its Lahore session in 1940, Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan into its rallying cry. The ensuing communal violence, especially after Jinnah declared ‘Direct Action Day’ in August 1946, put pressure on the British government and Congress to accede to his demands for a separate homeland for Muslims.
The arrival of Lord Louis Mountbatten as India’s last viceroy in March 1947, brought with it an agenda to transfer power as quickly and efficiently as possible. The resulting negotiations saw the deadline for British withdrawal brought forward from June 1948 to August 1947.
Contemporaries and subsequent historians have criticised this haste as a major contributory factor in the chaos that accompanied partition. Mass migration occurred across the new boundaries as well as an estimated loss of a million lives in the communal bloodbaths involving Hindus, Muslims and also Sikhs in the Punjab.
The final irony must remain that the creation of Pakistan as a land for Muslims nevertheless left a sizeable number of Muslims in an independent India making it the largest minority in a non-Muslim state.
Inventing Boundaries: gender, politics and the Partition of India edited by Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Pakistan as a peasant utopia: the communalization of class politics in East Bengal, 1920-1947 by Taj ul-Islam Hashmi (Boulder, Colorado; Oxford: Westview, 1992)
The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan by Ayesha Jalal (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
The Partitions of Memory: the afterlife of the division of India edited by S. Kaul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)
Borders & boundaries: women in India’s partition by Menon, Ritu & Bhasin, Kamla (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998)
Remembering Partition: violence, nationalism and history in India by Gyanendra Pandey (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
‘Reviews: The high politics of India’s Partition: the revisionist perspective’ by Asim Roy (Modern Asian Studies, 24, 2 (1990), pp. 385-415)
Chandrika Kaul is lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include British press and political culture (1850-1950), the British imperial experience in South Asia, the Indian press and communications in world history. She is author of the first detailed examination of British press coverage of Indian affairs, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India (2003). Kaul has also edited a collection of essays, Media and the British Empire (2006). Her forthcoming research project is a new history of India titled The Indian experience of the Raj.
khalidriazblog 