Daily Times

The government’s decision not to give a day off on Allama Iqbal’s birthday has been the subject of much criticism. Some quarters have even responded to it by calling it a full frontal assault on Pakistan’s ideology.

It would be interesting to investigate when Iqbal Day first became a national holiday but more importantly it is time to consider dispassionately whether Allama Iqbal should actually be considered a founding father of Pakistan. This is not to belittle Allama Iqbal who was an intellectual giant by any account. That Allama Iqbal was a great poet and philosopher who had his role in rejuvenating the Muslims of the subcontinent through his powerful poetic message is undeniable. But is it justifiable to elevate him in the state’s official pantheon to the level of the founding father at par with Mohammad Ali Jinnah? Historical record suggests that his contribution to what is now called the Pakistan Movement was at best marginal and that too by an extension of logic.

The claim that Iqbal was one of the founding fathers of Pakistan rests on two erroneous claims. The first claim is that he was the first to express the idea of a separate Muslim nation state in the subcontinent. In his 1930 address to the Muslim League gathering in Allahabad, Allama Iqbal did propound the idea of a Muslim political entity, within or without the British Empire, in the northwest of the subcontinent. He was not the first to do so nor was his idea necessarily that of a separate or independent Muslim federation. K K Aziz, one of Pakistan’s finest historians, counts as many as 88 different schemes for the separation of the northwest of the subcontinent by Muslims, Hindus and the British that predate Allama Iqbal’s 1930 address.

When Chaudhry Rahmat Ali’s Pakistan scheme was making the rounds, Iqbal explicitly distanced himself from the idea, pointing out in his letter to The Times on October 12, 1931 that he was “all for a redistribution of India into provinces with effective majorities of one community or another on lines advocated both by the Nehru and the Simon Reports. Indeed, my suggestion regarding Muslim provinces merely carries forward this idea. A series of contented and well-organised Muslim provinces on the northwest frontier of India would be the bulwark of India and of the British Empire against the hungry generations of the Asiatic highlands.” It must also be remembered that at the time Iqbal and Jinnah worked at cross-purposes to each other. Jinnah’s concern had been the interests of Muslims in the Hindu majority provinces. As a committed Indian nationalist, Jinnah also favoured an all India settlement between Hindus and Muslims and hence was, at the time, not swayed by appeals by Muslims of the northwest. Indeed, that was the gulf between the Muslims of Punjab, led by Sir Fazli Hussain and Sir Muhammad Shafi, and the Muslims of UP and Bombay, led in part by Jinnah. Iqbal fell decidedly in the former camp though as an urban Muslim he was never supportive of emerging the rural Muslim landlord alliance, which was to take shape as the Unionist Party. The overarching concern of the Punjabi Muslim camp, especially of Fazli Hussain’s supporters, was to ensure a statutory majority for Muslims in the Punjab province. It was this idea that was at the back of Iqbal’s famous Allahabad address.

The second erroneous claim is that Iqbal convinced Jinnah to come back from his so-called self-imposed exile from the UK. This is completely contrary to the facts. There is no correspondence between Iqbal and Jinnah from this time. A number of people attempted to convince Jinnah in 1932-1933 to give up his legal practice in London and return to Indian politics, including the Ahmedi prayer leader Ibrahim Dard, a young landlord from UP called Liaquat Ali Khan and a famous Hindu journalist called Durga Das but Iqbal was definitely not one of them. There may indeed have been several factors behind Jinnah’s return. His biographers, Hector Bolitho and Stanley Wolpert, seem to suggest that he was moved after reading the then best-selling biography of Kemal Ataturk called Grey Wolf. Some Indian authors have suggested that it was an arrogant remark from Nehru in a private party that “Jinnah is finished”, which forced Jinnah to pack his bags. Jinnah also failed to secure the candidature of a major political party for the British House of Commons around this time. Whatever may have been the reason, it is clear that Iqbal had no role to play in Jinnah’s return.

Much is made of Iqbal’s famous letters to Jinnah but those letters date long after Jinnah’s return to India. Iqbal’s letters to Jinnah speak more to the organisation of the Muslim League in Punjab than anything remotely related to a millennial goal for the Muslims of India in the form of Pakistan. Jinnah seems to have religiously avoided following any of the prescriptions laid out by the poet philosopher. The Sikandar-Jinnah pact especially went against the grain of Iqbal’s advice. The letters themselves were discovered by Muhammad Sharif Toosi in the 1940s and were published as part of the Muslim League’s propaganda as an afterthought. Jinnah’s replies to these letters are conspicuously missing and remain a mystery to this day.

Allama Iqbal was adopted by the Pakistani state as its national poet and philosopher sometime after partition. I suspect that his posthumous elevation to the status of a founding father is a counterfoil to Jinnah who does not lend himself easily to the straitjacket narrative of an ideological Pakistan. The state also jettisoned Iqbal’s more important ideas on ijtihad and reconstruction of religious thought in Islam but held on to his ideas of the Islamic superman or Mard-e-Momin. In doing so an increasingly ideological Pakistan constructed a new Iqbal that fit its narrative on the role of religion in statecraft. It is this Iqbal that is commemorated on Iqbal Day and not the poet philosopher whose work still inspires millions around the world.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com