Pan-Islamism and National Identity During the Colonial Period: Mohammad Iqbal

When the British ruled the subcontinent, a poet-philosopher from Sialkot reshaped how millions of Muslims understood who they were and where they belonged. Sir Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938) was not just a writer of stirring Urdu and Persian verse. He was a political thinker whose ideas about selfhood, community, and statehood travelled from the page into the heart of one of the most consequential political movements of the twentieth century. His vision rejected the territorial nationalism that defined the freedom struggle and instead placed faith at the centre of identity. Understanding Iqbal means understanding how religion, philosophy, and politics fused during the colonial period to produce an entirely new way of imagining belonging.

The colonial backdrop that shaped Iqbal’s thought 🔗

Iqbal’s politics cannot be separated from the world events he witnessed. The early twentieth century was a period of crisis for Muslims across the globe. Italy conquered Libya in 1912, and after the First World War the Ottoman Empire was dismantled while Britain and Russia occupied parts of Iran. For many Islamic intellectuals, this looked like the destruction of the political influence of Islam as a whole. Against this background, the idea of Muslims uniting across borders became deeply attractive.

His own intellectual journey mirrored these shifts. Iqbal spent time studying in Europe between 1905 and 1908, and scholars argue that this period marked a decisive move from Indian nationalism towards revivalism and Pan-Islamism. The young poet who once wrote patriotic verses celebrating a shared Indian homeland gradually replaced the nation with the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims, as the true object of loyalty.

Khudi: the philosophy of selfhood 🔗

At the foundation of Iqbal’s entire system sits a single Urdu-Persian word: Khudi, meaning selfhood, ego, or the “I.” This was not ego in the everyday negative sense of arrogance. For Iqbal, Khudi was the living, dynamic core of human existence, the centre of will and energy from which all action flows. He argued that the status of every object is fixed according to the extent to which it develops its individuality and gains mastery over its environment.

Strengthening the self, not dissolving it 🔗

Iqbal’s idea of Khudi was a deliberate challenge to a certain strand of Sufi mysticism. Some mystical traditions taught that the highest spiritual goal was the annihilation of the self, the dissolving of the individual into the Divine. Iqbal flipped this on its head. He proposed strengthening the self by absorbing divine attributes into the human personality, shifting emphasis from the divine to the human “I.” Knowing oneself, for Iqbal, was itself a route to perceiving God.

This philosophy had a clear diagnosis behind it. Iqbal believed that centuries of passive mysticism had drained the Muslim community of its vitality and its capacity for action. By teaching people to treat the material world as an illusion and self-negation as the highest virtue, this attitude had produced stagnation. Khudi was his prescription. A person who realises their selfhood, he held, could change the face of a nation. He developed these ideas most famously in his Persian work Asrar-i-Khudi (The Secrets of the Self, 1915).

From the individual to the collective 🔗

Crucially, Khudi was never only about the lone individual. Iqbal insisted that the development of the self has a collective dimension that cannot be ignored. The individual ego must come into harmony with the collective ego of the community, and this requires sacrifice and benevolence rather than constant conflict between competing selves. This bridge between personal selfhood and collective identity is what connects his philosophy directly to his politics.

Millat: the community of faith 🔗

If Khudi describes the individual, Millat describes the community. For Iqbal, the millat or ummah was the highest form of human association, transcending national, territorial, and ethnic identities. He grounded this unity in tauheed, the oneness of God. Faith in monotheism, he argued, creates cohesion within the individual self while simultaneously providing a principle of unity for the community.

An IGNOU study of his thought captures the essence well. For Iqbal, the religious community transcended national, territorial, and immediate identities, and Islam offered the value of human brotherhood irrespective of class, caste, colour, and racial distinctions. He saw in this an equitable and harmonious society, one where the individual’s quest for God could unfold within a framework built on Islamic principles of brotherhood and equality.

Social justice as a religious duty 🔗

This is where Iqbal’s revivalism meets his demand for social reform. His vision of the millat was not a backward-looking call to restore some frozen past. It was a society organised around justice, equality, and fraternity. The annual pilgrimage of Hajj, for example, struck him as a powerful symbol of social solidarity, an international gathering where distinctions of rank and wealth fall away. Iqbal combined theological revival with a sharp insistence that a just social order was an obligation of faith, not an optional extra.

The rejection of territorial nationalism 🔗

Iqbal’s most distinctive political position was his opposition to territorial nationalism, the very idea on which the mainstream Indian freedom movement was built. The Congress-led struggle imagined a single composite Indian nation, defined by shared geography and history, in which Hindus, Muslims, and others would be equal citizens. Iqbal rejected this premise.

He argued that true nationalism lay in belonging to the global Islamic community rather than to any single territory or nation. Tying identity to land, language, and ethnicity seemed to him a divisive Western import that fragmented humanity into competing groups. Faith, not soil, should be the basis of political belonging. In his presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad, he described India as “Asia in miniature,” a place where a unitary government was inconceivable and where religious community rather than territory was the natural basis for identification.

A universal vision with a global purpose 🔗

Iqbal’s Pan-Islamism was genuinely global in ambition. He envisaged that if Muslims could remake Islam for modern times, they could offer a model for the East and for the world. He believed that a polity created by Muslims in India could serve as a rallying point for Muslims throughout the world and a first step towards a global brotherhood. The proposed Muslim state was therefore not an end in itself but a means towards a wider spiritual and political renewal.

The Allahabad Address and the idea of a separate state 🔗

All these threads came together in one historic moment. On 29 December 1930, Iqbal delivered his presidential address at the annual session of the All-India Muslim League in Allahabad. In this speech he gave geographic shape to his political vision. He outlined a vision of independent states for the great Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern India, becoming the first politician to articulate what would become known as the two-nation theory: that Muslims are a distinct nation deserving of political independence.

He named the regions specifically. Iqbal proposed that Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Balochistan be combined into a single consolidated Muslim state. His reasoning rested on the conviction that Islam was the major formative factor in the life of Indian Muslims and that the community possessed a coherent, distinct identity that warranted political recognition.

Opposing Hindu political ascendancy 🔗

Iqbal’s position was sharpened by his reading of the political situation. He worried that in a single democratic India governed by simple majority rule, Muslims would be permanently outnumbered and their cultural and religious values overridden. His later thought on relations with non-Muslims took on an increasingly adversarial tone, and he came to see autonomy or separation as the only secure path for the community. The fear was not merely political subordination but the erosion of an entire way of life.

The ideological groundwork for Pakistan 🔗

Iqbal did not live to see Partition; he died in 1938, nearly a decade before independence. Yet his influence on the Pakistan Movement was profound. His vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British India is widely regarded as having animated the impulse for the Pakistan Movement. He is remembered there as the spiritual father of the nation.

It is worth being precise about his role, however. Iqbal supplied the ideological and philosophical foundation, the vocabulary of millat, distinct nationhood, and Muslim selfhood. But it was Mohammad Ali Jinnah who made Pakistan a territorial reality. Iqbal was a towering figure in the Muslim modernist movement of late colonial India, and his investment in Pan-Islamic identity and politics gave the later movement its intellectual scaffolding. The poet imagined the idea; the politician built the state.

A contested legacy in India 🔗

Iqbal remains a figure who attracts both reverence and criticism within India. He authored “Sare Jahan Se Achha,” still sung as a patriotic anthem, yet he also became the intellectual architect of the two-nation theory. To admirers of his poetry he is among the greatest literary voices of the subcontinent. To critics of Partition he is the thinker who gave separation its philosophical justification. This tension is part of what makes studying him so rewarding: his work refuses easy categorisation, sitting at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, theology, and hard political calculation.

Why Iqbal still matters 🔗

Iqbal’s thought endures because it grapples with questions that remain alive today. How should identity be defined, by territory or by shared belief? Can a community modernise while staying faithful to its religious roots? What is the right balance between individual self-realisation and collective belonging? His answers were specific to the colonial crisis of his age, but the questions are universal. By combining a demanding philosophy of the self with a sweeping vision of community, Iqbal produced a body of work that continues to shape debates about religion, nationhood, and politics far beyond the subcontinent.

What do you think? Is identity better grounded in shared faith and values, as Iqbal argued, or in the territorial and civic bonds of nationalism that he rejected? And can a thinker who inspired Partition also be claimed as part of India’s own intellectual heritage?

References

1. https://brill.com/view/journals/jrat/5/1/article-p201_11.xml?language=en
2. https://www.academia.edu/110187980/NATIONALISM_REVIVALISM_AND_PAN_ISLAMISM_SHIFTS_IN_THE_POLITICAL_AND_CULTURAL_IMAGININGS_OF_ALLAMA_IQBALS_POETRY
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khudi
4. https://www.academia.edu/37543253/The_Concept_of_Khudi_The_Self_in_Iqbals_The_Secrets_of_the_Self
5. https://kashmirobserver.net/2022/11/09/social-solidarity-among-muslims-and-allama-iqbal/
6. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/89399/1/Unit-11.pdf
7. https://www.scribd.com/document/500151733/Iqbal-s-Concept-of-Millat
8. https://allamaiqbal.com/webcont/16/Two%20nation%20Theory.htm
9. https://mukundsathe.com/2015/12/29/this-day-in-history-29-dec-1930-sir-muhammad-iqbals-presidential-address-in-allahabad-introduces-the-two-nation-theory/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahabad_Address
11. https://pwonlyias.com/upsc-notes/allahabad-address-1930/
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal
13. https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2308471.pdf