Iqbal’s Critique of Nationalism and Its Implications

Muhammad Iqbal stands among the most influential thinkers of modern South Asia, yet his ideas on nationalism are often misunderstood. While the world around him was busy celebrating the nation as the highest form of political belonging, Iqbal saw something darker beneath its surface. He believed that nationalism, far from uniting humanity, actually splintered it into hostile camps. His critique was not a casual objection but a systematic philosophical position rooted in his understanding of religion, community, and the moral purpose of human life. Understanding this critique helps explain why one of the subcontinent’s greatest poet-philosophers stood apart from the dominant political currents of his time.

What Iqbal meant by nationalism 🔗

To grasp Iqbal’s objection, we first need to understand what he was objecting to. For Iqbal, nationalism was not simply love for one’s homeland. He drew a clear distinction between affection for the land where one is born and the political ideology of nationalism that emerged in modern Europe. The latter, in his view, was something far more demanding and far more dangerous.

Iqbal understood nationalism as the organising of people into political communities on the basis of language, territory, or race. The political philosophy of Iqbal went through several phases, and in his earliest period he himself held a belief in nationhood based on language, culture, race, and geography. His famous early poem Tarana-e-Hindi (“Saare Jahan Se Achha”) reflected this pan-Indian sentiment. But this conviction did not survive his years in Europe.

The European experience 🔗

Iqbal spent the years from 1905 to 1908 studying in England and Germany, completing his doctorate at the University of Munich. This period transformed his thinking. He observed nationalism not in theory but in practice, and what he saw alarmed him. According to one scholarly account, his son later recalled that the biggest revolution during his stay in Europe was his distancing from nationalism. Iqbal watched how European nationalism, while building powerful nation-states, also fuelled militarism, colonialism, and eventually devastating wars.

This first-hand encounter convinced him that territorial nationalism carried within it the seeds of aggression and conflict. He came to believe that Europe’s atmosphere of competing nations was leading humanity toward annihilation rather than progress. The very ideology being celebrated as a path to freedom appeared to him as a mirage.

Nationalism as a divisive force 🔗

The heart of Iqbal’s critique was that nationalism divides humanity. By organising people according to narrow criteria such as language, race, or geography, nationalism creates exclusive identities. These identities, Iqbal argued, separate people into rival groups that view each other with suspicion and hostility.

The scholar Zafar Ishaq Ansari summarised Iqbal’s observation that nationalism had destroyed the idea of universal brotherhood, created barriers between people and between nations, and sown the seeds of international discord. For Iqbal, this was the fundamental flaw. A system that defines belonging by where you were born or what language you speak must, by its very logic, exclude those who fall outside those boundaries.

Iqbal saw this division as more than a practical inconvenience. He viewed it as a moral failure. When loyalty to the nation becomes supreme, the broader bonds that connect all human beings begin to dissolve. People start to prioritise their national interests over their shared humanity, producing a worldview that is narrow and self-centred.

Nationalism as a colonial import 🔗

One of the most striking elements of Iqbal’s argument is his claim that nationalism was an alien concept imposed on the East by European colonialism. He did not see nationalism as a natural development of Eastern societies but as a foreign idea borrowed uncritically from the West.

Iqbal argued that European powers used nationalism as a tool of divide and rule. By encouraging colonised peoples to define themselves through exclusive identities, the colonisers fostered enmity among different groups and prevented them from uniting against their common oppressor. In this reading, nationalism actually served the interests of imperial domination rather than liberation. Some scholars note that Iqbal viewed nationalism as an instrument used by colonialism to dismember the Muslim world.

This is a subtle and important point. Many anti-colonial movements embraced nationalism as a weapon against empire. Iqbal turned this assumption on its head, suggesting that the weapon itself had been handed to the colonised by the colonisers. He was particularly disturbed by what he saw as the blind imitation of Western territorial nationalism by the Muslim world, warning that around its neck hung the beads of aggression, imperialism, and atheism.

The Islamic community as a superior model 🔗

Iqbal did not merely criticise nationalism. He offered an alternative. In place of the nation organised by race or territory, he proposed the Islamic community, the Ummah, as a superior basis for human unity.

The concept that unites Muslims of diverse social, linguistic, ethnic, and territorial backgrounds into one community, in Iqbal’s understanding, is the shared sense of belonging to the Ummah. His rejection of nationalism was grounded in his concept of tawhid, the unity of God. Because all believers are equal before one God, distinctions of class, race, and geography lose their ultimate significance.

Why faith offered a better foundation 🔗

Iqbal believed that a community based on faith and ethical principles could achieve what nationalism never could: genuine universality. His community was universal precisely because it was a bond between human beings that transcended temporal boundaries. A society organised on the lines of righteousness, recognising the equality of all human beings and rejecting distinctions of class and race, offered the best conditions for individuals to develop their fullest potential and attain spiritual growth.

This is why Iqbal famously expressed the sentiment that for Muslims the whole world, rather than any single piece of territory, is the homeland. The Ummah was not confined to any geographical space. It was conceived as a moral and spiritual order capable of including people regardless of where they lived or what language they spoke.

It is worth being careful here. Iqbal’s universalism was real, but it was an Islamic universalism. He believed Islam itself could function as a kind of “League of Nations” that recognised artificial boundaries and racial distinctions only for convenience, never for restricting the social horizon of its members. His vision of unity flowed through the framework of faith rather than through a neutral, secular humanism.

Religion in public life and the danger of atheism 🔗

Perhaps the most philosophically dense part of Iqbal’s critique concerns the place of religion in society. Modern nationalism, especially in its secular form, tends to relegate religion to the private sphere. Faith becomes a matter of individual conscience, separated from the public business of governing and lawmaking. Iqbal found this deeply troubling.

For Iqbal, Islam could not be reduced to private opinion. As he put it, politics have their roots in the spiritual life of man, and Islam is not a matter of private belief but a society or civic order. He argued that if religion is separated from politics, what remains is the risk of dictatorship and moral emptiness. The debate between Iqbal and Husain Ahmad Madani captured this tension sharply. Iqbal contended that Islam as a moral force cannot be confined to the private sphere of individuals, and that doing so would eventually lead to atheism, leaving citizens of modern nation-states bound together only by their shared irreligiousness.

The nation as a new idol 🔗

Iqbal feared that the secular nation-state would itself become an object of worship. When loyalty is owed supremely to the nation rather than to God, the nation effectively takes the place of the divine. He was aware that the nation-state emerging from secular nationalism would clash with Islamic principles and become an “idol” to be obeyed and worshipped by the people. For a thinker whose entire worldview rested on tawhid, the unity and sole sovereignty of God, this was close to the gravest possible error.

This is why Iqbal saw the privatisation of religion not as neutral progress but as a slide toward a society without spiritual or moral foundations. He drew on philosophers such as Hegel, who emphasised the spiritual character of nations, to argue that only religion and faith could provide secure foundations for a genuine social order.

Iqbal’s political vision 🔗

Iqbal’s critique was not only theoretical. It had concrete political consequences. In his view, Islam was not merely a religion but a complete way of life that should guide both personal and public affairs. He envisioned a political framework in which Islamic principles governed all aspects of life, ensuring justice, equality, and moral integrity.

This vision found its clearest political expression in his presidential address at the Allahabad session of the All-India Muslim League in December 1930. There Iqbal argued that Islam was the major formative factor in the life of Indian Muslims, furnishing the emotions and loyalties that transformed scattered individuals into a people with a moral consciousness of their own. He proposed that Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Balochistan be amalgamated into a single state.

It is important not to reduce the full range of Iqbal’s philosophical and civilisational concerns to a simple demand for a separate country. Scholars have variously described him as an Islamist, a reformer, and even a third-world nationalist, which shows how difficult he is to place in any single ideological box. In the Allahabad address itself, his proposal can be read as a call for a territorial unit within India organised according to Islamic principles, rather than a fully formed demand for partition. For Iqbal, such an arrangement was desirable not out of hatred for other communities but because he believed an Islamic polity could allow the fullest development of the human being and move humanity toward universal brotherhood.

Why this critique still matters 🔗

Iqbal’s ideas were shaped by the specific circumstances of colonial India, but the questions he raised remain relevant. His critique invites us to think carefully about how we define our collective identities. Should belonging rest on accidents of birth such as language and territory, or on shared values and ethical commitments? This is a live question in a world still organised around nation-states and still troubled by national rivalries.

His insistence on the role of religion and ethics in public life also speaks to ongoing debates about secularism. Iqbal’s position challenges the assumption that pushing faith entirely into the private sphere is automatically a sign of progress. At the same time, his vision raises difficult questions of its own. A political order guided by one religious tradition must grapple seriously with how it treats those who do not share that faith, and how it protects individual rights and the diversity of belief within a single society.

Iqbal himself was wrestling with the deepest tensions of modernity: the relationship between faith and politics, between community and individual, between universal ideals and particular loyalties. His critique of nationalism is best understood not as a finished answer but as a powerful provocation that continues to test how we think about belonging.

What do you think? Is it possible to build a genuinely universal human community, or will people always organise themselves around narrower identities such as language, territory, and faith? And was Iqbal right that separating religion entirely from public life weakens the moral foundations of society, or does that separation actually protect both faith and freedom?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosophy_of_Muhammad_Iqbal
2. https://www.muslimsocieties.org/Vol11_1/Nationalism%20in%20the%20writings%20of%20Iqbal.pdf
3. http://www.scielo.br/j/his/a/pCLmLLGcCRSsv7bw66gzNHd/?lang=en
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328174697_NATIONALISM_IN_PERSPECTIVE_ALLAMA_IQBAL'S_CRITIQUE_OF_WESTERN_NATIONALISM
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madani%E2%80%93Iqbal_debate
6. https://www.academia.edu/33019546/IQBAL_AND_NATIONALISM
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahabad_Address