Iqbal’s Vision of Community: Beyond Nationalism

Communities form around many things. Some are bound by language, others by caste, profession, or the borders of a nation-state. But what if the strongest bond between people was none of these? Mohammed Iqbal, the poet-philosopher of the early twentieth century, argued that the most meaningful community is one rooted in shared faith and ethical principles rather than territory or ethnicity. His concept of the millat challenged the dominant idea of nationalism that was sweeping the subcontinent during his lifetime, and it continues to provoke debate about how human beings should organise themselves. This post explores Iqbal’s vision of community, why he placed it above nationalism, and how he connected it to the development of the individual self.

The idea of millat: community beyond borders 🔗

For Iqbal, the religious community held the highest significance. He used the terms ummah and millat to describe a community that transcended national, territorial, and immediate identities. This was not a community defined by where people lived or what language they spoke. It was defined by a shared commitment to faith in one God and to the principles of Islam.

This idea becomes clearer when we contrast two words Iqbal carefully distinguished: qawm and millat. The qawm is tied to natural distinctions like ethnicity, geography, or tribe. The millat, by contrast, is a community characterised by its rootedness in divine law. Iqbal grounded this distinction in the way these terms appear in the Quran. A person could belong to a qawm by accident of birth, but membership in the millat was a matter of conviction and ethical orientation.

What made this concept so radical for its time was its universality. Iqbal’s millat was a community of believers that crossed all barriers of caste, colour, race, nationality, and territory. It was global in nature, anchored in a religion that gave it a universal character rather than a parochial one. This is why his vision is often described as moving “beyond nationalism.” He was not simply offering an alternative nation; he was questioning whether the nation was the right unit of belonging at all.

Why faith and not language or caste? 🔗

Iqbal acknowledged that communities can form around many factors. People naturally group themselves by profession, region, or social background. But he argued that these bonds are limited and divisive. A community built on language excludes those who speak differently. One built on race or caste hardens divisions that pit human beings against each other. In Iqbal’s view, only a community founded on a shared moral and spiritual purpose could unite people across these differences.

He saw Islam as offering exactly this kind of foundation. Faith in one God, or tawhid, was the binding principle. Because this bond was based on belief rather than blood or soil, it could in principle include people of any background. Iqbal rejected race-based nationalism precisely because he believed a faith-based community could unite people of different races, languages, and backgrounds under a common ethical umbrella.

The self and the community: khudi and bekhudi 🔗

To understand why Iqbal cared so deeply about community, we have to understand his philosophy of the self. At the heart of his thought is the concept of khudi, usually translated as “self” or “ego,” though its meaning runs much deeper than the everyday sense of either word. For Iqbal, khudi refers to the inner essence of an individual, the core of one’s being that connects the person to the divine.

Iqbal first developed this idea in his Persian work Asrar-e-Khudi (The Secrets of the Self), published in 1915, which focused on the individual and the importance of self-reliance. He defined khudi in ethical terms as self-respect, self-confidence, and self-assertion in the service of truth and justice. Unlike certain strands of Sufism that sought to dissolve the self into the divine, Iqbal wanted to strengthen the self by absorbing divine attributes into the human personality.

From individual ego to collective ego 🔗

Here is where community enters the picture. Iqbal did not stop at the individual. In a later Persian work, Rumuz-e-Bekhudi (The Mysteries of Selflessness), published in 1918, he explored how the individual self relates to the development of the ideal community. The term bekhudi refers to a kind of self-transcendence, where the individual ego harmonises with the larger social ego of the community.

The relationship between the two is the key to his thought. Since Iqbal saw the spiritual development of the individual ego as the most important goal for a person, he argued that a community organised on spiritual lines provided the most appropriate conditions for the development of that ego. The individual needs the community, and the community is strengthened by individuals who have developed strong selves. One part of Iqbal’s thought emphasised the development of the individual ego as a path to spiritual fulfilment, while the other stressed the force that harmonises the individual with a community organised on ethical principles.

This balance is what makes Iqbal’s position distinctive. Many Western philosophies, he believed, swing between two extremes: radical individualism on one side and collectivism that swallows the individual on the other. Iqbal sought to harmonise the two, so that the perfected self is not an isolated ego but a creative personality in tune with both God and humanity. The community does not crush the individual; it gives the individual the moral environment in which to flourish.

Rejecting the divide between religion and politics 🔗

One of the most striking aspects of Iqbal’s thought is his refusal to accept the Western separation of private religion from public politics. In the modern liberal tradition, religion is often treated as a personal matter that should be kept out of governance. Iqbal disagreed sharply with this view.

He belonged to a group of intellectuals who argued that Islam contained not only the fundamentals of personal belief and conduct but also the principles of governance and polity. For Iqbal, personal and social development were intrinsically linked. A faith that shaped a person’s inner life could not be walled off from the way that person engaged with society and politics. Ethics, spirituality, and public life formed a single continuous whole.

Iqbal as a modern thinker 🔗

It would be a mistake to read Iqbal as a backward-looking traditionalist. He was, in important ways, a modernist. In his major prose work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a series of lectures published in the early 1930s, he called for a re-examination of the intellectual foundations of Islamic philosophy in light of modern science and knowledge. He argued that the Quran recognised the empirical realm of experience to which scientific knowledge belongs, so a scientific attitude was entirely legitimate within Islam.

Iqbal even engaged seriously with Western political concepts. Although he wanted a polity informed by spiritual principles, he supported representative institutions and believed modern legislatures could serve that purpose well. He drew on thinkers like Nietzsche and Bergson in developing his philosophy of the ego, while remaining rooted in the Islamic tradition. His project, in other words, was to renew Islamic thought for the modern age, a process Islamic scholars call tajdid, rather than to retreat from modernity.

Universal brotherhood as the goal 🔗

The ultimate aim of Iqbal’s vision was not narrow at all. While the millat was anchored in Islam, its orientation was universal. Iqbal believed the community of believers existed to promote what scholars describe as freedom, brotherhood, and the equality of humanity. The point of organising a community on ethical lines was to create the conditions for human dignity everywhere.

This universalism also served a deeply human purpose. Modern society, Iqbal observed, tended to reduce the individual to fragments, isolating people and stripping them of agency. A supra-territorial community of believers offered a way to counter these forces and reclaim individual freedom and agency. Belonging to something larger than the nation gave the individual a stable identity in a fragmenting world.

It is worth noting that Iqbal’s ideas evolved over time. After he entered active politics in the 1920s, his thinking increasingly reflected the political realities of the subcontinent, and in his 1930 Allahabad Address he argued that Muslims constituted a distinct community deserving political recognition. Yet even in this more practical phase, the foundation of his argument remained the same: a community defined by shared faith and culture rather than by territory alone.

Why Iqbal’s vision still matters 🔗

Iqbal’s concept of community speaks directly to questions we still wrestle with. In a world organised into competing nation-states, he asked whether territory should be the basis of our deepest loyalties. He insisted that ethics could not be separated from public life, and that the growth of the individual and the health of the community were two sides of the same process.

His vision was admittedly idealistic. Critics have long pointed out that the perfect community and the perfected self he described remain aspirations rather than realities. But the questions he raised, about belonging, identity, and the relationship between the self and society, remain as urgent as ever. Whether or not one accepts his answers, Iqbal forces us to think carefully about what truly binds people together.

What do you think? Can a community founded on shared values rather than shared territory really hold together in a world organised around nation-states? And do you agree with Iqbal that personal growth and social belonging cannot be separated, or is there value in keeping private belief and public life apart?

References

1. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/89399/1/Unit-11.pdf
2. https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/muhammad-iqbal-nationalism-pakistan
3. https://traversingtradition.com/2025/01/20/understanding-the-self-through-muhammad-iqbals-philosophical-and-political-thought/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosophy_of_Muhammad_Iqbal
5. https://tpmap.org/submission/index.php/tpm/article/download/3642/2709/7845
6. https://www.sup.org/books/religious-studies/reconstruction-religious-thought-islam