Mohammed Iqbal’s Vision of Nationalism and Muslim Identity

Few thinkers in modern South Asian history are claimed by two nations at once. In India, Mohammed Iqbal is remembered as the poet who gave us Saare Jahan Se Achha. In Pakistan, the same man is honoured as the spiritual father of the nation. This double legacy is no accident. It reflects a genuine intellectual journey, where a poet who once celebrated a shared homeland gradually came to argue that religion, not territory, was the truest basis of collective identity. Understanding Iqbal means understanding how and why that shift happened.

Who was Mohammed Iqbal? 🔗

Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), widely known as Allama Iqbal, was a poet, philosopher, lawyer and political thinker whose ideas reshaped Muslim political consciousness in the early twentieth century. Born in Sialkot in undivided Punjab, he was descended from a Kashmiri Brahmin family that had converted to Islam a few generations earlier. He studied in Lahore before moving to Europe, where he absorbed Western philosophy at Cambridge and Munich.

This exposure to both Islamic and Western traditions defined his entire body of work. He wrote landmark poetry in Urdu and Persian, and a major work of prose philosophy. His ideas were not abstract musings. They were responses to a specific crisis: the political and intellectual decline of Muslims in a colonised, rapidly modernising world.

From Indian patriot to pan-Islamist 🔗

Iqbal’s most famous transformation was political. In his early years, he was firmly within the fold of territorial Indian patriotism.

The two anthems 🔗

In 1904, Iqbal wrote Tarana-e-Hind, the poem popularly known as Saare Jahan Se Achha. It quickly became an anthem of opposition to British rule, celebrating Hindustan as the homeland and declaring that religion does not teach mutual enmity. In this early phase, his poetry praised Indian icons such as Lord Ram, whom he called the Imam of Hind, and Guru Nanak.

By 1910, his worldview had changed sharply. He wrote Tarana-e-Milli, set to the same metre, but with a striking new message. Where the earlier poem said the homeland was Hindustan, the new one declared that for Muslims the homeland was the whole world. The shift from “we are of Hind” to “we are Muslims and our homeland is the entire world” captured a fundamental change in how Iqbal defined belonging.

Why the shift happened 🔗

Several factors drove this evolution. His time in Europe was decisive. Observing the continent up close, Iqbal grew deeply critical of Western-style nationalism, which he believed was divorced from the ethical realm and had given rise to imperialism and racism. He came to view the nation-state as a Western political construct that demanded loyalty to territory while ignoring the cultural and spiritual values of people.

The political climate at home reinforced this. The fall of the Turkish Khilafat after the First World War shocked Muslims across the subcontinent, and it was during this period of crisis that Iqbal developed his concept of selfhood to overcome the sense of powerlessness among the Muslim elite. He increasingly feared that in a Hindu-majority India, Muslim heritage and political influence would be crowded out.

Islam as a non-territorial basis for nationality 🔗

The heart of Iqbal’s political philosophy was a radical idea: nationhood need not rest on land, language or ethnicity. For him, Islam itself provided the foundation for collective identity.

The concept of millat 🔗

Central to this view was the idea of millat, a community bound together by shared belief rather than by geography. Iqbal placed allegiance to the trans-national Muslim community above allegiance to one’s country. If he had a conception of nation at all, it was of an Islamic millat that was trans-territorial and based on belief in one God.

This was a direct challenge to the dominant European understanding of nationalism. Conventional nationalism united people through common language, common history and a common territory. Iqbal argued that Muslims constituted a nation not because they were concentrated in one region, but because of their shared religious and cultural identity. The universal brotherhood of Islam, in his view, transcended race and geography.

A critique aimed at the West 🔗

Iqbal saw the conception of nationalism as purely an outcome of a Western political worldview that demanded affiliation to territory without concern for cultural values. He believed this model could not be applied to India, because Hindus and Muslims did not share the common language, culture and history that nationhood, in the Western sense, required. For Iqbal, religion was not one factor among many; it was the organising principle of social life.

Khudi: the philosophy behind the politics 🔗

Iqbal’s politics cannot be separated from his philosophy of the self. His concept of Khudi, often translated as selfhood or ego, was the engine of his entire worldview.

For Iqbal, Khudi meant self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence and self-assertion in the service of truth and justice. He wanted to give Indian Muslims a renewed sense of “I am”, an individuality he felt they had lost. Crucially, he broke with the Sufi tradition of self-annihilation. Instead of the self dissolving like a drop in the ocean, Iqbal argued that the human ego should develop its individuality until it could sustain a direct relationship with God.

Reconstruction and ijtihad 🔗

Iqbal laid out his philosophy systematically in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a series of lectures published in 1930. He argued that the Muslim world’s decline came from intellectual stagnation, particularly the abandonment of ijtihad, the principle of independent reasoning. He famously called ijtihad the principle of movement in the structure of Islam. Iqbal proposed that the right to interpret Islamic law should no longer rest with individual jurists alone but with representative legislative assemblies expressing the collective conscience of the community. This idea of “spiritual democracy” tried to blend Islamic principles with modern democratic forms.

The Allahabad Address of 1930 🔗

Iqbal’s most consequential political moment came on 29 December 1930, when he delivered his presidential address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad.

In this speech, he outlined a vision of self-government for the Muslim-majority provinces of north-western India. He stated plainly that he would like to see Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state, whether within or outside the British Empire. He argued that such a state would offer Muslims genuine opportunity for free development, which he felt was impossible under a unitary government dominated by the Hindu majority.

This address is widely regarded as the first articulation of what became the two-nation theory, the idea that Muslims were a distinct nation deserving political autonomy. It is on the strength of this speech that Iqbal earned the title of “dreamer of Pakistan”. His later confidential letters to Mohammed Ali Jinnah between 1936 and 1937 are credited with helping transform Jinnah’s thinking towards the idea of a separate state.

An important nuance 🔗

It is worth being precise about what Iqbal actually demanded. In the Allahabad Address, he did not call for a fully independent country separate from India in the way Pakistan eventually emerged. Scholars note that he sought a territorial division within India organised according to Islamic principles, and he even suggested that securing such a unit would strengthen, not weaken, Muslim loyalty to India. The leap from this autonomous bloc to a sovereign nation-state was made by others after his death in 1938.

The contradictions in his thought 🔗

Iqbal’s legacy is not free of tension, and acknowledging this is essential to understanding him honestly.

The most obvious contradiction is that the same poet who condemned territorial nationalism as a Western disease ended up advocating a territorial Muslim homeland. If nationhood was meant to be spiritual and trans-territorial through the idea of millat, why demand a specific bloc of provinces defined by borders? Critics argue that his pan-Islamic universalism sat uneasily beside his concrete political proposal.

There is a further irony. Iqbal sharply rejected Western modernity, yet his philosophy drew heavily on European thought, including his reworking of Nietzsche’s ideas into an Islamic framework. His relationship with the West was therefore one of both rejection and absorption. These tensions do not diminish his importance; they reflect the genuine difficulty of forging a modern identity under colonial conditions, where every available political vocabulary carried a foreign origin.

Why Iqbal still matters 🔗

Iqbal’s influence reaches far beyond the creation of Pakistan, where he is revered as the national poet and philosopher. His questions remain alive today. Can a community’s identity rest on faith rather than territory? How should religion and politics relate in a modern state? His concept of ijtihad continues to inform debates about reform in Islamic law, and his idea of selfhood still speaks to anyone thinking about confidence, agency and renewal.

For students of political thought, Iqbal is valuable precisely because he resists easy categorisation. He was a patriot who became a separatist, a critic of the West who used Western tools, a mystic who championed action. His thought captures, perhaps better than any other figure of his era, the intellectual turbulence of a civilisation trying to find its footing in the modern world.

What do you think? Was Iqbal’s vision of a faith-based nationality a genuine alternative to territorial nationalism, or was the contradiction between his universalism and his demand for a Muslim homeland impossible to resolve? And in an age of nation-states, do his questions about identity beyond borders still hold any relevance?

References

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2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sare_Jahan_se_Accha
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8. https://kashmirreader.com/2025/11/09/iqbals-concept-of-ijtihad-a-comparative-perspective/
9. https://www.allamaiqbal.com/webcont/393/AllahabadAddress.html
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahabad_Address
11. https://www.academia.edu/82831815/FROM_INDIAN_NATIONALISM_TO_PAN_ISLAMISM_THE_POETIC_JOURNEY_OF_ALLAMA_IQBAL