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A Separate Muslim State in the Subcontinent
By Sir Mohammad Iqbal
What, then, is the problem and its implications ? Is religion a private affair ? Would you like to see Islam, as a moral and political idea, meeting the same fate in the world of Islam
and Christianity as already met in Europe ? Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical and to reject it as a polity in
favor of national polities in which religious attitude is not permitted to play any part ? This question becomes of special importance in India where the Muslims happen to be in minority. The proposition that religion is a private individual experience is not surprising on the lips of a European. In Europe the conception of Christianity as a monastic order, renouncing the world of matter and fixing its gaze entirely on the world of spirit, led by a logical process of thought to the view embodied in this proposition. The nature of the prophet’s religious experience, as disclosed in the
Quran however, is wholly different. It is not mere experience in the sense of a purely biological event, happening inside the experient and necessitating to reactions on its social order. Its immediate outcome is the fundamentals of a polity with implicit legal concepts whose civic significance cannot be belittled merely because their origin is revelational. The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim. This is a matter which at the present moment directly concerns the Muslims of India.
...It is, however, painful to observe that our attempts to discover such a principle of internal harmony have so far failed. Why have they failed ? Perhaps we suspect each other’s intentions, and inwardly aim at dominating each other. Perhaps in the higher interests of mutual co-operation, we cannot afford to part with the monopolies which circumstances have placed in our hands, and conceal our egoism under the cloak of a nationalism, outwardly simulating a large-hearted patriotism, but inwardly as narrow-minded as a caste or a tribe. Perhaps we are unwilling to
recognize that each group has a right to free development according to its own cultural traditions. But whatever may be the causes of our failure, I still feel hopeful. Events seem to be tending in the direction of some sort of internal harmony. And as far as I have been able to read the Muslim mind, I have no hesitation in declaring that if the principle that the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian homelands is
recognized as the basis of a permanent communal settlement, he will be ready to stake his all for the freedom of India. The principle that each group is entitled to free development on its own lines is not inspired by any feeling of narrow communalism. There are communalisms and communalisms. A community which is inspired by feeling of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities. Nay, it is my duty, according to the teaching of the Quran, even to defend their places of worship if need be. Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and
behavior ; and which has formed me what I am by giving me its religions, its literature, its thought, its culture, and thereby recreating its whole past, as a living operate factor, in my present consciousness.
Communalism, in its higher aspect, then, is indispensable to the formation of a harmonious whole in a country like India. The units of Indian society are not territorial as European countries. India is a continent of human groups belonging to different races, speaking different languages and professing different religions. Their
behavior is not at all determined by a common race-consciousness. Even the Hindus do not form a homogenous group. The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without
recognizing the fact of communal group. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified. The resolution of the All-Parties Muslim Conference at Delhi is, to my mind, wholly inspired by this noble ideal of a harmonious whole which, instead of stifling the respective individualities of its component wholes, affords them chances of fully working out the possibilities that may be latent in them. And I have not doubt that this house will emphatically endorse the Muslim demands embodied in it. I would like to see the Punjab, North-West frontier,
Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, and the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to me to in the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.
The idea need not alarm the Hindus or the British. India is the greatest Muslim country in the World. The life of Islam as a cultural force in this country very largely depends on its
centralization in a specified territory. This centralization of the most living portion of the Muslims of India whose military and police service has, notwithstanding unfair treatment from the British, made the British rule possible in this country, will eventually solve the problem of India as well as of Asia. It will intensify their sense of responsibility and deepen their patriotic feeling. Thus, possessing full opportunity of development within the
body-politic of India, the North-West Indian Muslims will prove the best defenders of India against a foreign invasion, be that invasion one of ideas or of bayonets...
...the Muslim demand...is actuated by a genuine desire for free development which is practically impossible under the type of unitary government contemplated by the nationalist Hindu politicians with a view to secure permanent communal dominance in the whole of India.
Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states. I have already indicated to you the meaning of the word "religion", as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a church. It is a state, conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as living factor in that mechanism...I, therefore, demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power ; for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to
mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contract with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.
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