All said and done, Iqbal's core contribution to Muslim regeneration lay in giving his people an ideal, something to live and die for. In tandem, it also lay in fostering in them the moral fibre and the determination to realise that ideal. And that fostering was inspired by his soul-lifting verses that worked almost like magic. Indeed, by the last decade of his hugely productive life, he had donned the role of an ideologue, besides being the national poet.
Towards the intellectual and political emancipation of Muslims, Iqbal's contribution was fourfold. Through the powerful medium of poetry, he had drawn their attention to the depths of degradation to which they had fallen; he had diagnosed their ailments and the causes of their decline; he had warned them of the dire consequences if they failed to mend their ways in time. Above all, Iqbal had also outlined a destiny for Indian Muslims at a most critical juncture in their recent history.
In so doing, he proved himself to be a man of vision. An outstanding intellectual, who had the ability to analyse their situation in the light of their past history and current developments and give serious thought to both their short-term problems and long-term destiny. And he envisioned for them a destiny, which, while being congruent with the Indo-Muslim ideological legacy, provided an answer to their current problems, and predicaments.
Poet-Philosopher Iqbal spelled out his vision and delineated the contours of Muslim India's destiny in his famous presidential address to the annual session of All India Muslim League in December, 1930. By far, the most important of his various political pronouncements concerning Muslim destiny in India, his address was as significant as Jinnah's presidential address to the League's Lahore Session on March 22, 1940, which provided the background and the justification for the adoption of the Lahore Resolution (1940).
In his 1930 address, if only because of his wide-ranging scholarship, his deep insight into Muslim history (both in the sub-continent and elsewhere) and his close reading and easy familiarity with Muslim ethos, Iqbal was able to attempt in a profound way an intellectual justification of Muslim nationhood, of a separate Muslim nationalism. His panacea was: the "centralisation of the most living portion of the Muslims of India" in a specified territory - "a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State" in a truly federal Indian state.
Iqbal justified Muslim India's claim to nationhood on the basis of the "moral consciousness" engendered by the Muslims' deep commitment to Islam, its ethics and ethos, its wide-ranging institutions. He argued, "Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity - by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal - has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best. In India, as elsewhere, the structure of Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal. What I mean to say is that Muslim society, with its remarkable homogeneity and inner unity, has grown to be what it is, under the pressure of the laws and institutions associated with the culture of Islam."
Clearly, Iqbal was "not despaired of Islam as a living force for freeing the outlook of man from its geographical limitations". For one thing, he felt that "religion is a power of the utmost importance in the lives of individuals as well as States". Above all, he believed that "Islam is itself Destiny and will not suffer a destiny" (emphasis added).
Despite all this, he could not possibly ignore what was happening to Islam and the Muslims in India and elsewhere. "True statesmanship", he told his Allahabad audience, "cannot ignore facts, however unpleasant they may be. The only practical course is not to assume the existence of a state of things which does not exist, but to recognise facts as they are and to exploit them to our greatest advantage."
Hence Iqbal took due cognisance of the fact that in attempting to get rid of foreign domination, to withstand Western designs as well as to rehabilitate themselves, the Muslim countries had unwittingly gone in wholesale for nationalism and nationalist movements, that the national idea was radicalising the outlook of Muslims everywhere, and that the growth of racial consciousness might as well mean "the growth of standards different from and even opposed to the standards of Islam".
Iqbal also recognised that the Muslim countries could organise themselves on national - that is, on territorial - lines, and yet be the chief decision-makers and masters in their respective countries for the simple reason that they were practically wholly Muslim in population. But not so the Indian Muslims, who were differently situated. Although comprising some 70 million and constituting the largest block of Muslims anywhere in the world, they were still a minority within the subcontinent, comprising but one-fourth of India's teeming millions. Hence their adoption of undiluted nationalism would irretrievably undermine their distinct place in Indian's body politic, their religio-cultural entity, depriving them of the opportunities of "free development", unthwarted by the interference of the majoritarian, dominant community.
Since the peoples of India had refused to pay the price required for the formation of the kind of moral consciousness which, according to Renan, constitutes the essence of national feeling and nationhood, as evidenced by the failure of Akbar, Kabir and Nanak to seize the imagination of the Indian masses no less than the nobility and upper classes, India at the moment could not be considered a "nation" in the Western sense. And since, on the other hand, Islam had provided the Indian Muslims with a moral consciousness of their own, Iqbal argued, they were the only Indian people who could aptly be described as a "nation" in the modern sense of the word.
Having thus made out a cogent case for Muslim nationhood, Iqbal went on to suggest a viable solution to India's communal problem: "a re-distribution of British India" and territorial readjustment, which would yield a stable and solvent consolidated Muslim province in north-western India. It is in this context that Iqbal suggested the amalgamation of the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Balochistan into a single state and the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State. He also suggested the exclusion of the Ambala Division and perhaps some of the non-Muslim demographically dominated districts, with a view to making it less extensive in area and more Muslim in population.
Indeed, unassailable were Iqbal's reasons in favour of this solution. Since Indian nationalism was pro-Hindu and predominantly Hindu-oriented, the Muslims should contrive and construct a separate "nationalism" of their own. Since the whole of India could not be won for Islam, if only because of the overwhelming Hindu majority, "the life of Islam as a cultural force" in India must be saved and salvaged by centralising it "in a specified territory". And this must be achieved by setting up "a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State", comprising "the most living portion of the Muslims of India".
Equally significant: Iqbal demanded "the creation of autonomous states" on the basis of "the unity of language, race, history, religion and identity of economic interests", and that "in the best interests of both India and Islam".
Of crucial importance is Iqbal's elucidation of this last point: "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 mobilise its laws, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times."
Thus, while the bases or attributes of nationalism such as language, race, history, identity of economic interests and viable territorial frontiers (and territorial unity) were sought to be incorporated among the base of (what later came to be known as) the "Pakistan" demand, religion was retained as the leavening factor and the consequences were to be spelled out in essentially Islamic terms. Thus were laid the intellectual foundations of Muslim nationalism and Muslim nationhood in India.