بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
نحمده ونصلى على رسوله الكريم
Continuing
in our series on Iqbal’s book Islam and Ahmadism, we now come to a fresh
issue which is Iqbal’s conception of Islam as civilization: “Thus in the year
1799 the political decay of Islam in Asia reached its climax. But just
as out of the humiliation of Germany on the day of Jena arose the modern German
nation, it may be said with equal truth that out of the political
humiliation of Islam in the year 1799 arose modern Islam” (p. 27).
Pay
close attention, dear reader, to the wording which Iqbal is using. He does not
speak about the political decay of the Muslims or the Ummah, but
rather the “political decay of Islam” and the “political humiliation of Islam”.
The point to be noted is that Iqbal conceives of Islam as a civilization,
whereas we Muslims of (the real) Ahlus Sunnati wal Jama’ah conceive of Islam as
a Religion. If the Muslims are practicing Islam properly, and that is evident
by the existence of an abundance of saintly and pious, righteous personalities
among them, and the common Muslims too focus on the study of the Holy Qur’an
and strict adherence to the laws of the Shari’ah, etc., then it can be said
that Islam is in a good condition. If the opposite is true, it means that Islam
is fading away and the Muslims are in a pitiable and bad condition.
However,
we see from the words of Iqbal that he judges the condition of Islam as being
contingent to civilizational power. If the Muslims are masters of vast and
powerful empires, and they have an abundance of wealth and wordly power, then
according to Iqbal Islam itself is in a good condition, otherwise not.
So
the reader should keep this important difference between the orthodox
conception of Islam as religion and the Iqbalian conception of Islam as
civilization or dominion in mind as we examine what Iqbal has to say next:
“the
function of Ahmadism in the history of Muslim religious thought is to furnish a
revelational basis for India’s present political subjugation” (p. 31).
Whatever
the merits of Iqbal’s claim that Ahmadism is a movement that aims to reconcile
the Muslims to their subjugation to the British on a “revelational basis”, it
must be pointed out that even if this is true, Iqbal has failed to demonstrate
how the Muslims being in a state of political subjugation to a foreign power
is, in it of itself, the raison d’etre for Islam being in a bad condition. While
it is certainly true that if the Muslims become decadent and negligent in their
observance of the teachings of Islam, the inevitable result will be all sorts
of calamities, political, social and economic, for the Muslims, it is quite
something else to posit that the condition of Islam is dependent upon a notion
of political ascendancy. In other words, teaching the Muslims to resign
themselves to their political subjugation to a foreign, non-Muslim power is not
heresy insofar as Religion is concerned. One can legitimately argue whether
such a teaching is beneficial or not from a political perspective, but from the
religious perspective, such a teaching is not a deviation from Islam, let alone
such a major deviation (in Iqbal’s view) as to constitute a major challenge and
threat to Islam.
Iqbal’s
folly, as we have suggested, is based on his wrong conception of Islam as being
a civilization or dominion, and thus his purely political approach to the
Religion. It is not surprising that the so called “Islamic” political thinkers
like Mawdudi and Dr. Israr Ahmad were so influenced by the wrong ideas of
Iqbal. They too view the real danger of Ahmadiyyah as not theological but
political. This is why Iqbal claims that the Ulama who opposed Ahmadiyyah at
its inception did so because of theological differences, but failed to
appreciate it as the source of a dangerous political threat to the solidarity
of the Ummah: “The Indian Ulama, therefore, took it to be a purely theological movement
and came out with theological weapons to deal with it. I believe, however,
that this was not the proper method of dealing with the movement” (pp. 25 –
26).
We
see that for Iqbal, heresy or deviation from Islam is not theological in
nature. Indeed, as we have shown previously in this series, Iqbal claims that
Islamic theology is synthetic, meaning, it has evolved over time to combine and
mesh together ideas of distinct sects and schools of theology which were initially
at variance and conflict with each other. For Iqbal, the real heresy or
deviation from Islam is political dissent from what he considers to be the
national interests of the Muslim community.
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