Iqbal — a man of vision

“WHERE there is no vision, the people perish” — so goes an old adage. It has stood the test of time because it quintessentially epitomizes the prime rationale behind the rise and fall of nations all through history. And it is Muslim India’s good fortune that it found a man of vision in Iqbal at a most critical juncture in their 1200-year old encounter with Hinduism in India.

As seer who could see beyond time and space, an outstanding intellectual, who had the ability to analyse the Indian Muslim situation in the light of its past history and current predicament and give serious thought to their short- and long-term problems, he envisioned for Muslim India a destiny. What was most remarkable about it was that while being congruent with the ideological legacy of Indian Islam, it provided a viable and constructive answer to Muslim India’s current problems and predilections.

That vision was spelled out and the contours of Muslim India’s destiny delineated in Iqbal’s presidential address to the annual session of All India Muslim League at Allahabad in December 1930. The most important of his many political pronouncements concerning the Muslim destiny in India, this address was as significant as Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah’s presidential address to the League Lahore session in March 1940 which provided the background of, and the justification for, the adoption of the Lahore Resolution (1940), later known as the Pakistan Resolution.

While Jinnah argued the case for separate Muslim nationhood at the micro level, Iqbal did it at the macro level; while Jinnah provided the political justification of that nationhood in terms of an achievable goal, Iqbal presented its intellectual justification on the ideological plane. Devoid of such justification, an issue cannot be intellectualized and it fails to find a viable solution.

In any case, it was Muslim India’s good fortune that the protagonist of the ideal and the one who brought to fruition thought on the same lines, so that the Allahabad address and the Lahore address together present a composite and well-integrated concept of Muslim nationhood.

In his 1930 address, Iqbal, if only because of his wide-ranging scholarship, his long insight into Muslim history (both in the subcontinent and elsewhere), his close familiarity with the Muslim ethos, was able to envision and enunciate the intellectual justification of Muslim nationhood, of Muslim nationalism, and for a separate Muslim national and cultural home in the subcontinent.

Iqbal justified Muslim India’s claim to nationhood on the basis of the “moral consciousness” created among the Muslims by their allegiance to Islam, its ethics and ethos and its 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.”

It is important to remember that Iqbal believed in Islam “as a living force for freeing the outlook of man from its geographical limitations.” He also believed that “religion is a power of the utmost importance in the life of individuals as well as states.” Above all, he believed that “Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer a destiny.”

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 recognize facts as they are, and to exploit them to our greatest advantage.”

Hence Iqbal took cognizance of the fact that in an attempt to get rid of foreign domination, for successfully withstanding western designs as well as for rehabilitating themselves, the Muslim countries had gone in for nationalism and nationalist movements, that the national idea was racializing the outlook of Muslims everywhere, and that the growth of racial consciousness might mean “the growth of standards different and even opposed to the standards of Islam.”

Since the people 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 capture the imagination of the Indian masses, India at the moment could not be considered a “nation” in the western sense of the terms.

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 term. Having thus made out a cogent case for Muslim nationhood, Iqbal went on to suggest a viable solution to India’s communal problem: “a redistribution of British India”, and territorial readjustment, which would ensure stable Muslim provinces in the North-Western India.

It is in this context that Iqbal suggested the amalgamation of Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Balochistan into a single state and the formation of an integrated North-West Indian Muslim state. He also suggested the exclusion of the Ambala Division and perhaps some of the districts where non-Muslims predominated, with a view to making it less diverse and more unitary in population.

Iqbal’s reasons in favour of this solution were unassailable. Since Indian nationalism was pro-Hindu and predominantly Hindu-oriented, the Muslims should 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 by centralizing it “in a specified territory”. This must be achieved by setting up “a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state”, comprising “the most living portion of the Muslims of India.”

It is also significant that 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.”

Iqbal’s elucidation of this last point is important: “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 laws, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.”

Two years earlier, in the course of his famous Lectures, Iqbal had enunciated two basic principles. First, he called on every Muslim nation to “sink into her deeper self, temporarily focus her vision on herself alone, until all are strong and powerful to form a living family of republics.” Second, he warned his audience that Islam “recognizes artificial boundaries and racial distinctions for facility of reference only, and not for restricting the social horizon of its members.”

The destiny that Iqbal envisaged for Indian Muslims in 1930 represented a political expression in the peculiar Indo-Muslim context of these twin principles. For while proposing a national or territorial solution to the Indian Muslim problem, Iqbal — unlike leaders of other Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iran and Egypt — was against restricting the social horizon” of the Indian Muslims. Thus, he laid the groundwork for delineating the demand for Pakistan, which the Muslims of the subcontinent finally adopted as their main political objective, in essentially Islamic terms, signifying a renewed interest in international Islam.

Open up to Pakistan

IF ever there was a case for immediate trade liberalization, American barriers to Pakistani textile exports are it. As a direct consequence of the political uncertainty caused by the American bombing of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s textile industry is losing orders from American companies, with the result that an estimated 10,000 Pakistani textile workers have lost their jobs.

By abolishing tariffs on Pakistani textile imports, the United States could offset the shock and perhaps dampen the popular anti-Americanism that threatens Pakistan’s commitment to the coalition against terrorism. The European Union has already announced duty-free access to its markets. Yet the administration and Congress have not so far delivered. The American textile lobby, representing the special interests of a small industry, is being allowed to compromise the national interest.

Pakistan sells just under $2 billion of textiles to the United States annually, a sum that accounts for fully a fifth of the country’s merchandise exports. On top of that, it sells textiles to other countries that sew them into clothes for the American market, so that Pakistan’s exposure to the United States is enormous. But since Sept. 11, American buyers have had cold feet about sourcing from Pakistan. Usually they would be placing orders for next spring’s season now, but the flow of business is said to be down 40 per cent.

Even if American trade policy were flawless, there would be a case for making special concessions to Pakistan now. But American trade policy is far from flawless. The United States imposes an average tariff on Pakistani textiles of 15 per cent, and all such taxes on desperately poor country producers are shameful. —The Washington Post

Case of self-destructing superpower: WORLD VIEW

RAPIDLY expanding American influence in the Central Asian republics to the north of Afghanistan underlines the degree to which the world has changed - not since the tragedy of September 11, but in the 10 years that have followed the demise of the Soviet Union. US military bases on the periphery of the USSR would, of course, have been unthinkable.

It is equally improbable that Tajikistan would have faced the level of deprivation it is currently confronted with had Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded in his effort to retain the Union in one form or another. And it is at least conceivable that the continued existence of a rival, ideologically divergent superpower would have significantly reduced the likelihood of the United States attracting the unadulterated wrath of the likes of Osama bin Laden.

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union may therefore not be restricted to its former citizens and others who drew sustenance from the perceived successes of what they believed to be a socialist state. Faced with an unfathomable foe, many US intelligence operatives may well be yearning for the relative certainties of the cold war.

However, just as the predictability of the KGB is a poor reason for wishing the USSR had never disappeared, the decade of disillusionment that has followed its disintegration offers an insufficient basis for mounting a defence of the Soviet past. It is tempting, of course, to contrast the volatility and impoverishment of the post-Soviet period with the stability of the pre-perestroika era. Freedom of speech may have been severely circumscribed, but more or less everyone had access to jobs, health care, education and other basic necessities. Disparities of wealth were by no means unheard of, but were kept under control: paupers were almost as hard to come across as millionaires. Hunger was not unknown, but nor was it endemic. And the umbrella of a Soviet identity put a damper on conflicts between nationalities.

In the event, it is not entirely surprising that in an opinion poll conducted earlier this year in Russia, 85 per cent of respondents said they regretted the dissolution of the USSR. And, asked to name the outstanding Russian politician of the 20th century, the majority of them plumped for Leonid Brezhnev. It’s worth recalling that on the domestic front Brezhnev presided over the least exciting period in Soviet history; his regime could be held accountable for the two decades of stagnation that both necessitated and undermined perestroika.

At the same time, there was a perceptible rise in living standards during the 1960s and ‘70s, there was no war (until the Soviet Union blundered into Afghanistan), and although Brezhnev drew heavily upon Stalinism in many respects, he eschewed the mass exterminations that made Josef Stalin one the 20th century’s bloodiest tyrants: under Brezhnev, the proverbial midnight knock was more likely to be followed by loss of liberty than by loss of life.

There can nonetheless be little doubt that Brezhnev’s leadership was distinguished primarily by its mediocrity, and in designating him as “outstanding” the poll respondents have unwittingly shown up the caution, conformism and conservatism of the Soviet mindset, in which there was little room for critical faculties. Small wonder, then, that Mr Gorbachev was being reviled in his homeland long before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. He was perceived to be tinkering with a system that was ostensibly functioning quite well. As someone who had risen through the ranks of the all-powerful Communist Party, Mr Gorbachev knew better. But perhaps the profoundest tragedy of the Soviet paradigm is that the subjects of the experiment had only a hazy idea of what it was all about.

They were spoon-fed the tenets of Marxism-Leninism on which their society was ostensibly based, but the vast majority of them lacked the capacity to judge whether Karl Marx or even Vladimir Lenin would have found much to identify with in that society. This cannot be attributed to a flaw in the national psyche, notwithstanding the tendencies towards authoritarianism in pre-revolutionary Russian history. The party deliberately chose to shut out those in whose name it had made the revolution from the decision-making process. The fate of the experiment was probably sealed when an organization intended to serve as the vanguard of the proletariat was transformed into the upholder and enforcer of a new religion. The ideology it professed was drained of all dynamism in the process of being converted into an immutable creed.

The stifling of debate about the party led inexorably to the stifling of debate within the party — and many of the rules established by Josef Stalin survived until the end. Ironically, even Mr Gorbachev relied on the prerogatives traditionally associated with the party general secretary to ram through policies that most other members of the Politburo were at best lukewarm about. Unfortunately, his revolution from above came too late to breathe new life into the Soviet dream. Besides, Mr Gorbachev was considerably more adept at identifying symptoms of the malaise that afflicted his nation than at proposing effective remedies. Many of his half-measures were unpopular because the certainties of the past, mundane though they may have been, were being swept away without effective replacements emerging. The vacuum that resulted made it relatively simple for Boris Yeltsin and his dedicated band of market therapists to step in and wreak havoc.

Had Soviet citizens been permitted to acquaint themselves more closely with the processes that made their society tick, they may well have been more enthusiastic about the motivation behind Mr Gorbachev’s project. It would, however, be far from accurate to suggest that glasnost and perestroika were appreciated only outside the USSR. When leading conservatives in the Politburo mounted a coup against Mr Gorbachev, protesters spontaneously poured into the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. (supporters of the coup were evidently sufficiently embarrassed to stay at home.) In what is remembered as his finest hour, Mr Yeltsin mounted a tank outside the Russian parliament and rallied opposition to the putschists as potential tragedy retreated into farce — but it is barely conceivable that Muscovites of any stripe would have dared to express themselves forcefully in public without the imprimatur of glasnost.

Yet resistance against an attempt to deprive them of newly won rights does not imply a thorough comprehension of the historical processes that had led them to that juncture. Some of the gains of glasnost have been incorporated into the post-Soviet set-up in Russia (even though Mr Yeltsin proved to be considerably less tolerant of dissent than his predecessor, going to the extent of waging war against the Russian parliament, and his successor has on occasion betrayed an alarmingly authoritarian streak), but that is broadly not true of the Central Asian republics. It is singularly unfortunate that the Gorbachevite project of filling the blank pages in Soviet history remained incomplete: just as vital aspects of the past were glossed over or obliterated altogether in the Soviet era, the official tendency now is to portray the entire Soviet past as a sorry aberration unworthy of explication or analysis.

It is not entirely surprising, in the circumstances, to find Brezhnev being upheld as a paragon of communist virtue, nor is it altogether strange that posters of Stalin are prominently displayed at shows of strength organized by latter-day communists. But the most significant social experiment of the past 100 years deserves better than this. An explanation of its successes, excesses and failures is crucial not only to understanding the 20th century but also to the conceptual task of developing efficient, equitable and non-exploitative alternatives to the tyranny of the market.

Why are they detained?

THE Department of Justice continues to resist legitimate requests for information regarding the 1,017 people it acknowledges having detained in its investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Civil liberties and other groups have been reduced to filing a request for the data under the Freedom of Information Act. It ought not come to that.

The questions are pretty basic. How many of the 1,000-plus are still in custody? Who are they? What are the charges against them? What is the status of their cases? Where and under what circumstances are they being held? The department refuses to provide the answers and also to give a serious explanation of why it won’t provide them. By withholding the information, it seems to us to create a larger problem than any it might solve.

The government has an enormously difficult and in some ways contradictory task. It must do its utmost not just to prosecute any surviving conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks but also to try to prevent a recurrence. At the same time, lest it abandon some of the very principles for which it is fighting, it must act within traditional constitutional bounds. There have been some assertions — no more than that — that in the mass arrests thus far it has occasionally exceeded those bounds. The attorney general says no, even as his department intensifies its efforts through the additional powers that Congress granted in the anti-terrorism bill last week.

The civil-rights groups rightly observed the government’s “official silence prevents any democratic oversight of (its) response to the attacks.” —The Wasington Post