AFTER the completion of the burial ceremony of poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal, an English officer said: “Today, you have buried the last true Muslim of this subcontinent.”

The 77th death anniversary of Iqbal (April 21) has passed, leaving behind a plethora of questions about whether we discharged our duty according to the sayings of Iqbal.

Have we been sincere and honest with the concept of Pakistan given by Iqbal? The answer would be in the negative, and this is the tragedy.

Iqbal had conceived Islam as an evolutionary and dynamic system of thought and conduct fraught with limitless possibilities of expansion and development.

In his philosophical and erudite masterpiece in prose, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he sought to discover, in the spirit of an imbued reformer, a dynamic principle of movement in the otherwise rigid and stereotyped legalistic structure of Islam.

He proposed in the midst of an extremely illuminating discourse in his lecture, ‘The principle of movement in the structure of Islam’, that Muslim countries, in order to shake off their dogmatic slumber and intellectual stupor, should approach the question of Ijtehad in the spirit of Umar: the first critical and independent mind in Islam.

Iqbal contends: “Who, at the last moments of the Prophet (PBUH), had the moral courage to utter these remarkable words: “The Book of God is sufficient for us.” Advising Muslims, Iqbal said:

Tan-i-bey rooh say bezaar hai (God is fed up with a spiritless body) Khuda-i-zinda zindon ka khuda hai (He is a living God and is God of the living).

On Iqbal’s death, Rabindranath Tagore remarked: “The death of Iqbal creates a void in literature that like a mortal wound will take a very long time to heal. India whose place in the world is too narrow can ill-afford to miss a poet whose poetry had such universal value.”

Let us cast an inward glance, retrace our steps, rethink our thoughts and reconstruct our lives in the light of the principles our Quaid prescribed for us. In this alone lies our salvation and relevance to our future as a nation.

M. Yasir Kayani

Lahore

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2015

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