Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1875 to 1938 CE) stood at the cusp of modernity in British India. As the “poet visionary” and “spiritual father” of Pakistan, his role as an anti-colonial intellectual who “dreamed” of carving out an independent Muslim homeland from British India is thoroughly ingrained in the popular imagination, state institutions, and political rhetoric. Other than Jinnah, the political “founder” of Pakistan, no other figure enjoys such heroic, mythic status. Scholars of Islam and modernity have treated and cited him as a preeminent Muslim modernist globally. His role as a leading Pan-Islamist with Jamal-ud-din Afghani and Syed Qutub is unquestioned and his prominence as Indian Muslim political modernist is unrivalled. Indeed, “few people have ever disputed his power”11 M. Dorraj, “The intellectual dilemmas of a Muslim modernist: Politics and poetics of Iqbal,” The Muslim World 85 (1995), 266–79: 266. and Iqbal’s name is invoked as a moral authority22 E. Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy. Translated by D.F. Pocock, trans. D. F. Pocock, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010 [1924]). to this day. In addition to his 12,000 verses of Urdu and Persian poetry, Iqbal famously published six English language lectures under the title “Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam” in 1930 (a seventh was added in editions since 1934). These lectures have stood as a testament to his significance for those invoking “liberal” Islam.33 R. Hassan, “Introduction,” in Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought, ed. H. C. Hillier and B. B. Koshul (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). See also M. Q. Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton University Press, 2018: Ch. 2). The lectures have influenced Muslim intellectuals around the world, from Dr. Ali Shariati (ideologue of the Iranian revolution) to Dr. Fazlur Rahman in Pakistan to Dr. Tariq Ramadan (the noted European Islamic reformer) today. They remain a persistent reference point in the modern academic study of Islam44 F. Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); H. C. Hillier and B. B. Koshul, eds., Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). and, indeed, South Asian Islam.55 M. Q. Zaman, Islam in Pakistan. However, less discussed is the fact that four years after publishing Reconstruction, Iqbal wrote an essay in a newspaper entitled Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims denouncing the community of the Ahmadiyya as heretics, a charge he reiterated a year later in a written exchange with the Hindu, Indian nationalist, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Iqbal used the term “heretic” to describe the Ahmadiyya 30 times in these two English-language essays, leaving no doubt as to his views on the matter. Now, the Ahmadiyya were considered heterodox virtually since the community was established by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1880 in the town of Qadian in British Indian Punjab. A decade or so later, Ahmad’s claim of receiving revelation as a “prophet” was roundly condemned by Muslims worldwide. Although Ahmad used this term in a particular sense of Islamic tradition, he and his followers were quickly declared “heretics”.66 Y. Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); A. Qadir, “Doors to the Imaginal: Implications of Sunni Islam’s Persecution of the Ahmadi ‘Heresy’,” Religions 9, no. 4 (2018): 91–107. Iqbal’s essays consolidated this charge. Numerous studies have mapped the discrimination and violence experienced by Ahmadis since 1899 in Qadian, then in Pakistan where the community moved in 1947, and now worldwide.77 S. R. Valentine, “Prophecy after the Prophet, albeit lesser prophets? The Ahmadiyya Jama’at in Pakistan,” Contemporary Islam 8 (2014), 99–113; S. Saeed, “Pakistani nationalism and the state marginalisation of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 7 (2007), 132–52; N. Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Editorial, “Events of 1974: Anti-Ahmadi hostilities,” The Review of Religions, March 2008; A. U. Qasmi, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2015); A. Qadir, “Parliamentary hereticization of the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan: The modern world implicated in Islamic crises,” In Religion in Times of Crisis, edited by G. Ganiel, C. Monnot and H. Winkel (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 135–154: A. Qadir, “How heresy makes orthodoxy: The sedimentation of Sunnism in the Ahmadi cases of South Africa,” Sociology of Islam 4, no. 4 (2016): 345–367. In Pakistan, the community was officially declared heretical by constitutional amendment in 1974.88 A. Qadir, “When heterodoxy becomes heresy: Using Bourdieu's concept of doxa to describe state-sanctioned exclusion in Pakistan,” Sociology of Religion 76 no. 2 (2015): 155–176: A. Qadir, “Parliamentary hereticization of the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan”. Iqbal is often cited as justification in both official persecution and popular violence. This is no “mere” theological issue for adjudication by Doctors of Law, since Iqbal’s arguments are not centered on theology nor, for that matter, does theological reasoning exist in a socio-political vacuum (as pointed out by critical religion research generally, and in the case of Ahmadiyyat specifically).99 T. Fitzgerald, “Religion and politics as modern fictions,” Critical Research on Religion 3 (2015), 303–19; R. T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). On defining theology when hereticizing Ahmadiyyat, see A. Qadir, “Doors to the imaginal”. Given Iqbal’s moral authority, it becomes crucial to ask what implications his hereticization of the Ahmadiyya has for understanding modern South Asian Islam. This article probes Iqbal’s texts on Ahmadiyyat to ask how he justifies his argument to declare the Ahmadiyya heretics and “beyond the pale of Islam.” The intention is to get at discursive themes undercutting his argument which, in turn, become points of entry to destabilize the modern “reconstruction” of Islam building on Iqbal. As Foucault famously showed in his cultural genealogies, it is by examining who is excluded and the manner of that exclusion that we can gain a better sense of the disciplining norm. The political (colonial) context of Iqbal’s declaration of heresy is also relevant, not least since he cites it himself. Now, it may be coincidence that Ahmadiyyat emerged during the peak of the British Raj in India and was condemned and excluded by Muslim authorities at the same time. However, the logic of coloniality cannot be isolated from the conditions of that exclusion. The colonial milieu informed the theological, legal, and political grounds on which the Ahmadiyya were excluded from Islam in British India and into Pakistan, and the logic of coloniality led to institutionalization of those conditions after colonialism had ended. In general, as a study points out, “It is remarkable that doctrinal orientations that dominate Islam took their shape only during colonial rule in the late nineteenth century,”1010 M. Q. Zaman, Islam in Pakistan, 14. although there has been no attention to Ahmadiyyat in this context. Colonialism — the politico-economic arrangement inhering in an extension of sovereignty over a foreign territory — led directly to institutionalization that informed the exclusion of Ahmadiyyat in British India. Institutions such as the modern nation-state, the federated legal system, state abstraction from local territory and centrally controlled education, all enabled Ahmadi exclusion. However, the continuation of those macro-institutions can be explained by coloniality, or the logic of that colonial relationship in structures of knowledge and existence.1111 N. Maldonado-Torres, “On the coloniality of being,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007), 240–70. On one hand, that logic constructed colonial territories in a dominated way by subjecting them to a certain form of knowing, as Edward Said famously showed.1212 E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). That is, economic domination co-occurred with a coloniality of knowledge that produced an epistemological hierarchy across the colonial border. On the other hand, the logic of coloniality also formed the colonial sense of self in a manner that extended that logic far beyond its political footprint. This adds to discussions of complex selfhood in postcolonial South Asian studies.1313 A. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). This paper analyzes the discourse of Iqbal’s essays hereticizing the Ahmadiyya to describe the extensions of colonial logic into the most analytically elementary of postcolonial institutions, viz. the (post)colonial Muslim.1414 M. Iqbal, Islam and Ahmadism (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf Publishers, 1935; repr., 1980). Drawing on recent post- and de-coloniality scholarship, the paper outlines three features of the modern, postcolonial, Muslim subject that are conditions of possibility for Iqbal’s exclusion of Ahmadiyyat. Collectively, these features — whose genesis may be seen in coloniality — organize and enable a sustained, institutional momentum to keep Ahmadis in the shadow of Islam. These are the role of science and unity, what Anidjar termed the secular divisibility of human and divine,1515 G. Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). and the production and maintenance of what Santos called the absyssal line.1616 B. de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 30 (2007), 45–89. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1835 to 1908) declared in 1880 that he had received divine inspiration to reform the condition of Muslims in British India.1717 M. G. Ahmad, Barahin-e-Ahmadiyya (Qadian, India (English translation published by Islam International Ltd., Tilford, Surrey, 2012)1880). In November 1888 he invited Muslims to be initiated under his guidance and held a major ceremony for dozens of new initiates the following March. The ceremony marked the beginning of Ahmadiyyat as an Islamic reform movement centered in British-ruled Punjab and became an annual event (ijma’), analyzed first in this journal.1818 H. A. Walteb, “The Ahmadiya movement today,” The Muslim World 6 (1916), 66–78. Ghulam Ahmad made four spiritual claims based on revelations.1919 Y. Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous. He referred to himself as mujaddid [reformer] of the century, drawing on a tradition that a reformer of the religion would appear every 100 years. Next, he referred to himself as muhaddath [a person spoken to by God], a title only agreed upon previously for the Caliph Umar, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad and his second successor. Third, Ahmad claimed the title of mahdī [guided one, typically used by Shia’s for the eschatological 12th imam] and masīh [messiah]. With this claim (recorded in his 1893 A’ina-yi kamalāt-i Islam, p. 426), Ahmad claimed to be the second coming of Jesus. He interpreted Islamic tradition to suggest that Jesus had survived the crucifixion to continue his mission in the east (in Kashmir) and had died a natural death there.2020 This claim might seem audacious to many today. Yet, it drew on a Muslim tradition of Jesus’ missing years and life past 33 having taken place in Kashmir H. Kersten, Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life Before and After the Crucifixion, trans. T. W.-Czisch (New York: Element, 1986). It is a minority tradition and contested by most Muslims and Christians, e.g. G. Grönbold, Jesus in Indien: Das Ende einer Legende [Jesus in India: The end of a legend] (Berlin: Kösel-Verlag, 1985) The controversy of this claim was quickly overshadowed by Ghulam Ahmad’s fourth claim: to have received revelation that he was a “prophet.” This claim violated a belief among Muslims then (and which has only increased since) that Muhammad was the last of the prophets sent by God. The Ahmadi response to this rests on interpretations of the Quranic reference (33:40) to Muhammad as khātim al-anbiya’ [final prophet] and of a hadith [oral tradition] in which he said he was the “seal of the prophets” (Al-Bukhari, Sahih, Kitab al-manaqib 18, vol. 2, p. 390). The common interpretation considers khātim [final] as temporal finality, implying that Muhammad was the last in time of a succession of over 124,000 prophets sent by God; prophecy therefore was sealed (closed) after his death in AD 632.2121 This view is amplified in Urdu, Ahmad’s own language, in which the root word “khtm” is ambiguous but in common parlance often connotes “final” as “last.” However, one of Urdu’s parent languages is Arabic which, similar to Hebrew, is based on triconsonantal roots. As a result, most words may have many meanings depending on how the sequence of three consonants is interspersed with vowels. Meanings are often gleaned from contexts, and ambiguity is common in interpretations. Urdu vernacular thus also includes many places where khatam means “ultimate.” Ahmadis interpret khātim as logical finality (“ultimate”) and believe that Muhammad is the ultimate “seal”, or guarantee of authenticity, to perfect all minor prophecies. Once again, the claim drew on a long theological tradition.2222 A. Qadir, “Doors to the Imaginal”. In the early days of Islamic thought, there was never a consensus on the now-dominant, temporal definition of finality: “this now generally received understanding of the Qur’anic phrase [“final”] is not the only possible one and had not necessarily been the earliest”.2323 Y. Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous. Popular and political Muslim opinion on Mirza Ghulam Ahmad quickly turned hostile and groups demanding state action against Ahmadis multiplied. After Pakistan was formed in 1947, the Ahmadiyya leader at the time, Ghulam Ahmad’s son, led the community out of Indian Qadian to Lahore in Pakistan, and then to a new city nearby. Violence and discrimination against Ahmadis in the “Islamic” republic of Pakistan simmered and erupted often, involving looting, arson and murder of community members. Eventually, the National Assembly passed a unanimous constitutional amendment in 1974 declaring the Ahmadiyya heretics. The Second Constitutional Amendment of Pakistan declared they be treated as non-Muslim minorities under law, invalidating their claims to be Muslims and associating them as political Other in the state-building process of Pakistan.2424 N. Khan, Muslim Becoming. In 1984, military President Zia-ul-Haq promulgated an Ordinance that declaring most Ahmadiyya activities criminal offences (Anti-Islamic Activities of the Qadiani Group, Lahori Group and Ahmadis (Prohibition and Punishment) Ordinance, 1984). The Ahmadiyya are now barred from calling themselves Muslim, praying or preaching in the name of Islam, and exhibiting Islamic symbols publicly, distributing Islamic literature, pronouncing the statement of faith, or calling their places of worship “mosques”.2525 T. Mahmud, “Freedom of religion & religious minorities in Pakistan: A study of judicial practice,” Fordham International Law Journal 19 (1995), 40-100; M. N. A. Siddiq, “Enforced apostasy: Zaheeruddin v. State and the official persecution of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan,” Law & Inequality 14 (1995), 275–338; S. R. Valentine, Islam and the Ahmadiyya Jama'at: History, Belief, Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Those accused of “posing” as Muslims may be charged with blasphemy, punishable by death under Pakistani law. The ordinance led to Ahmadis are barred from of President or and are to in only on minority The community this leading to their of violence against the six Ahmadis in Pakistan is by religious authorities and state Persecution of Ahmadiyya Muslim no. March in the name of 21 2008; R. to to The H. International 6 Ahmadis from Pakistan and at least six now in However, they around the world, in Muslim and as as minority contexts, such as and South A. Qadir, “Parliamentary hereticization of the Ahmadiyya in A. Qadir, “How heresy makes for the second amendment and for violence against the Ahmadiyya — such as the of Pakistan — often Iqbal. Iqbal wrote a essay in entitled Qadianis and Orthodox the to to the Iqbal’s argument was that the Ahmadiyya be declared as with the of Qadianis is a in calling as as that Ahmadis are but Muslims other cases of Muslims are Ahmadi can be declared both Muslim as as which is what Iqbal to the This is not a of but of the of Iqbal’s Islamic is with of or of Y. Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: C. eds., of in A on (Leiden: Brill, but it had what Iqbal was now to it to not Ahmadiyya to themselves as they had been Iqbal’s preeminent in was the political of a modern Muslim state by the as a political Although Iqbal was famously and against as a there is no doubt that he considered the to be the most political form for the Muslim in South S. The of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in India University Press, This with his definition of an Muslim as those who were not In when by the the political of Pakistan, Jinnah, on in Kashmir that all those calling themselves Muslims would be treated as such in the of Pakistan. Iqbal had taken a of on political to Islam, such as the of the in modern Muslim political in a colonial Indian or the place of nationalism in a In many he against and considered of Islamic or in that Islamic is to interpretation and S. The of Muhammad Iqbal: However, Iqbal never definition of an he declare other of Muslims as His only reference to this is in this essay and so it for Iqbal, that an Muslim is only what an Ahmadi is of Iqbal’s political such as the by to the that Ahmadiyyat the Islamic statement of for Iqbal’s views S. The of Muhammad Iqbal: that Iqbal also considered following the to be although Iqbal himself never wrote he only that believe in a which is not the same as and that interpretation of the may T. Iqbal on Muslim and A to (2015), M. Iqbal, Islam and These points are with that have been a of Islamic tradition and are a far from declaring a heterodox or heretical in an of of Islam. Iqbal’s is Muslims for at the time, there had not been an for a Muslim so Iqbal’s views of the as a political not His first was for Islamic across South and beyond in a of Muslim is that Iqbal Ahmadism in six years after the first by Mirza Ghulam “The Ahmadiyya The Allama Iqbal had an The He referred at one point to the community as of Islamic and the as the among modern Indian in the second get as of the Kashmir “The Ahmadiyya to Iqbal the community in but on and never condemned Ahmadism the essay in Iqbal’s intellectual other that he later such as However, he never the essays on Ahmadiyyat. In Indian Pandit Jawaharlal on the by that Iqbal’s of to have as and other Muslim were and to for “The of The Modern Review of to Iqbal was not the Ahmadiyya be considered but Iqbal’s of Islamic was and after he would on the Ahmadiyya and not Muslims Iqbal’s response in was the essay Islam and in which he the of and all Ahmadi heretics on the political His claims that the Ahmadiyya Muslim on in which that those who not him are not In 1974 the fourth Ahmadi Mirza pointed out that such were taken out of context and were to against the Ahmadiyya by other Sunni following an established tradition of the of M. N. Ahmad, The by the Ahmadiyya Muslim to the National Assembly of Pakistan Its (Lahore: Islam International 2003). Iqbal’s theological is that a Muslim only two of and finality of Prophet to all other may be Islam but these two are The first is generally considered one of the of Islam, but the second was never an article of in the way Iqbal makes it out to does not to the other four as in these In of his political Iqbal was a that he would a That was the which had to be to that it had not a of in who to a belief as Islam. The of a out of an so is one that Iqbal’s (in the entitled The of the and However, what is less on is that the of the as a in of a took place on the same grounds of that most The to that in Iqbal’s own words in the when he to the in Ahmadism as one of the of the and of the M. Iqbal, Islam and In Iqbal’s most cited has been his for Muslim The of Ahmadis as Muslims as a to his that does not to the of A. M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Second ed. (Lahore: are two for Iqbal’s of the exclusion of the The first and is that Iqbal’s prominence has made his an cited for or for or the in the of the on the second constitutional As points out, the amendment and case in Pakistan may be seen as Iqbal’s to declare the Ahmadiyya out of the of N. Khan, Muslim Becoming: Indeed, Iqbal is referred to often as an in the of the National Assembly in 1974 that in the second constitutional amendment declaring the Ahmadiyya A. Qadir, “When heterodoxy becomes as as the at the Iqbal’s of the Ahmadiyya as a also Iqbal — he with in most political — when it to that the Ahmadiyya the of Islam of their own A. A. Qadiani (Lahore: Islamic Ltd., The second is Iqbal’s concept of which for him when such a is in the of life and the to to the of S. A. ed. and of Iqbal (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad in With this Iqbal was with to Indian Muslims a sense of an that he A. A the Religious of Muhammad Iqbal (Leiden: Brill, A. the Muslim Muhammad Iqbal, and the Modern Studies Journal 2 (2014), E. “The in Iqbal’s in Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought, ed. H. C. Hillier and B. B. Koshul (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). he becomes by and the most to He that a sense of would enable to colonialism as as a from the of India. was the of Iqbal’s since he the concept in his of the The concept has been taken on its Yet, it is to that this concept is from his essays on the the two have never been A an understanding of how to exclusion of the Ahmadiyya from the of Islam. this is the missing in many South Asian where the intellectual of Iqbal is to of selfhood in postcolonial Pakistan. Before the end of the century, not exist He is a recent which the of knowledge with its own less than two years but he has so quickly that it has been only to that he had been for of years in the for that of in which he would be M. The of It is that the of Iqbal’s of Muslim — in a of the postcolonial Muslim subject in South — on hereticization of the In the essays, three are as conditions of possibility for this hereticization and so of the postcolonial Muslim are from the which includes both essays in one with only and no other to this With the of and critical in its own the and of of which at an of human
Source: The Muslim World
DOI: 10.1111/muwo.12410
Author: Ali Qadir
Institution: Tampere University
Language: English
Topic: Islamic Studies and History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $1,925
OpenAlex ID: W4206327675