The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal.
[…]Iqbal’s argument was like this. Islam is not only an ethical ideal; it is also a “certain kind of polity.” Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice, as Christianity can be for the man in Europe. There never was, Iqbal says, a specifically Christian polity; and in Europe after Luther the “universal ethics of Jesus” was “displaced by national systems of ethics and polity.” There cannot be a Luther in Islam because there is no Islamic church-order for a Muslim to revolt against …
To accept Islam is to accept certain “legal concepts” … “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.”
Iqbal, in fact, is saying in a philosophical way that in an undivided India Islam will be in danger, will go the way of Christianity in Europe and cease to be itself. Muslims, to be true to Islam, need a Muslim polity, a Muslim state
[…]Seventeen years later (and nine years after Iqbal’s death) it happened—and to the Muslim-majority northwest was added the Muslim-majority eastern half of Bengal, a thousand miles away. But that Muslim state came with a communal holocaust on both sides of the new borders. Millions were killed and many millions uprooted.
[…]The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith […] If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for.
[…]Wouldn’t it have been better if the creation of Pakistan had been seen as a political achievement, something to build on, rather than as a victory of the faith, something complete in itself? […] Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions?
