‘Relocating the Nation’
Amir Ali
THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MUHAMMAD IQBAL: ISLAM AND NATIONALISM IN LATE COLONIAL INDIA by Iqbal Singh Sevea Cambridge University Press, 2013, 234 pp., 595
October 2013, volume 37, No 10

This book is definitely a much-needed contribution to the study of the political philosophy of Allama Iqbal the poet. Iqbal Singh Sevea expends significant intellectual energy on the analysis of Iqbal’s well-known antipathy to the ideology of nationalism and the nation-state. ‘Rejecting Nationalism, Relocating the Nation’ can in this sense be considered the core of the book which also attempts to make sense of Iqbal by placing him in the larger matrix of late 19th and early 20th century Muslim intellectual thought. This is done especially in ‘Muslim Political Discourse Circa 1857-1940’, but also in numerous other sections of the book where Iqbal’s political, intellectual and philosophical ideas are considered in relation to other prominent figures such as Hussain Ahmad Madani of Deoband, Suleiman Nadwi, Akbar Allahabadi et. al.

Sevea notes at several places in the book that Iqbal seems to occupy a position of variance with respect to both the traditional ulama and the modern educated Muslims. Iqbal castigated the traditional ulama for their inability to come to terms with the complexities of the modern world.

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