Chapter Fourteen

Peace in a Plural Society For instance, the famous Indian Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) took the extremist understandings of nation and territorial nationalism as synonymous with nationalism as such, and declared: Is daur mein mai aur hai jam aur hai jam aur Tehzib ke azar ne tarashwaye sanam aur In taza khudaon mein bada sabse watan hai Jo pairahan uska hai voh mazhab ka kafan hai In this age, the wine is different and so is the wine-cup. The Azar of civilization has chiseled a new idol. Among these new gods the biggest is the homeland. Its dress is the shroud of Religion. This understanding of nation and territorial-nationalism is undoubtedly baseless. The strange thing is that in this period, most ulema and Muslim intellectuals were making out issues of political import to be supposedly so vital to Islam as to appear to be a question of life and death for it. The fact of the matter, however, is that no political upheavals—no political successes or downfalls—can ever become a challenge to the eternal nature of Islam. But this fact escaped many Muslim leaders. For instance, when, in the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Indian Muslim writer Shibli Numani, bemoaning this, wrote: Zawal-e daulat-e usman zawal-e shar-o-millat hai Aziz-o-fikr-e-farzand-o-ayal-o-khanama kab tak The decline of the Ottoman Empire is the decline of the Islamic shariah and the Muslim millat. O my friends, till when will you be concerned only about your children and families? This understanding, that the collapse of a certain government