Intellectual history has acquired a kind of centrality in current academic circles, and certain ideas and concepts, such as the ‘event’ and ‘personality’ have come to hold precedence over the usual categories of historical analysis.
This, however, does not imply that the event or personality is discounted from the epistemic equation altogether. The central premise of that sub-discipline is that ideas do not germinate and evolve in isolation from people who create and deploy them; therefore, these must not be studied as abstract propositions but in terms of culture, lives and historical contexts that produce them.
In other terms, studying the process of how ideas are formed, transformed and mutated either because of the change in context or convergence with other ideologies etc. is the thematic scope of intellectual history. Thus, context is extremely important for proper appreciation of ideas and so is the way ideas are expressed in texts.Their message(s) resonate in the subcontinent, particularly Pakistan, but far beyond it. Iqbal’s poems are compulsory in Iran and his importance as a Muslim thinker is rising. Iqbal has a partial relevance even in India.
Correspondingly, Maududi has been re-discovered by Western academia along with Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna in the wake of 9/11. Currently, he is seen as a pan-Islamic thinker whose influence has gone beyond the geographical confines of the subcontinent. Here, we will reflect on the two thinkers with reference to their impact on Pakistan and on them attributing a definitive religious slant to it.
Biographical accounts of the two reveal that they did not attend any religious seminary. This was probably the reason that strong doubts were cast by the typical ulema, particularly about their authority as scholars and spokespersons of Islam. Iqbal went to modern institutions like Cambridge and Munich Universities and adopted and adapted modern Western thoughts in his poetry as well as prose. Despite being trenchantly critical of the West, he was receptive to the intellectual currents flowing from the occident.
I wonder if Iqbal can ever be understood without any serious engagement with contemporary epistemic trends in the West. What he did was indeed perceptive. The convergence of Western ideas with Islamic thought, derived primarily from Quran and Masnavi-i-Ma’navi by Rumi, was an extraordinary creative venture of Iqbal. It made his philosophical insights a fascinating subject of study.
Iqbal’s thoughts and poetics continue to fascinate even after 77 years of his demise. Yet Iqbal is the main steering force of Pakistani nationalism, despite the fact that he passed away almost nine years before the creation of Pakistan.
Though widely different from Iqbal, Maulana Maududi shared some commonalities with him. Unlike Iqbal, Maududi was self-taught with a background in Urdu journalism. He had been an editor of Al-Jamiat in the 1920s. Writing effective and lucid prose was his forte. The phenomenonal success of his Quranic exegesis, Tafheem ul Quran, was largely because of the uniqueness of his writing style.
Maududi was a prolific writer with ideas steeped in modernity: his support for nation state, constitution and democratic dispensation indicate that he was a modern-age thinker.
Both Maududi and Iqbal lent Islamic intent to Pakistan. Iqbal’s Urdu poetry became instrumental in serving the cause of the Islamists which was extensively used to prove that Pakistan was essentially meant to be an Islamic state. In the 1970s and 1980s, ulema like Dr. Israr Ahmed appropriated Iqbal for propagating their extremist version of Islam as a state ideology.
In the current discourse punctuated with horrifying spectacles of killings and bloodshed, Iqbal’s Urdu poetry recited by the clerics like Israr Ahmed or Maududi’s thoughtful and lucid writings appear extremely modest and soft. It is, however, quite interesting that both these thinkers are under critical scrutiny in the Western academia. As the subject(s) of intellectual historians and social scientists, both of them are being studied through different prisms and in multiple contexts. It will certainly provide us with a fresh perspective of both these thinkers.

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