Muhammad Iqbal

The poet-philosopher Iqbal rejected both Western materialism and territorial nationalism, which he saw as dividing Muslims, and called in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam for a dynamic, self-renewing faith. Yet his 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League proposed a Muslim state in north-west India, and he is now honoured as Pakistan's national poet. The tension between his universalism and that territorial outcome is the interesting part.