iqbal day
Iqbal Day - Today was “Iqbal Day” in Pakistan: a national holiday to honor the nation’s poet. Allama Muhammed Iqbal was a man firmly opposed to secularism. He once said, “the biggest blunder made by Europe was the separation of Church and State.” He also claimed that “it is obvious that the only way to a peaceful India is a redistribution of the country on the lines of racial, religious and linguistic affinities.” He used claims of mystical “enlightenment” ala Aliester Crowley to justify his positions; and he grasped onto any event of modest importance to “prove” his theories (”The war of 1914 proves that my psychic prophecies were true”). A tireless self-promoter, and his ideas were actually not so absurd for his time (he died in 1938). But the years immediately following 1938 are ample proof of how screwed-up things can be when nationalism and ethnic or religious lines converge. Isn’t that what Hitler was all about? Now that we’ve had 100 years to see just exactly how stupid his ideas were and to watch Europe’s secularism leave Islamist isolationism in the middle ages, it is really surprising that anyone would still want to celebrate this guy’s legacy. As far as I can tell, Iqbal has far more in common with Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri than with Musharref. Maybe this is just some cynical joke that Musharref is playing on the people of Pakistan…