Allama Iqbal could never have imagined that the city where, in 1930, he called for a separate Muslim state in India would one day have its Muslim name erased, vindicating his fears about Muslim identity. Every year on November 9, Pakistan observes Iqbal Day, and the Allahabad Address is invariably mentioned at the events held to mark it, because it is this address that earned Iqbal recognition as the originator of the idea of Pakistan.
On December 29, 1930, the annual session of the All India Muslim League met in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. In his presidential address, Iqbal argued that the Hindu leadership had colluded with British imperialism, that this collusion threatened the very existence of Islam and Muslims, and that Muslims would have to establish a separate state to confront it. That state came into being in 1947 as Pakistan. Today, however, India’s extremist Hindu leadership not only wishes to wipe out Pakistan but also seeks to destroy the religious identity of hundreds of millions of Indian Muslims.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is notorious for his hostility to Islam and his demolition of mosques. He has not only renamed Allahabad as Prayagraj; some time ago, in a speech to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, he also blamed Iqbal for the partition of India and attacked him. The recitation of Iqbal’s famous poem “Bachche ki Dua” (A Child’s Prayer) has been banned in the state’s government schools, even though the poem does not condemn Hindus anywhere. Banning Iqbal’s poems in Indian schools, or removing him from university curricula, does nothing to diminish the stature of the Poet of the East.
On the contrary, it shows that Iqbal was a great benefactor of the Muslims of this region. He abandoned “Tarana-e-Hindi” (Anthem of India) and wrote “Tarana-e-Milli” (Anthem of the Muslim Community) precisely because, in 1930, he had foreseen the threat to Muslims that the whole world can now see in the anti-Muslim policies of Narendra Modi in 2026.
The irony is that while India’s Hindu extremists hate Iqbal simply because he proposed a separate Muslim state in the Allahabad Address, some Pakistani intellectuals, consciously or unconsciously, keep spreading confusion about that address in order to sever Iqbal’s link with the idea of Pakistan.
Yesterday evening, a teacher from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, sent me an article by Yusuf Nazar, a London-based banker, published in a local on October 29, 2026. He insisted that a rebuttal was essential, because yet another attempt had been made to break the connection between Iqbal and the idea of Pakistan. After glancing at the article, I told him it contained nothing new: it merely retells the story of Iqbal’s debate with Edward Thompson, a subject on which I had shared my views only a few days earlier.
When he persisted, I asked, “Why don’t you write the response this time?”
“We are government employees,” he said. “If I highlighted the real spirit of the Allahabad Address, my job would be at risk.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You know that the address identified not only the collusion between British imperialism and Hindu extremism as a threat to Muslim identity, but also Arab monarchy. Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik lost the rectorship of the International Islamic University after speaking on this subject. I will not take that risk.”
It is sad that in Iqbal’s Pakistan, professors at public universities now find it difficult to defend Iqbal.
Those who claim that Iqbal proposed not a separate state but a Muslim province within the Indian federation overlook some important facts. The most important is the complete text of the Allahabad Address, which anyone should read in full before saying or writing anything about it. Doing so shows that Iqbal was in fact defending Quaid-i-Azam’s Fourteen Points, which were presented in March 1929.
The first point stipulated that India’s constitution would be federal; the second, that all provinces would enjoy uniform autonomy. Quaid-i-Azam was speaking of Muslim rights within an Indian federation.
Now consider Iqbal’s own words in the address: “I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.” Further on, he said: “I demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best interests of India and Islam.
For India, it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it.” Iqbal wanted a Muslim state with no room for monarchy or imperial rule.
Then-British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was deeply angered by the proposal for a Muslim province within the Indian federation, and several newspapers reported his displeasure. Prominent Hindu newspapers such as the Times of India, the Tribune and the Pratap also criticised Iqbal harshly, as did Edward Thompson, the Congress-sympathising British intellectual. Iqbal’s reply to Thompson was framed in the context of Quaid-i-Azam’s Fourteen Points.
In 1934, he clarified that his proposal in the Allahabad Address differed from Chaudhry Rahmat Ali’s Pakistan Scheme. He delivered the address as president of the Muslim League, within party policy; personally, he did not wish to remain within the Indian federation. Following a political strategy, he was moving gradually toward independence.
In fact, Chaudhry Rahmat Ali presented the Pakistan Scheme in 1933 on Iqbal’s advice. In 1931, during a meeting in London, Rahmat Ali asked Iqbal what the name of the state would be if one were created according to the scheme outlined in the Allahabad Address. Iqbal replied that if one took the first letter of each province of northwestern India and added the “tan” of Baluchistan, the result would be “Pakistan,” a very meaningful and fine word.
Dr Irshad Shakir Awan narrates this incident in his book Iqbal ka Tasawwur-e-Millat aur Azadi-e-Hind (Iqbal’s Concept of the Community and India’s Freedom, published by Iqbal Academy Lahore), on the authority of Abdul Waheed Khan, to whom Iqbal himself described the conversation in Bhopal in 1935.
Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (Ali Miyan), former head of Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama, writes in Naqoosh-e-Iqbal that when he met Iqbal in Lahore on November 22, 1937, Iqbal told him, “Pakistan is the only solution to the Muslim problems.” To clarify Iqbal’s concept of a separate Muslim state, Quaid-i-Azam himself published, before the creation of Pakistan, the letters Iqbal had written to him between 1936 and 1937.
The word “Pakistan” did not appear in the resolution passed at the Muslim League session in Lahore on March 23, 1940, but Iqbal’s vision of a separate state, and the word Pakistan on his lips, recurred again and again. The countless historical proofs of this are not easy to erase.
Today in India, the BJP, by demolishing mosques and renaming Allahabad, has proved Iqbal right. But in Pakistan, too, merely observing a holiday on November 9 is not enough to honor him. In light of the Allahabad Address, the Pakistani state must also be steered away from monarchy, autocracy, subservience to imperial powers, and extremism.
The writer is a senior journalist, anchor, and columnist, associated with Geo News. He posts on X@HamidMirPAK
