"AND yet it was strange, the Arab tilt of Pakistan: the little boy in Arab clothes, the Pakistan Steel project given the name of the Arab conqueror. The poet Iqbal, putting forward his plan for an Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that the Islam of India was special, “a people-building force … at its best.” “I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam,” Iqbal had said. “For India, it means security and peace …; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it.” But the world had changed since 1930; Arabia had some say in the world again. Pakistan had changed since 1947. Seeking more than Iqbal’s Muslim polity now, seeking in failure an impossibly pure faith, it called up its Arabian origins, mystical but at the same time real. At Banbhore, a remote outpost of the earliest Arab empires, you walked on human bones."
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RevolutionariesPeople of British IndiaPoliticians from IndiaLeaders of the Pakistan MovementPoliticians from Pakistan
Original Language: English
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Naipaul, V.S. - Among the Believers (Vintage, 1982)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal
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Muhammad Iqbal
(9 November 1877 – 21 April 1938), widely known as Allama Iqbal (}}), was a poet, philosopher, and politician, as well as an academic, barrister and scholar in the British Raj. He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary work in both the Urdu and Persian languages.
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