Allama Muhammad Iqbal emerged as a major Muslim thinker on nationhood during a period of profound political and intellectual upheaval in British India, when the Western concept of the territorial nation-state was becoming a norm and anti-colonial movements embraced nationalism. For Iqbal, however, nationhood could not be reduced to territory, race, ethnicity or language. His poetry and philosophy consistently show that a true nation must rest on shared spiritual purpose and moral agency, not merely on borders or secular nationalism.

The drift of Iqbal’s thought on the nation-state from territorial patriotism to identifying the global Muslim community as one nation became evident in his writings in the first decade of the last century. Scholars later concluded that Iqbal considered religion as the most enduring basis of collective identity and that, unlike territorial nationalism, Islam offers a longer and deeper continuum of social order.

This distinction that a nation is a spiritual-moral community united by faith, memory and ethical ideals, while the state is merely an administrative structure tied to territory, shaped Iqbal’s political theory. Western nation-states fuse both concepts, but Iqbal insisted they must remain separate. His concept of nationhood defined unity through moral commitment rather than soil, and his concept of selfhood extended to be a collective moral will and historic purpose of a nation. As Iqbal rejected Western nationalism for being territorial, secular and spiritually hollow, several major Western thinkers advanced theories that directly contradicted his moral vision of nationhood. Max Weber viewed the state as a power structure defined by its monopoly on force, opposing Iqbal’s belief that political authority must serve an ethical purpose. Ernest Gellner tied nationalism to industrialisation and mass culture,........

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