On Nationalism

Wataniyat — usually translated 'Patriotism' or 'Nationalism' — is one of Iqbal's most argued-over poems, and one of the clearest statements of the great shift in his thinking. The young Iqbal had written Saare Jahan Se Achha, a tender hymn to a shared India. Wataniyat is the work of an Iqbal who had begun to distrust the very idea it celebrated.

The poem's target is not love of one's home or land in the ordinary, human sense. Its target is nationalism as a modern political religion — the doctrine that the nation-state is the highest object of loyalty, the thing for which all else may be sacrificed. That doctrine, Iqbal argues, had quietly taken the place of God.

His central image is blunt and famous: among the new gods of the age, he says, the biggest is the nation — watan. Iqbal, who had spent years in a Europe convulsed by competing nationalisms and heading toward war, had watched what the worship of the nation could do. He came to see it as an idol that demanded blood.

The poem's deeper charge is that nationalism divides humanity. By cutting the human race into rival nations, each absolute unto itself, it sets God's creation against itself and erases any sense of a wider human or spiritual community. For Iqbal, who increasingly located identity in a borderless community of faith, this fragmentation was the real danger.

Wataniyat must be read honestly, as part of a thinker visibly changing his mind. Read beside Saare Jahan Se Achha, it charts a journey from territorial patriotism to a more universal — and, in his case, explicitly Islamic — idea of belonging. Both poems are sincere; they simply belong to different stages of one mind.

Formally the poem is compact and argumentative, closer to a verse essay than a song, with each couplet driving its case forward. It is Iqbal the thinker more than Iqbal the lyricist.

Wataniyat endures because its warning outlived its moment. Whatever one makes of Iqbal's own alternative, his core caution — that a nation can become an idol, and that idol can divide and devour — is one the last hundred years have not made less relevant.