Illiberal Islam
Keyword(s):
The Indian philosopher Muhammad Iqbal developed one of the earliest Muslim criticisms of liberalism in the early twentieth century. Given the caste, communal and other differences that he thought made a European form of nationalism and so democracy impossible in India, Iqbal asked how social relations there might be envisioned in its absence. He went on to question the three liberal categories, interest, representation and contract, that underlay the liberal form of nationalism and democracy, and describe and try to re-imagine the non-liberal ways in which Indians related to one another in moral, philosophical and aesthetic terms.