Constructing Pakistan - pg. 137

This is how the narrative of Indian Muslim nationhood finds different expressions. While the early exponents of the Muslim cause desperately needed to create a space for the Muslims within the hegemonic project of the empire, during the terminal stages of the freedom struggle, one important strand of national struggle is focused primarily on cleansing the Muslim consciousness of the residual effects of the hegemonic negotiation of the Western system. Both Iqbal and Mawdudi represent the struggles of two such reformers in retrieving and articulating a Muslim identity separate from the Hindus but also in difference to the in identity-forming imperatives of the British hegemonic project.

Iqbal and Mawdudi are both aware of the pitfalls of purely Western secular nationalism and are skeptical about it. For them Islam must form the basis of everyday life in an Islamic state and must not be reduced to the affair of the individual. It is this public nature of Islam as a way of life that forces the Muslim scholars of this particular path, for there were dissenting views, to make it imperative for the Muslims to seek a separate, autonomous nation-state. Hence, while Iqbal articulates a grand vision of the nation, Mawdudi, highly influenced by Iqbal but also the more conservative of the two, illustrates the tactical details of the Muslim nationalistic vision.