Constructing Pakistan - pg. 129

In his second speech, Iqbal is even more confident of his vision and completely aware of the prevailing charged political climate on the question of Muslim nationhood. He begins by putting forward his own idea of nationhood as opposed to the Western concept:

Politics have their roots in the spiritual life of man. It is my belief that Islam is not a matter of private opinion. It is a society, or if you like, a civic church. It is because present-day political ideals [...] may affect its original structure and character that I find myself interested in politics. I am opposed to nationalism as it is understood in Europe [...] I am opposed to it because I see in it the germs of atheistic materialism, which I look upon as the greatest danger to modern humanity. Patriotism is a perfectly natural virtue and has a place in moral life of man. Yet that which really matters is a man's faith, his culture, his historical tradition. These are the things which, in my eyes, are worth living and dying for, and not the piece of earth with which the spirit of man happens to be temporarily associated.

Constructing Pakistan - pg. 118

According to Ahmad Mian Mukhtar: 'Iqbal had studied Islamic Sufism deeply including the original writings of all great Sufis. But he had noticed certain un-Islamic practices in Sufisn and was opposed to these unIslamic influences':

This Neo-Platonism is an altered version of Plato that one of his followers (Plotinus) presented as a religion. In Muslims this was spread through Christian translations and became a part of Islam. In myopinion this is strictly un-Islamic and has no relationship with the Qura'nic philosophy. The edifice of Sufisn is based on this Greek absurdity.

The Confidence-Man - pg. 8

As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those of oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters; buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists; deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Siox chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.

As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one comsopolitan and confident stride.

Gandhi on Islam

Islam enjoins upon us tolerance towards others’ religions. It doesn’t say that other religions are false. He alone who does good to others is a true man. This is the principle of the [Qu’ran] as also the teaching of other religions. The students of the Jamia, I hope, will spread the message of unity and freedom throughout the country.

-- Letter to Jamia Millia in 1930