How Allama Iqbal fight as freedom fighter.

Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), in layman's terms, was a gifted poet whose verses inspired the Indian Muslims, awakened them from bondage and motivated them to strive for liberty. In fact, Iqbal was a very different man from the Freedom Movement leader our history has conjured up with its imaginative understanding of the great thinker's ideas and beliefs. 

Iqbal was a liberal Muslim with a scientific comprehension of old school religious - specifically Quranic - ideas; in other words, he was a reasoning philosopher whose mission was to create a version of Islam - yet again, Qur'an mainly - compatible with modern scientific research. He was a diligent student of German philosophy and had deeply recognized the traits which could render any faith to lie frail and submissive before the intellectual progress of the human race. As wisely recognized, Iqbal adored his creed, and his honest intentions were to protect "Mohammedanism" from the upcoming onslaught of science in Asia. 

How did Iqbal find a way to equally compare Islam and science? How did he defend the legends narrated in Quran the like of which are ridiculed in Bible? Well, there exist among Muslim certain groups of pure liberal origins. These factions reject any possibility of miraculous phenomena meddling in human affairs. You may call them the famed (or notorious, I can't decide) Hadith-Rejectors or the Quranists. One of Iqbal's contemporaries, Ghulam Ahmad Pervez (1903-85) - a close associate of Pakistan's founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah - was the leader of one of such movements called Tulu-e-Islam (Rise of Islam). But we're going a bit farther in history than we ought to. The man whom Iqbal succeeds in what a simple believer would call bizarre beliefs, was none other than the celebrated Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the intellectual father of All India Muslim League. 

Sir Syed (1817-1898), as he's mentioned throughout all standard Pakistani text books, was a freethinker, if one allows me to categorize such remarkable a personality according to modern taxonomy. If you're a Pakistani by birth, it's impossible you have never heard of his services to the Indian Muslim community. Stories are told how he held back politically-impoverished Muslims from joining the Hindu-dominant Congress, rather preached the importance of English education for the creation of a more civilized Muslim generation. His Aligarh institutions were criticized by the mullahs, just like his marvelous ideas regarding Quran, but eventually people had to surrender before the surge of reason and had to confess that they badly needed to adopt Western standards if they desired to save the Muslims from evaporating before the heat of science. 

But how did Sir Syed manage to spark such fierce controversies in India? The Answer's quite simple, and Pakistani students are taught about the entire melodrama in their high schools. Sir Syed had gone crazy over exegesis of Quran. For example, Muslims believe in the existence of spirits called the genies or the jinn. Sir Syed disbelieved in genies and interpreted metaphorically the verses of Quran mentioning Prophet Muhammad's (bless him and his posterity) encounters with these spirits. He refused to believe in seven heavens. Again, it was some allegorical mystery for him. He also intervened in several jurisprudential problems and differed from the mainstream fight.