Iqbal was born in the Indian subcontinent and as a child received a traditional Islamic education. Later, he was awarded degrees in Philosophy and Law from universities in England and Germany. Like Sayyid Ahmad Khan before him, and along with Afghani and Abduh in the Middle East, Iqbal argued that Islam had to submit itself to a thorough reevaluation and updating by borrowing what it could from the West and from modernization. Writing in his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal says:
"'With the reawakening of Islam, therefore, it is necessary to examine, in an independent spirit, what Europe has taught and how far the conclusions reached by her can help us in the revision, and if necessary, reconstruction of theological thought in Islam.'" (quoted in John Esposito, Islam the Straight Path, Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 137)
Basing his thought on the Prophet's tradition that "the whole of the earth is a mosque," Iqbal embraced secularism: "'All that is secular is therefore sacred in the roots of its being.'" (Esposito, 138)
Iqbal admired the West, but was critical of its excesses, especially colonialism, imperialism, and, in some quarters, atheism.
Among Iqbal's friends and colleagues was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and a founding father of the modern state of Pakistan. While Jinnah helped build Pakistan "hands on," the initial idea of a Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent was Iqbal's. In a famous speech he delivered in 1930, Iqbal called for the formation of a Muslim state in the Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan. (Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 737)
While he had been a nationalist as a young man, Iqbal eventually came to view nationalism as a divisive force and abandoned it in favor of pan-Islamism.