Who said there is no room for reform in Islam? Indians are having a lot of fun these days. Never in the past had we given Indians so much space. Something wrong with the management. I would find many Indians going pink.
Anyway Allama was a secularist and strongly stood fr secular Islam. In fact Allama Iqbal strongly stood for reform of the muslim community. He stressed on the ideal of Ijtehad and sought to reform the muslim world.
Ijtehad was an ideal where each debate, each scholar started with "I may be wrong but" then stated his views.
He also supported Turkey's secularism and reforms. Let me state that we aren't reforming Islam, we are reforming the mindset and ideals of the muslim ummah. For example secularism was an ideal forwarded by a muslim philosopher named Ibn Rushd. We were the ones who instituted the system the west adopted and today we are blowing things up. We should be ashamed that we gave up Ijtehad and reform process in muslim countrys. Instead we have orthodox, conservative ideals which are from a time that has long gone by.
According to changing times things change, laws change, ideals change. We cannot have a law that is for the 7th century now in the 20th century. Many laws in Islam may have changed.
Here is what Iqbal says:
On sufism:
- The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in important respects, from our own.
On politics:
- If the aim of religion is the spiritualisation of the heart, then it must penetrate the soul of man, and it can best penetrate the inner man . . . We find that when Muhammad Ibn Tumart—the Mahdi of Muslim Spain—who was Berber by nationality, came to power and established the pontifical rule of the Muwahhidun, he ordered for the sake of the illiterate Berbers that the Quran should be translated and read in the Berber language and that the call to prayer should be given in Berber.
- Such is the attitude of the modern Turk, inspired as he is by the realities of experience, and not by the scholastic reasoning of jurists who lived and thought under different conditions of life. To my mind these arguments, if rightly appreciated, indicate the birth of an International ideal, which forming the very essence of Islam, has been hitherto overshadowed or rather displaced by Arabian Imperialism of the earlier centuries in Islam.
- The republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that were set free in the world of Islam
