In many cases, quam and millat co-existed in Islamic communities, but a secular government, such as a “nation”, never overruled the Islamic rule of law. These aspects of Iqbal’s argument define an opposition to the European imperialist conceptualization of the “nation”, which sought to remove the Islamic rule of law as a form of subversion of Muslim governance. More so, the misguided use of millat in terms of “nationhood” is being defined by Iqbal as a divisive form of territorialism that creates disunity in Islam. In this manner, the terms millat and qaum identify the differing roles of people in Islamic communities, yet the millat always provides the overarching “rule of law” in terms of governance and territorial claims. Iqbal (1939) identifies the original source of the millat as being the most powerful rule of law in the land, which countermands the modernist …show more content…
In many cases, leaders of certain Muslim countries were being inspired by the concept of secular nationalism (based on land or territory), which Iqbal (1939) opposes through the original meaning of the millat. In this manner, the label of “nationhood” is impossible under the rule of Islamic law, and that European imperialistic forms of governance are a threat to the sovereign way of life for all Muslims. In this manner, two dangerous views arise in the threat of European nationalism: “First, that the Muslims as a nation can be other than what they are as a millat. Secondly, because as a nation they happen to be Indians, they should, leaving aside their faith, lose their identity in the nationality of other Indians or in "Indianism”. In this manner, Iqbal (1939) defines the threat of European imperialism to the regional identity of various Muslims of differing races or ethnic backgrounds, which defers all legal and religious rites of Muslims. Certainly this is one aspect of Iqbal’s (1039) argument that defines why he so vehemently opposed the idea of “nationalism”, because it actually infers that a foreign European power would govern the Muslim people and remove any authority of millat in the