The Rhetoric of Milla: How Iqbal’s 1937 Persianate Vocabulary Shifted Jinnah’s Political Framework

In the spring of 1937, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was primarily a constitutional lawyer arguing within British legislative frameworks. By 1940, he had articulated a vision of separate sovereignty. A primary catalyst for this shift lay in a private, year-long exchange of letters written by the philosopher-poet Allama Sir Muhammad Iqbal between May 1936 and November 1937.

Iqbal did not merely offer Jinnah political advice. He supplied him with a specialized Perso-Arabic vocabulary that fundamentally redefined the political category of Indian Muslims. Through precise terms like milla (religious community) and qawm (nation), Iqbal pushed Jinnah to abandon the conventional vocabulary of minority rights in favor of an ontological argument for Muslim statehood.

The Semantic Divergence: Milla versus Qawm

To understand Iqbal’s intervention, one must examine the specific lexical history of the terms he deployed. In classical Arabic and Persian political thought, milla (Devanagari: मिल्लत, IAST: millat, plain English gloss: "faith-community or religious brotherhood") designates a collective identity bounded by shared divine law rather than geography or bloodlines. By contrast, qawm (Devanagari: क़ौम, IAST: qaum, plain English gloss: "people or nation") historically referred to a group tied by common descent, locale, or language.

In classical Sanskrit jurisprudence, a parallel distinction exists between dharma (Devanagari: धर्म, IAST: dharma, plain English gloss: "cosmic order or duty") as an overarching code, and jāti (Devanagari: जाति, IAST: jāti, plain English gloss: "birth-group or community") as a localized social division. Iqbal recognized that translating the European term "nation" into the Indian context using modern secular categories introduced a fatal ambiguity.

When British colonial administrators and Congress politicians spoke of an "Indian nation," they used qawm in its modern Western sense: a secular body politic defined by territorial boundaries. Iqbal argued that applying qawm in this manner reduced Indian Muslims to a permanent structural minority within a centralized state.

In his letters to Jinnah preserved in historical archives, Iqbal countered this by elevating milla as the primary organizing principle. On May 28, 1937, Iqbal wrote directly to Jinnah regarding the economic distress of Muslim communities and the inadequacy of secular models:

"The question therefore is: how is it possible to solve the problem of Muslim poverty? And the whole future of the League depends on the League's activity to solve this question... After a long and careful study of Islamic Law I have come to the conclusion that if this system of Law is properly understood and applied, at last the right to subsistence is secured to every body. But the enforcement and development of the Shariat of Islam is impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states."

Here, Iqbal systematically tied economic survival (rizq, plain English gloss: "daily bread or sustenance") to the institutional enforcement of shari'a (Devanagari: शरीअत, IAST: sharīʿat, plain English gloss: "sacred Islamic law"). By framing the issue through Islamic law rather than secular minority protections, Iqbal reframed Muslims not as an ethnic sub-group within a multi-ethnic nation (qawm), but as an autonomous ideological community (milla) requiring territorial jurisdiction to exercise its code.

From Legal Safeguards to Political Autonomy

Prior to this correspondence, Jinnah’s legal rhetoric drew heavily from 19th-century British constitutionalism. He sought statutory guarantees, weighted representation, and veto powers within a federated India.

As historical analysis published by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) demonstrates, Jinnah’s strategic positioning transformed as he absorbed Iqbal’s critique of the 1935 Government of India Act. Iqbal urged Jinnah to reject centralizing federal schemes, arguing that a unified central legislature would permanently subjugate Muslim-majority provinces to a non-Muslim majority.

In his letter dated June 21, 1937, Iqbal pushed Jinnah to explicitly state the League's political goals:

"A separate federation of Muslim provinces, reformed on the lines I have suggested above, is the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and save Muslims from the domination of non-Muslims. Why should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are?"

Notice the deliberate shift in vocabulary. Iqbal adopted the Western international-law term "self-determination," but tied it directly to the geographic regions where the milla constituted a demographic majority. He systematically shifted the unit of analysis from individual citizens holding rights to a collective body holding territorial sovereignty.

Scholarly research published in the Journal of Centre for South Asian Studies shows that Iqbal’s letters helped Jinnah bridge the gap between elite constitutional negotiation and popular political mobilization. By moving away from hyper-technical legal arguments and adopting a Persianate political vocabulary grounded in Islamic moral economy, Jinnah was able to communicate directly with the Muslim electorate in Punjab, Bengal, and the Sindh.

The Transformation of Jinnah’s Episteme

Jinnah himself acknowledged this profound conceptual debt. When Jinnah published the correspondence in 1942—four years after Iqbal’s death—he wrote in the foreword that Iqbal’s views "were substantially in consonance with my own and had finally led me to the same conclusions as a result of careful examination and study of the constitutional problems facing India."

Scholars debate the extent to which Jinnah embraced Iqbal’s pan-Islamic ideology versus using Iqbal’s phrasing as an effective negotiating instrument against both the British Crown and the Indian National Congress. What the epistolary evidence shows is that the vocabulary Jinnah deployed after 1937 changed dramatically.

In his famous presidential address at the Lahore session of the Muslim League in March 1940, Jinnah famously declared that Islam and Hinduism were not merely two religions in the strict sense of the word, but two distinct social orders. That formulation directly mirrored the philological argument Iqbal had laid out in his private 1937 letters: that a milla cannot be subsumed under a single secular qawm without destroying its foundational legal identity.

Through this precise linguistic shift, Iqbal furnished Jinnah with the conceptual scaffolding necessary to argue that Muslim autonomy was not a demand for privileges, but a assertion of distinct political identity.