, Columnist
Islam Offers a Third Way in Pakistan and Tunisia: Pankaj Mishra
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During the worldwide depression of the mid-1930s, the poet and Islamic modernist Muhammad Iqbal, often called Pakistan’s spiritual founder, wrote a poem dramatizing the inadequacies of Western political and economic systems.
Democracy and capitalism had empowered a privileged elite in the name of the people, Iqbal felt. But he was not much fonder of Marxism, which was then coming into vogue among anti-colonial activists across South Asia and the Middle East: