Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), the celebrated Muslim poet and philosopher of South Asia, definitely knew about Canada. He never visited the distant country, nor did he mention it anywhere in his poetry or scholarly work. (Though he did consider studying in Canada, based on his discussions with Mr. Stratten, the Canadian principal of the Oriental College where he worked.) But what do I mean by “Iqbal in Montreal”, and how did Shā’ir-i Mashriq (Poet of the East, as he’s known) leave his mark so far out west?

In January of 1951, Canada signed agreements with India, Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to allow a certain number of immigrants from these countries into Canada. One hundred Pakistanis could come to Canada every year, together with their spouses, parents, and unmarried young children. [1] This policy, which was in place until 1962, enabled the first Pakistani-Canadian community to be formed—first in Montreal, and then in other places. [2]

1962: Muslims after ‘Īd ul-Fitr prayer at the United Church in Montreal.

For many Pakistanis, Iqbal was (and is) seen as the ideological or “spiritual” founding father of their nation. As they settled in Canada, Iqbal must have been occasionally mentioned, if not discussed, in private gatherings. Poetry recitals (known as mushāʿirah in Urdu) were organized at times. [3] In 1972, a Swiss-Canadian scholar specializing in South Asian Sufi music, Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, began holding regular discussions of Iqbal’s poetry and thought, and has published a lot of research on Iqbal during her long tenure at the University of Alberta. [4]

In November 1998, the Iqbal Society of Canada was established, and it organizes regular events and maintains a library of about 200 books by or about Iqbal and his work.

But “Iqbal in Montreal” actually began long before then.

In 1938, a young student named Wilfred Cantwell Smith graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in Oriental Languages. Smith, a Torontonian, came from a Presbyterian family that was hit hard by the Great Depression, and so by the end of the 1930s he was very interested in the Christian, Islamic and Marxist traditions and what they could contribute to social change.

At 17, Smith had visited Egypt with his parents, sparking his interest in Arabic. His father, was a strict Presbyterian who had opposed the formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925, and his mother was an American Methodist, a lover of religious poetry and a descendant of the Cory family, the women of which had been persecuted during the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s. While in university, Smith became an active socialist in the Student Christian Movement.

After graduating, Smith moved to the UK to pursue an MA at Cambridge University under the guidance of the famous Orientalist scholar H.A.R. Gibb. Smith’s thesis was rejected due to his sharp criticism of the British approach to Hindu-Muslim relations in India. Not discouraged, Smith decided to go to India himself, and by 1941 had found a position teaching Islamic history at Forman Christian College in Lahore. He would stay there until 1949.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Iqbal, who had spent most of his life in Lahore, had passed away in that city in 1938. His work was already widely discussed in his lifetime, but after his death, as the question of Pakistan began to loom large on the horizon, Iqbal became increasingly relevant, especially in the intellectual circles in Lahore. This is where Smith “met” Iqbal.

Iqbal puzzled the young Canadian. Smith had come to India with the stated aim of helping the Indians—on the scholarly front—in their struggle for independence. To do this, Smith felt the need to first categorize Indian thought leaders into “reactionaries” and “progressives”. Iqbal didn’t fall neatly into any category, and Smith quickly became engaged with his work.

Smith’s first book, Modern Islam in India (1943), discussed Iqbal in detail:

“Muhammad Iqbal summoned the sleeping Muslims to awake. […] Throughout his life he devoted himself to inciting activity, to insisting eloquently that life is movement, that action is good, and the universe is composed of processes, and not of static things. He bitterly attacked the attitudes of resignation and quiet contentment, the religious valuation of mere contemplative, passivity, and withdrawal from strife. […] Above all, his Islam repudiated the conception of a fixed universe dominated by a dictator God and to be accepted by servile men. In its place he would put a view of an unfinished growing universe, ever being advanced by man and by God through man. Iqbal’s prime function was to lash men into furious activity, and to “imbue the idle looker with restless impatience.” Life is not [only] to be contemplated but to be passionately lived.” [5]

Throughout the 1940s, Smith continued to engage with Iqbal, especially on the question of religion as a driving force of individual and, as a consequence, social change.

The experience of living in Lahore during the Partition and seeing the breakdown of long-thriving relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs contributed to his growing interest in comparative religion, a field in which he would do pioneering work in North America. (Through his work he would also establish himself as the greatest Canadian-born scholar of Islam. [6])

But before that, he brought the inspiration he had found in Iqbal’s work to Canada. In 1952, Smith, who was teaching at McGill University in Montreal at the time, founded the university’s Institute of Islamic Studies (IIS) and the Islamic Studies Library, the first of their kind of North America. (He later also established the Department of Religion at Dalhousie University in Halifax.)

In a speech in Lahore in 1951, Smith had announced his intention to establish the IIS in North America because Iqbal had studied intellectual engagement with the Islamic tradition, especially by Muslims but also by non-Muslims. Sheila McDonough, one of Smith’s first students at the IIS, said that he thought of the IIS as “applied Iqbal”: every student had to learn four languages, every non-Muslim student had to spend time in the Muslim world, and half the faculty and even staff had to be Muslims. [7]

The IIS was the reason that many young Muslims immigrated to Canada, and thus it became the conduit through which the community developed. One of the first students, for example, was Hammouda Abdalati, a graduate of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, who later became an imam at the Al-Rashid Mosque in Edmonton and wrote Islam in Focus, considered one of the best introductions to Islam for the North American audience. [8]

Many others who were involved with the IIS also went on to play important roles within the community, including Talat Muinuddin, a founding member of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. [9]

As a scholarly institution, the IIS also brought in⁠—to study, teach, or both⁠—some of the world’s top scholars on Islam, thus putting Canada on the map for its contributions to research on Islam. These include, for example, Toshihiko Izutsu, Niyazi Berkes, Fazl ur-Rahman Malik, Sajida Alvi and Wael Hallaq. By 2015, more than 100 theses on Islam had been published by IIS students, including several on Iqbal. [10]

Sheila McDonough has said that all of this happened because Smith had gone to Lahore and read Iqbal’s Bang-e-Dara, though of course he was influenced by much more than that. But it does remind us, again, of Iqbal’s enduring impact in Canada, and the need to remember the ways that inspiration criss-crosses our world.

[1] Freda Hawkins, Canada and Immigration: Public Policy and Public Concern (2nd ed.) (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 99.

[2] For more on the history of the early Muslim community in Montreal, http://mrsp.mcgill.ca/reports/html/MuslimHistory/index.htm#30.

[3] Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, “Transcending Space: Recitation and Community among South Asian Muslims in Canada”, in Barbara Metcalf (ed.), Making Muslim Space: Mores, Mosques and Movements in Europe and North America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 53.

[4] Muzaffar Iqbal, “Prayer Call in the Wilderness: Iqbal in Canada”, in Nadeem Shafiq Malik (ed.), Perspectives on Allama Iqbal: A World Survey of the Iqbal Studies (Lahore: Fiction House, 2015), 25.

[5] Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis (Lahore: Minerva Book Shop, 1943), 119; for more discussion, see Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and Arvind Sharma (eds.), The Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017).

[6] Amir Husain, “The Canadian Face of Islam: Muslim Communities in Toronto”, PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2001, 14.

[7] Iqbal, 2015, 37-8.

[8] Ibid, 38.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 36.