Iqbal Singh Sevea is interested in the socio-cultural, political and intellectual histories of modern South Asia. His new book, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2012), uses the controversial South Asian Muslim intellectual, Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), as a foil to a broader analysis of the engagement between Muslim intellectuals and western socio-political thought. Instead of assuming a fixed Islamic political tradition, the book explores contesting interpretations of Islam, which emerged in South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often through deep entanglement with western political thought from Nietzsche to Marx.
