From a historical perspective, Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed of the University of Stockholm and Professor Shamsul Islam of the University of Delhi classified the Muslims of the subcontinent into two categories during the era of the Indian independence movement: Indian nationalist Muslims (individuals who opposed the partition of India) and Indian Muslim nationalists (individuals who desired to create a separate country for Indian Muslims). The All India Azad Muslim Conference represented Indian nationalist Muslims, while the All-India Muslim League represented the Indian Muslim nationalists. One such popular debate was the Madani–Iqbal debate.
Historical foundations
During the medieval era, an Islamicate society in the Indian subcontinent that originated from Persianate culture that spread the religion amongst Indians, resulting in the rise of powerful Muslim kingdoms such as the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. The Islamization of India resulted in the birth of a new distinct Indo-Muslim culture or civilization, which, by assimilating many aspects of Indian culture in customs, social manners, architecture, painting and music, not only established its separate identity from other Muslim peoples such as the Persians, etc, but also simultaneously maintained the distinctiveness of this new Indo-Muslim culture from the former Hindu India by being essentially Indo-Persian in character. This is seen as a conscious decision of the Muslims of India. Thus an Indo-Muslim cultural identity existed as a distinct group both in relation to Hindu India and the rest of the Ummah and the Muslim World. The assumption of the Muslims of India of belonging to a separate identity, and therefore, having a right to their own country, also rested on their pre-eminent claim to political power, which flowed from the experience of Muslim dominance in India. According to the historian Qureshi, the distinctiveness of Muslim India could only be maintained by the political domination of the Muslims over the Hindus. Any sharing of political power with the Hindus was considered dangerous and the first step towards the political abdication of the Indian Muslims. Although a religiously informed cultural identity did not translate automatically into what came to be understood by the 1920s as communalism and separatism, there had been a sense of religiously informed cultural differences in the subcontinent long before the encounter with Western colonialism.
Ideological foundations
The first organized expressions began with Muslim scholars and reformers like Syed Ahmed Khan, Syed Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan who had an influential major hand in the Indian independence movement.
Expression of Muslim separatism and nationhood emerged from modern Islam's pre-eminent poet and philosopher, Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal and political activists like Choudhary Rahmat Ali.
Variants
Indian Muslim Nationalism
The nationalism espoused by Sayyid Ahmad Khan defined Indo-Muslim identity as a distinctive cultural identity in relation to both Hindu India and to the rest of the Ummah or the Muslim World. Muslim rule had resulted in the development of the Indo-Muslim culture marked by Indo-Persian influences, which was exclusive to the Indian Muslims, the foremost symbol of which was the Urdu language. At the core of his views was the romanticization of Muslim rule in India at the historic realm, which identified it as an exclusive possession of the collective national memory of the Indian Muslims.