Allama Iqbal's Address came at a time when Muslim India was passing through a great crisis. To be or not to be was the question before the Muslim nation. This was because Whitehall was the venue of a secret concord arrived at between the traditionally Pro-Hindu Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald and the narrow minded Hindu leadership thinking in terms of Hindu Raj under the aegis of the British. They agreed on a scheme of constitutional reforms providing for a strong Centre with Hindu position being further strengthened by the inclusion of Princes in a Federation of India.

Allama Iqbal found a God-sent opportunity to project his views when he was elected as the President of the Allahabad Session of the All India Muslim League. The result was the historic Address he delivered, declaring that the destiny of Indian Muslims lay in the establishment of a North-Western Muslim National State comprising Punjab, Sind, N.W.F.P., and Baluchistan. That was a bomb-shell for the British as well as the Hindus.

Allama Iqbal expressed his views as a student of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature. It was his firm belief that Islam was the major formative factor in the life history of Indian Muslims and it furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own. Iqbal had no hesitation in saying that "if the principle that the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian homeland is recognized as the basis of a permanent communal settlement, he will be ready to stake all for the freedom of India." He added; "The life of Islam in this country very largely depends on its centralization in a specific territory."

He regarded the Indian problem as international rather than a national one and he also had in his mind the possibility of the ultimate formation of the Muslim State. That is why he said; "I am not hopeless of an inter-communal understanding, but I cannot conceal from you the feeling that in the near future our community may be called upon to adopt an independent line of action to cope with the present crisis." He concluded saying that; "I do not wish to mystify anybody when I say that things in India are not what they appear to be. The meaning of this however, will dawn upon you only when you have achieved a real collective ego to look at them." And when the Muslim nation developed that collective ego, the result was Pakistan.