The Other Iqbal and the Other in Iqbal
By Dr
Muhammad Maroof Shah
15 July
2020
Allama
Mohammad Iqbal
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Unlike
Holderlin and Rilke, Iqbal is still awaiting his Heidegger, who could
appropriate and present him for the post-Nietzschean world audience. Unlike
Heidegger, he has received little attention from great philosophers and
theologians of the world. Even the Muslim world has been largely ignoring him
or just packaging his complex and enormously fecund and subtle mystical and
metaphysical insights into some neat and clear formulations. Due attention to
his existential and metaphysical thought has been overshadowed by overemphasis
on his political thought. He has so far been written off by major histories of
philosophy into margins of modern Muslim thought through his vast output was
addressed to modern man as such and not to the Muslims only.
Under his
unique literary genius and combining all traditionally-recognised approaches to
the Ultimate – poetry, philosophy, religion and mysticism – has immense power
to speak to an age marred by various crises that fundamentally spring from
haunting nihilism (even violence from fundamentalism has been understood in the
backdrop of pathologies of nihilism and reactions to them) and is seeking in
art and poetry its redemption. If Holderlin, Rilke and Rumi have a worldwide
audience, if Gibran, Hesse, Borges and many other mystically inclined authors
are still popular, why can’t Iqbal the mystic, the poet, the sage have a
worldwide audience? There is an enormous scope for Iqbal who batted for Rumi
almost a century back, an Iqbal who read Nietzsche in mystical terms well
before his importance in the postmodern thought came to be widely explored along
this line, an Iqbal who formulated a mystical philosophy that addresses certain
concerns of the nihilistic age in an idiom that is not too alien to its ears,
an Iqbal who diagnosed decadence in the Western civilisation and suggested turn
East much before it became a rallying cry appropriated by counterculture poets
and some influential writers and philosophers, an Iqbal who championed passion,
vitality, individuality, freedom and faith in relationships and love in a
milieu that still longs for retrieving them in a dehumanising,
deindividualising homogenising mass culture.
In
post-Nietzschean times, where the spectre of nihilism keeps us haunting, it is
no longer the problem of cross and crescent or even atheism and theism or usual
binary of transcendence vs. immanence that man is asked to address
From the
perspective of the self with which Iqbal measures everything, what is most
significant is avoiding West/East binary, Cross/Crescent binary and even
tradition/modernity binary and thus Coloniser/Colonised category and moving on,
as a legitimate inheritor of God’s vast earth, creatively appropriating its
resources and rejecting political framing of human destiny. Iqbal the poet, the
philosopher, the mystic – as Muslim to Truth/Real – as compared to Iqbal the
ideologue of an ideology/theological formulations that could be passé or that
formed limited context or framed his more universal or comprehensive and
de-ideologised transcendence centric anthropology/autology – needs to be
emphasised in reading him in postmodern times. For Iqbal, salvation is won here
and now and he gives us, beyond posthumous framing of the question, “this
worldly” picture of what it means to believe. For him, belief is translatable
as love or vital act of appropriation of the whole universe. In
post-Nietzschean times, where the spectre of nihilism keeps us haunting, it is
no longer the problem of cross and crescent or even atheism and theism or usual
binary of transcendence vs. immanence that man is asked to address. The
question is of certain withdrawal of Being/Sacred to which not only Heidegger
but even Schuon testify due to movement of history or what is implied in the
doctrine of cycles or what our theology deals under the heading of end times
ordeal forcing “descent into Hell” of which theologians such as Altizer talk
about. Our saviours today are, according to many moderns including some
theologians like Altizer, sage writers. If art has partially substituted
religion in the (post)modern world, and there are great difficulties with
saving people with the traditionally received idiom of religious narratives,
the poets like Holderlin and Iqbal have much to help save many souls in the
post-theological and post-secular world. Iqbal appropriated major spiritual,
cultural and philosophical figures in his vast poetic corpus, especially Javid
Nameh, to illustrate the thesis of spiritual democracy here and salvific
inclusivism there. Even great secular figures like Nietzsche, Lenin and Marx
are respectfully accommodated in his inclusive picture. World religions are not
rejected as such though the uniqueness of Islam in comparison is stressed. Like
Levinas, he illustrates the universality of religion (Ad-din al-qayyim) through
Islamic particularism.
The problem
of redemption from the hell unleashed by nihilism is addressed by Iqbal in a
way that postmodern theology and key issues in philosophy of religion get
illumined. Nihilism is overcome by the burning for the meeting (and not
meeting) with the Beloved, by being open to the Call of the Other, by being
receptive, by negating the ego that seeks some other meaning than the meaning
one discovers when the ego recedes to the background. Iqbal’s RumooziBeykhudi
and the insight that the other is a projection of the self for its unfoldment
of riches or play, so to speak, and God forms the horizon of the self as the
latter is affirmed to the extent God’s proximity is achieved, underscores his
other-centrism. For him, the self gets fuller realisation by becoming open to
love, by witnessing itself in the presence of God/the Other. Iqbal speaks of
the garden, of music, of beauty, of intoxication of love and he gets access to
them by opening himself up to Reality, by transcending the cunning of the
conceptual intellect that posits dualities that separate or push us to the
narrow cocoon of the self-failing to love and that is what constitutes hell
from which great modern and postmodern thinkers seek an exit. No dualisms, no
need to comprehend but a drive to dissolve in the Mystery, to embrace life and
love unconditionally without imposing conditions conceptual intellect or
Faustian attitude demands. Iqbalian project of dealienation helps in
existential translation of theological notions that seem to posit otherworldly
stage for the resolution of key issues including salvation. Praying for a
fulfilled heart for which unceasing travel is itself a destination that keeps
the possibility of love alive, Iqbal overcomes anxiety and temptation of
secular utopianism. Iqbal lived the “unseen” world – the higher world – that is
invoked in mystics and artists. Prophets have brought the news from the nowhere
– the Netherland of spirit, of love, of living for the other that is
felicity/redemption. Jesus is love. Mystics or saints live the station of love.
We need to note the significance of Iqbalian appropriation of more traditional
Sufi lore and his advocacy of radical innocence before the Word/Truth/Being
resisting all ordinary representational linguistic and cognitive attempts that
Derridean and Heideggerian approaches have strongly questioned. Iqbal’s love
centrism is a way of affirming other centrism of which Levinas is a great
prophet in postmodern times.
Iqbal is
far more subtle and nuanced than hitherto recognised as can be, for instance,
noticed by cognisance of his appropriation of Bedil and Ghalib who are arguably
the key claimants for recognition in the postmodern milieu, his attention to
poetry and philosophy interface, his notion of intuitive reason, his notion of
immanent infinite and reworking of key Sufi notions for a more open-ended and
affirmatory ontology and his reading of apocalypse on almost Derridean lines
where Mahdi/Kingdom of God is the far off horizon of the present moment, an
event to be that is coterminous with what is unfolded in every coming and the
universe is never finished as is unfinished the wail of a lover for the
consummation of love.
Given
postmodern thinkers have sought to reclaim the Romantics for their ends, it is
instructive to note how Iqbal engaged with them. Iqbal found some echoes of his
own deeply felt perceptions in the Romantics and was never swayed by them
though he could, in his catholic genius, assimilate the best of their haunting
melodies of soul in exile seeking company in the ruins of modernity. Romantics
themselves were at heart medieval in sensibility, nostalgic about dying
relationships, peasant simplicity, freedom of spirit and imagination, beauty
and splendour of nature. They couldn’t accept key claims of modernity and its
attendant secularisation though they were converts to its promises of freedom
and liberty and justice. Modernity had succeeded in weaning most of them away
from traditional founts of transcendence but they sought to evade corrosive
nihilism in its wake by rediscovering albeit in some demythologised and impoverished
form the Platonic realm of eternity, inspiration, love and imagination. Iqbal
though a devotee of tradition couldn’t afford disengagement with the emerging
worldview that overturned almost everything traditional. He “appropriated”
tradition for facing modernity and all its alienating and nihilistic
undertones. The Romantics were fellow travellers in the path.
Aziz Ahmed
in his Iqbal: NaiTashkil, observes: “After having read all of Iqbal’s poetry,
one feels obliged to read a lot around him (to understand him), for example,
Rumi, Nietzsche, Bergson, al-Jili, Greek philosophy, ancient Hindu philosophy,
modern European philosophy, German, Latin and English poetry, Persian and Urdu
ghazal, and after having read all this when you come back to Iqbal you feel you
have yet to read a lot.” This intertextuality makes Iqbal hard to fix or frame
in absolutist terms in any system. He built heavily on the other texts that the
Quran requires to be read beside itself including cosmic Quran/Quran-e Takweeni
(“signs on the horizon”), history, psycho-spiritual phenomena (“signs within”).
One can’t finish reading him and he becomes open-ended quest instead of
finished realised vision. Iqbal is all ears, ever seeking newer horizons, never
ready for union or settling at any station, ever striving to approximate the
unattainable or supremely Transcendent though He lives as “Immanent Infinite”
as well. Iqbal while every inch a proud Muslim honours great sage, saints,
philosophers, religious and most of the secular figures of the non-Islamic
world.
Iqbal
initiated many debates which continue to attract the interest of scholars
worldwide. We have not produced another Iqbal. We have not finished reading and
understanding him. His vision remains to be realised. He constitutes an
invitation to keep quest alive as newer revelations of Being are pouring in
every moment. Beyond the framing and conceptual tools of binary logic and
language, sciences and ideologies, and fixation with absolutes on this side of
the grave, Iqbal calls for love’s and Imagination’s unfinished and unending
work that is life when lived from its depths. Being an “unattainable quest,”
the Other/God is never possessed but every approximated. Justice is never fully
done as Derrida would say as the need for a struggle against all kinds of
oppression and need for the martyrdom of Hussains never ceases. Man lives in
tension with the Other and life of ego is this tension and this never ceases.
Poetry and philosophy keep wonder alive and life becomes a Question that has no
given or final answer. One must learn to live with the Question or as the
Question as Voegelin would argue.
If
postmodern thought is read as a pagan rejection of transcendence,
absolutisation of relativism, impossibility of knowledge and access to liberating
meaning or truth or fashionable obeisance to the notion of the death of God as
most Muslim and Indo-Pakistani critics of it (from Jalaul Haq in his
Postmodernity, Paganism and Islam to Ahmed Javed), Iqbal launches a war against
it as a new idol of the West. However, if read as quasi-mystical, other
centric, justice centric, wonder centric, art inflected, compassion oriented,
open-ended quest, Iqbal has something to say in which philosophers as diverse
as Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida and the post-secular post-theological world
would be interested.
Dr
Muhammad Maroof Shah is a columnist who has masters in Philosophy and doctorate
in English literature
Original
Headline: Reading Iqbal in Postmodern
Times: invitation to the other Iqbal and the other in Iqbal
Source: The Daily Times
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