IQBAL AND MULLAHCRACY

(4.12.1974)

My call for going back to Iqbal as a source of our cultural revolution has been taken by some friends as a variety of regression in thought. In their opinion Iqbal's writings are a weapon in the hands of the Mullah to strike against the revolution in life and culture which is presently taking shape in our country as well as in other countries of the Muslim world.

This is a strange situation -culturally as well as politically. It is strange because it was precisely Mullahism and its deathly orthodoxy and obscurantism which was the target of Iqbal's religious criticism and satiric verse. Through out his life Iqbal was a bitter critic of the Mullah, and, conversely, the Mullah was anathematising him as long as he lived, as a kafir. Even now, when his works have become grist to the mill of a resurgent Mullahism, the Mullahs are very careful how they quote him for their purposes. For instance they never quote anything by him written directly in denunciation of the Mullahs, and there are umpteen places in his poetry and prose where he holds up the Mullah to scornful ridicule and satirical laughter as the symbol of social, intellectual and political backwardness, of perversion of the message of Islam, of using the word of God for materialistic and pecuniary benefits, of ignorance and sloth, of cheating the gullible, simple-minded Muslim masses -in fact of acting as an exclusive Brahmanic caste in the body- politic of the Muslims, Mullahs -these "brahmins of Ka'aba" are being worshipped in Iqbal's opinion, "like idols", “His (Mullah's) task is to mis-educate nations and peoples".

"These law-interpreters of the Haram are so lacking in purpose, that, instead of changing themselves, they change the Quran." "What should these poor Imams of two 'rakaats' understand what the nation means or what it is to lead the nations." " -The drunkenness of words". - One could go on quoting ad infinitum from Iqbal's poems, his philosophical writings and his letters, what he thought of the Mullahs.

That there was a reciprocal antagonism from the side of the Mullahs to Iqbal's life and thought is not so well-known today because in recent years he has been adopted as a "rahmat-ullah-alaih" by the Mullahcracy now prevailing in our politics. Since our younger intelligentsia has no patience to study their own history nor the changes in political, religious and philosophical ideas which have been going on among our people in modern times, they take for granted the version of Iqbal which the Mullahs in our political and educational institutions have been dishing out to them. Unless they look into their own history as well as the conflicts - religious and philosophical -which have been going on in the Muslim world for the last two hundred years, our revolutionary intellectuals will never be able to play any significant role in our politics. They continue to mouth Marxian phrases -taken from here and there -without realising that Marxism is not a dogma of any kind but essentially a scientific method of historical analysis. What they ought to have been doing at the beginning of their revolutionary work is the analysis of our own history rather than blind application to our conditions of the historical analysis done in the Christian European context by Marx and his European followers. They do not understand, if they at all know, what Marx meant when he named Islam as the "Islamic Revolution" - certainly not what Maudoodites are trying to enact in our country.

Islam was a revolutionary force in the period of heyday of the slave empires which held sway over the major part of human civilisation at the time that it arose. The miracle of the quick spread of Islam, and the tumbling of the slave empires of the Romans, the Sassanians and the Hindus before its sweep, is a fact of history, and anybody who wishes to understand our history, whether in Pakistan or in the rest of the world, must wade through all the mass of historical literature which has been left behind by our historians, and arrive at independent conclusions on the basis of this study so that we can come to some rational understanding of our present in the light of our past.

The greatest significance of Iqbal's work is that he began this tremendous work all by himself, and in the teeth of all the Mullahs of his time who were thirsting for his blood for having challenged their authority as interpreters of not only our history but also our religion. He has not insisted on the finality of his conclusion. Not being a Mullah he did not have the dogmatic pride of the Mullah, for whom Islam is restricted to what he has to say about it. Iqbal pointed out that the revolutionisation of religious thinking, which meaning he gave to Ijtihad, was not possible by taking the traditional schools of Fiqh as the be-all and end-all of Islam. It was necessary in his -opinion to go back to the original authority of the Quran as adduced by Caliph Omar, whom he called "the first critical and independent mind in Islam." Iqbal said categorically that "the claim of the present generation of Muslim liberals to re-interpret the foundational legal principles, in the light of their own experience and the altered conditions of modern life, is in my opinion. perfectly justified. The teaching of the Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessor, should be permitted to solve its own problems." (Recon.5troction p. 168) He denounced the concept that "the door of Ijtihad is closed", as pure fiction.

His most breath-taking idea however, was that the" power of Ijithad should be transferred "from individual representatives of schools to a Muslim legislative assembly, which, in view of the growth of opposing sects, is the only possible form the Ijma' can take in modern times." (Reconstruction p. 174).

This was the biggest attack on Mullahcracy that Iqbal launched, and in the light of what he said, the special position of the Mullahs in a Muslim country is reduced to zero; hence the 'fatwas' of 'kufr' which Iqbal had to face. At one stroke he had taken away not only the bread and butter of this "herd of ignoramuses" posing as doctors of law, but also made them appear in their true colours -as enemies of all change in the dynamic structure of Islamic faith.

These were dangerous thoughts. Even as the thought that the responsibility for ossification in Islamic life was a result of what Iqbal called "the Arab imperialism" -to distinguish the fundamental principles of Islam from the lust for conquest with which tHey were identified in the times after the Khulafa-i-Rashedin.

Iqbal's works were anathema to the Mullahcracy of his time for another reason. He refused to accept the Mullah's bifurcation of 'deen' and 'Duniya', of 'spirit' and 'matter', of 'sacred' and 'secular.'

"Agar na ho tujhe uljhan, to !
khol kar keh doon
Wajood-i,.Hazrat -i- Insan na

rooh hai na badan."

-Zarb-i-Kaleem.

(If you do not get confused, I shall say so openly: the being of man is neither spirit nor matter.).

Basing himself on the Unitarian principle of the Quran Iqbal resolved this dichotomy. He said, "The truth, however, is that matter 'is' spirit in space-time reference. The unity called man is body when you look at it as acting in regard to what we call the external world; it is mind or soul when you look at it as acting." In the light of this he went on to say, "All that is secular is therefore sacred in the roots of its being."

(Reconstruction, p. 154-155).

Such 'materialistic' and 'secularistic' concepts in Iqbal's work make him stand at the head of our cultural revolution only if we studied him, and understood the profound revolutionary meanings of his philosophy. The Mullah has - after his death. adopted him and turned him into an image of what he was fighting against. But then the Mullah being an 'idol' and a 'Brahmin' in his essence, cannot conceive of even Iqbal, his adversary except as an idol. Iqbal is of course only a modem phenomenon. Even Islam has been turned by the Mullah into an idol - in his own image.

NOTES:

1. Published in The Pakistan Times. 4.12.74.