SHAH WALIULLAH AND IQBAL

(16.9.1982)

Iqbal's relevance for the Muslim's of the 20th century, and especially for the Pakistani Muslims today, is the same kind as the relevance of Shah Wali Ullah for the Indian Muslims of the 18th century. Both were the 'Mujaddids' of their times.

The concept of "Mujaddid" is a concept of the age of crisis. A Mujaddid (a renewer, a renovator, a reformer, a moderniser) is aware of the danger to the community, and hence to Islam itself, because of a degeneration of the political, economic, cultural, or military power of the community, or of all of them together. This awareness prompts him to a profound rethinking of the causes of social decay and to suggest ways and means of a regeneration of Muslim society in the light of Islamic principles.

Shah Waliullah (1703-1762) lived in a time of crisis for the Muslim community which was similar to the crisis we are facing today. In his time the crisis was limited to the Muslim society in India , while we are faced with a crisis which is world-wide and the Muslims as a whole - in the entire world - are involved in it.

In a way today's crisis is the continuation of the crisis of the 18th century, because the source as well as the effect of both crises is the same. The source is the degeneration of Muslim society as a whole 'which has rendered it incapable of adjusting its thinking and behaviour patterns with a changed view of reality and of social organisation. The effect is the inability of Muslim society to defend its independent existence and its freedom of action against encroachment of alien powers and foreign societies. The challenge is posed in terms of the simple existential choice: either you change yourself or go under.

This is how Shah Wali Ullah saw the challenge:

"As for the condition of the Muslims it is this: the servants of the king who numbered more than a hundred th9usand, comprising foot soldiers as well as horsemen, used to be moneyed men and fief holders. The negligence of the King brought them to such a pass that the fief holders cannot maintain control and administration of their fiefs .. Nobody tries to understand that this is a result of inaction. When the treasury of the King became defunct there was no money for the serving class. Consequently all the servants scattered abroad and took the begging bowl in their hands. Nothing remained of the Kingdom except its name. When the King's men are in this plight you can figure out the condition of the stipend holders and merchants and craftsmen …

In short the condition of the Muslim community is pitiable. Currently whatever is left of the work of administration in the King's government is in the hands of the Hindus, since none other than them are Mutasaddis (accountants) and Karkuns (Managers). All wealth has got concentrated in their houses. A cloud of poverty and suffering is looming over the heads of the Muslims. In short this is the nature of the power of non-Muslims in the country of Hindustan which I have described, and the weakness of the Muslims has reached the limits which I have specified …

"If, God forbid, the dominance of paganism (Kufr) continues to prevail in this wise, the Muslims will forget Islam, and in a very short time this Muslim nation will be transformed into such a nation that the distinction between Islam and non-Islam will disappear …”

This is an extract from the lengthy letter that Shah Wali Ullah wrote to Ahmed Shah Abdali. There is much more in it than what I have quoted - about the various rebellious and fissiparous forces, like the refractory Subedars, the Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, etc. but the essence of the matter is that he was trying to point out the basic economic and organisational causes of the weakness of the central power and the corrosive effects that this weakness was going to have on the individual morale and the national identity of the Muslims. We mayor may not agree with the solution that Shah Waliullah thought of to meet the crisis - namely the invitation to Abdali to come and save the empire - but we can appreciate his diagnosis of the crisis that had over - taken the Muslim society.

Abdali could deal - and deal most effectively - with the menace of the Marathas, but their place was taken by a number of other hostile forces, above all the British, while the inner disintegrative force of Muslim authority and Muslim society continued unabated. The reorganisation did not take place and by the end of the century the British became the real masters of the empire.

Shah Waliullah's venture failed, but his ideological .influence continued to play its role in the 19th century to at least save the national identity of the Indian Muslims. There were other political and religious leaders who played their part but certainly the family of Shah Waliullah through the dissemination of his reformist ideas contributed a great deal.

Their methods were defensive, and they continued to work and think within the framework of a feudal political and economic structure. Those who succeeded them preserved the form of Muslim thought but failed to regenerate its meaning. This resulted in their socially static and politically reactionary role in the 20th century right up to today. Their basic weakness was that they were totally unaware of the techniques and methods of a reorganisation of Muslim society which would be relevant to the change in the system of .civilisation that had taken place in the world, and with the coming of the British was now dominating the feudal forms of .India.

In the 19th century various personalities in the Muslim world, among them Jamaluddin Afghani and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, representing two opposing poles of modem consciousness, tried to come to grips with the problem of reorganisation of the Muslim society to meet the challenge posed by the new civilisation that continued to dominate and further expand its conquest over the Muslim world as well as the rest of the world.

But it is only with Iqbal that we arrive at a kind of personality equipped with the intellectual instruments and methods which were necessary for the reorganisation envisaged by the reformers from Shah Waliullah to Afghani. He had the same anguished sense of crisis which we have seen in the case of Shah Waliullah, and the same recognition of the imminent danger to the national identity of the Muslims -the danger of extinction:

"The most critical moment in the history of the Indian Muslims has arrived. Do your duty or cease to exist."

We are well aware of the political dimension of Iqbal's thought and vision in the form of a separate national state of the Muslims of India. But while paying tribute to him on this aspect of his work we quite forget the other, and more important, part of his thought - the one which relates to the inner change of character of the individual and the community. Without realising this fact we would be negating the political aspect of his teaching as well.

In the course of a discussion of the meaning of his Persian MASNAVIS, (in a letter to Dr. Nicholson) Iqbal described the objective he had before him:

"My aim is simply to discover a universal social reconstruction, and in this endeavour I find it philosophically impossible to ignore a social system which exists with the express object of doing away with all the distinctions of caste, rank and race: and which while keeping a watchful eye on the affairs of this world, fosters a spirit of other worldliness so absolutely essential to man in his relations with his neighbours".

This quotation has to be considered carefully to grasp the particular ideal that Iqbal had in front of him, and which differs in its emphasis from that of Shah Waliullah. And this is due to the different contexts in which both men lived.

Shah Waliullah was a great scholar --much: much, greater than Iqbal --of Islamic religious lore, and could speak with uncontrovertible authority on the metaphysical, spiritual, social and legal aspects of the SHARIA T and the DEEN. But his perspective was limited to the medieval culture and social, political, economic forms of the feudal age. He was not at all aware of the great changes that had come about in the human consciousness of the world and of the universe, and the related transformation of human society from the feudal to the modern organisational principles. Human relationships, and patterns of human thinking and behaviour had changed. The medieval world view and feudal modes of thinking and behaviour could not compete with the new human consciousness and new social organisation of modern Europe . Within fifty years of the death of Shah Waliullah this new mode of human thinking, behaviour and organisation had swept away the entire medieval structure within which he was born and bred and beyond which he could not think. If the Muslim people of India had to survive they had to understand and know the meaning of the change that had come about, not merely in their limited world of India and Islam but in the whole wide world outside. They had to cease to be insular and come to terms with the outer world.

In an essay written as far back as 1909 ("Islam as a moral and political idea"), while stressing the necessity of establishing Muslim's own institutions of modern knowledge, and fully conscious of the nature of the crisis that we were facing in a hostile world, Iqbal said:

"In order to be truly ourselves we ought to have our own schools, our own colleges, our own social and historical traditions, making us good and peaceful citizens, and creating in us that free but law abiding spirit which evolves out of itself the noblest types of political virtue. I am quite sensible for the difficulties that lie in our way, all that I can say is, that if we cannot get over our difficulties, the world will soon get rid of us."

By the time that Iqbal had come on the scene the world was in a way preparing to get rid of us. We had continued smugly to watch history moving forward, in our country and in the rest of the world, and were content in the belief that the Ummah of the Prophet (peace be upon him) could not be eliminated. We had forgotten that time does not wait for any nation, howsoever holy its origin and foundation and that "God does not change the condition of a people unless they exert to change it themselves."

It is the changing of the condition of the Muslim people everywhere that has been on the cards for these many hundreds of years. Iqbal was interested in finding out the mechanism, while the conservative minded religious scholars continued to bask in the reflected glory of the vanished power of their forefathers.

Iqbal's emphasis is on change -change in the inner condition of the Muslim nations and peoples. It is a change from the medieval thinking, patterns of social, political, economic, educational behaviour relevant to a feudal society to the patterns of thinking and behaviour of a modern society. Only a modern Muslim society can contend with, and coexist with, the non-Muslim modern societies. And there is no time to wait, or "the world will get rid of us."

With this anguished sense of the crisis that has overtaken the backward Muslim peoples of the world Iqbal addressed himself to the essential task of a reconstruction of Islamic thinking. How to be Islamic and modern at the same time. That is the task we have been faced with.

Iqbal set out the essential terms of this task in its philosophical, legal, and political aspects. His word is not final, but nobody among the present day Muslims has yet gone beyond the limits of even Iqbal's thinking, and we have to at least consider the purport of his view of the possible manner in which we can reconstruct our thought.

NOTES:

1. Published in Mag. 16.9.82.