RELEVANCE OF IQBAL

(9.9.1982)

Ever since the fall of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century -soon after the death of Aurangzeb -the Muslim people of the subcontinent have been living through an age of crisis.

It is not merely a crisis of our own situation in the sub- continent, but a universal crisis of the Muslim Ummah as a whole. While in the 18th century we were merely mourning the loss of our power and glory in India in the 19th and 20th centuries we were faced with the prospect of the elimination of our political, economic, social and cultural independence throughout the world. One after another the European powers overpowered the various kingdoms and states of the Muslims from the far east of Asia to the far west of Africa . By the beginning of the 20th century we saw the great Ottoman Empire of the Turkish Khalifas tottering to a fall before the combined onslaught of the West, at first in Europe and then in Asia and Africa as well. The process was completed at the end of the 1st World War, when the dominions of the Caliphate were partitioned amongst the victorious European powers.

The victory of the West was symbolically clinched - for the Muslims as a whole - when General Allenby entered Jerusalem at the head of a mixed soldiery of Arabs and Europeans, and declared in front of the first Qibla of the Muslims the successful conclusion of the crusades. The West had finally overcome the world of Islam.

The period between the two world wars was full of crises but their nature now was different. From the far west in Morocco to the far east in Indonesia , through Africa and Asia the subjugated. Muslim peoples were rising in revolt against their Western conquerors. These rebellions, brutally suppressed again and again, finally attained their objectives in the decade after the end of the 2nd world war. But the age of crisis for the Muslim Ummah was not yet over.

Weakened, impoverished, divided as they were by long periods of alien rule and the free play of internal forces of decay and disintegration, the Muslim nations have continued to be an easy prey of Western intrigue, dictation and domination.

While other nations, even in the 3rd world, seem to .be going ahead and reorganizing themselves for their independent role in world affairs, the Muslim peoples still seem to be going round and round in circles, and getting deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of confusion and despondency.

Occasionally, we seem to be possessed by a euphoria of our power today and dreams of our possible glory in a not too distant future. We start thinking in terms of leading the rest of the world, if not of converting it wholesale to Islam. Some among us have even given evidence of Alexandrian delusions of world conquest.

But such moments are brief. We in Pakistan have had a great many periods of temporary exaltation and in spite of our repeated sad experiences of disillusionment in the last three decades continue to nurse our illusions of grandeur.

We believe that the Muslim Ummah is a great power in the world. And some of the ingredients of greatness are certainly there.

The Ummah has a vast territory. It straddles across three continents, and is now said to be spilling over into the fourth and the fifth continents as well, if our fundamentalist publicists are to be believed.

The Ummah is rich. It is fabulously rich. Its oil barons are as rich as Qaroon who is mentioned in the Quran. They have bought themselves palaces in all the metropolises and hot spots of the world. Some of them have palaces which fly in the air.

They have so much hard currency -about one half of the total currency reserves of the world -that if they thought of withdrawing their deposits from American and European banks they would bust those banks and bring the world money market crashing down.

The Ummah is rich in resources. It has in its possession more than half of the world's resources of oil. The whole of Europe would turn into a dark continent, with its giant industrial cities grinding to a halt, if the Arabs stopped the flow of oil. It has been done before - the famous "oil weapon" was used in 1973, and the world has not recovered from the crippling effects of that exercise in economic blockade.

The Ummah is not lacking in human resources. It comprises nearly a thousand million people round the world - a number greater than that of the Chinese, greater than the Hindus, greater than the Christians.

The Ummah has well equipped armies at its disposal. It has Egyptians, Sudanese, Algerians, Libyans, Moroccans, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, Omanians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Malaysians - and so many others. In many of these lands generals commanding well armed forces are at the same time heads of state. And yet we have had to witness the strange spectacle of this entire mass of humanity - rich, resourceful, well armed - silently and unconcernedly watching the Israeli invasion of Lebanon , the massacre of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children, and the forced evacuation from Beirut of a few thousand ill armed Palestinian guerrillas.

Of course there has been much activity at the UN and in the capitals of the member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. But much of this activity has been rhetorical.

In most crises that have struck the individual countries and states of the Ummah in the last three decades all the action of the Ummah has been merely rhetorical. In every case - the massacre of 1947 partition of the sub-continent - the defeat in Kashmir, defeat in Palestine 1948, the crisis of Pakistan in 1965, the Arab defeat in 1967, Pakistan's defeat in 1971, the uncertain victory of the Arabs in 1973, the betrayal at Camp David, the crisis of Pakistan in 1977, - the Ummah has responded by silence, or by empty rhetoric.

The power and unity of the Ummah had already proved a myth in the course of these successive crises. In the present crisis even its claim of being an entity of any kind has proved to be a joke.

We need not go into the causes -internal and external - to which we can attribute the inability of the Muslim countries to respond, unitedly and with force, to the challenges that are being constantly thrown in their face. They' are obvious enough and too well known to be reiterated. One of the biggest causes is the close association of the ruling elite of most of the Muslim countries with the greatest enemy of the Ummah, namely Western Imperialism. This association, which is economic, political, and strategic (in military terms as well), lies at the root of the problem. As Iqbal regarded the orthodox Mullah, the miracle-maki

As Allama Iqbal said in "Pas cheh Beyad Kard",

-"The wound from him, the lancet from him, the needle from him;

-We are drowned in rivers of blood (by him) and from him we have expectation of getting our wounds sown."

In any case the causes are obvious. What concerns us here is the effect of all this on our culture, especially our literary culture in Pakistan .

The general reaction of the literary artist in Pakistan to this prevailing situation of decadence, disintegration and apathy in the Islamic world is that they have lost the idealism which marked their youthful consciousness of thirty years ago. There is a loss of confidence, hope has been replaced by despair, and involvement by cynicism and withdrawal. The disaster of 1971 was a stunning blow, and as Mr. Intizar Husain has revealed in his novel "Basti" it spelled for him the complete loss of an interest in the fate of the nation. He regards the events of 1971 as a kind of "national suicide". His feeling is that "the nation has stopped taking interest in creative processes. It has suffered a death of feeling." Further -"the nation is not serious about becoming a nation".

This is not merely the attitude of Mr. Intizar Husain. Most writers and intellectuals have arrived at the same conclusion, though they might not express their opinion in as clear and forthright terms as he has.

The recent growth and proliferation of a literature which is not merely unconcerned with the theme of the nation's fate but even with any social reference, is an indication of the writer's inability to respond to the collective in any manner whatsoever.

The political strife in the country in the last ten years, especially the total alienation of the people from any participation in the country's affairs, has added to the cynicism and de-idealisation of the writers as it has in the case of the other sections of society. Yet there are various modes in which this disillusionment expresses itself.

The first of these modes is a complete dissociation with political matters touching the people or the nation. The theory of a political literature has been evolved as an expression of this attitude. This theory which is represented in the critical writings of late Mr. Mohammad Hasan Askari, Mr. Salim Ahmed and Mr. Intizar Husain began by placing an unusual emphasis on form and style, mostly in terms of the tradition of Urdu literature of the period before Ghalib who was our first great modern poet. Later, especially towards the end of the life of Mr. Askari, it evolved a concept of tradition which had nothing any longer to do with literature or literary form and content, but with primordial metaphysical beliefs of mankind. Mr. Intizar interprets the tendency in terms of an eternal human condition which has been expressed in the ancient myth and medieval tradition. In any case it reflects a withdrawal of the literary artist from the present and from the complicated interests of the world today.

The second mode of the writers' response to the confusions and conflicts of the present situation is to become a pacifist and hope for the development of a polity - especially in terms of Indo-Pakistan reality -which should be without conflict and strife. Such is the attitude of those who actively promote such institutions as, the Prem Sabha. A large section of our intelligentsia is attracted towards such ideals. In his heart of hearts Mr. Intizar Husain has a soft corner for this tendency, although knowing as he does the deep seated sources of the conflict which gave rise to Muslim separatism and Pakistani nationalism he is not quite convinced about a hopeful outcome of such pacifist ventures. Besides he is a realist -in spite of his medieval romanticism - and an inveterate pessimist.

The third form of response is that of the new youth for whom the stress on the Islamic dimensions of our culture has been totally misplaced. Being moderns, and quite on an extremist plane, they think religion to have been responsible for much of the troubles of humanity. For them, with the existentialists of the West, the human condition is a perpetual absurdity and their experiences of last three decades have proved it. Hence they are opposed to all the religious motivations of human action -including Pakistani. They take refuge in pure imagism and concrete sensuous experience.

The fourth attitude which is yet unformed is a kind of reverting to the position of Iqbal.

Iqbal's main contribution to the growth of consciousness of our people was a sense of the continuity of our national self. Born in the midst of the process of the downfall of Muslim empires, he not only witnessed the end of the process but the beginning of a new upsurge among the Muslim peoples and their aspiration towards a future which could he created and moulded by themselves.

For him this process was not a repetition of what had gone before, but a new beginning on the basis of the new world forces of the masses of people which were asserting themselves throughout humanity. Most of the Islamist commentators on Iqbal today merely stress his vision of a separate country for the Indian Muslims. Or they emphasise his idea of the subjective Islamic vitalism of the national self. In the process they interpret his meaning in such a way as to make it correspond with the most orthodox, and even reactionary, of the present day fundamentalism. As a matter of fact Iqbal was a revolutionary who, while insisting on the continuity of the Muslim national self, conceived of that continuity only in a revolutionary dimension. Iqbal regarded the orthodox Mullah, the miracle-making landlord fir who exploited his Murids, and the medievalist monarchs, as the three major opponents of the Muslim people, who had to be eliminated before the Muslim societies could be reorganised and become viable in the modern world. He regarded these three groups as the closest allies of capitalism and Imperialism which were the real enemies of Islam and of humanity.

Iqbal being a thorough revolutionary knew that these tasks could not be accomplished without a reinterpretation of the received Islamic doctrine. Much of his poetry and the whole of his prose is an attempt at such are-interpretation. Unfortunately this essential aspect of his work has not been given the attention it deserves, especially by the younger generation. That task has to be undertaken if we are to emerge from the slough of despondency into which we have sunk on account of repeated failures of the Muslim Ummah to meet the challenges of the time. Indeed it is the only way.

NOTES:

1. Published in Mag. 9.9.82.