IQBAL AND OUR ISLAMIC IDENTITY

( 23-09-1982 )

IQBAL HAS been given a very high position in our society. He is not only regarded as one of the two founding fathers of Pakistan , but also as the pre-eminent authority on our ideology.

In our literary circles also his name is uttered with an awe-inspired regard and respect, although lately there has been a tendency to consider his ideas as well as his sentiments as outmoded. This does not appear in the form of a direct attack, although there is something of that also, as in Mr. Salim Ahmed, but rather in the indirect form of ignoring his message.

Among literary critics we find an emphasis on Iqbal's stylistic excellence which, through the application of structural and semantic methods, creates an abstract image of the poet devoid of his historical context as well as of his philosophical, political or social meaning. This is the best way of killing a poet. Even better than ignoring him. The trouble is that Iqbal is too recent and too tremendous a phenomenon to be ignored. And a large number of his verses and phrases have acquired too insistent a presence in our everyday speech. Who can excise his line " Gaya Daur-i- Sarmaya Dari Gaya" or "Utho Meri Dunya Ke Gharibon Ko Jaga Do" from the consciousness of our people? These verses have become proverbs because they are expressions of the deepest truths realised by our people through their life experience. You may say they have become clichés - but so are all proverbs turned into clichés if they are used mechanically and too often.

There is another method of ignoring Iqbal's meaning and his message. It is through misinterpreting and distorting his thought.

One way of doing this can be observed by listening to All India Radio or Indian Television programmes, where we find Iqbal's poetry reduced to the first few poems of Bang-i- Dara. Naturally these patriotic poems in praise of India and its physical features fit in perfectly with the national purposes of present day Indian nationalism.

Another way is the one used by our fundamentalists when they quote his poems from his pan-Islamic phase and the time of his disillusionment with the Western liberal ideals. The most dangerous use of his verses from this period is when the enemies of a national and democratic state of Pakistan make him out as, like themselves, an enemy of all nationalism and of democracy. In fact he is brought forth as a defender of fascist dictatorship. Unfortunately in this context they are assrited by no less a person than Dr. Javed Iqbal, Allama's own son, who is, because of this lineal connection regarded as the most credible authority on Iqbal's thought.

Fortunately for us, Pakistani nationalists and democrats, Iqbal has left behind not only his poetry -divided into various phases of his development and often expressing merely occasional responses to particular events and movements which might even be contradictory in their import -but also a large mass of prose through which we can get at the essence of his philosophical, political and social thought. These prose writings provide us with an authentic interpretation of his poetic thought as well as his comprehensive, connected and logically stated position on most of the important themes and subjects which are sought to be made the subject of un-informed and dogmatic misinterpretation by most Islamists today so that there is little left to choose between his thought and the thought of any Mullah.

The most important of his prose works is "the Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam", a series of six lectures (seven in fact as they were printed in book form in 1934) first delivered in Madras .

The book covers every facet of Iqbal's thought - his ideas on Being and Becoming, his theory of knowledge, his concept of God as ultimate reality, his view of ethics and morality, of the basic distinction of Islamic culture, Islamic law, and finally of the possibility of adjustment of Islam in the modern world.

The word "modern" has come to assume a rather negative sense with our Islamist intellectuals and almost as an antithesis of Islam. For the moralist it is synonymous with the permissive western society, for the spiritualist it means atheistic materialism for the authoritarian politician it connotes the people's rule, for the extreme fascists it comprises socialism. For Iqbal, however, it means the outgrowth of Islamic culture 'in terms of its fundamental principle of Inductive reason, which in his view is the greatest contribution of Islam to human thinking. That is why he is at home in the world of empirical, Western philosophy and its development in twentieth century science.

While the major part of Muslim intellectuals of his time either rejected their past or the present, Iqbal had the capacity to accept both. He was at home in the medieval civilisation created by Islam and in the modern civilisation which he regarded as itself rooted in and developed from Islamic civilisation not in its superficial aspects but in its essence as development of humanity through the conquest of Nature. There was no East or West for him on the intellectual plane, nor was there the rigid distinction between the past and the present. It was in this context that he aimed at a reconstruction of Muslim thought as well as of Muslim society.

Naturally this process involved the freedom of action of Muslim society. But Muslims throughout the world were enslaved, not only by the Imperialist powers in the political and economic sense, but also by their local inhibiting factors. There were certain elements within Muslim societies which had become obstructive to their growth and to the growth of their thought. Politically the greatest of these were Muslim monarchs who, in alliance with Imperialists, exploited and oppressed the people. Spiritually it was the class of decadent Sufis and Pirs (who had become exploiting landlords) who turned the common people into superstitious and uncomplaining sources of revenue. Intellectually they were kept unaware of the sense of reality and ignorant of their rights as human beings by the Mullahs who mentally lived in the world of Ptolemy and Aristotle.

As thralls of Muslim potentates, decadent Sufis, and ignorant Mullahs, the Muslims had no hope of taking up the challenge of the present day political, economic, social reality. Without .being free from within they could not fight against world imperialism which was their greatest enemy. Iqbal's greatest contribution to our uplift was that he made us realise the necessity of an inner change in individuals and societies. His was an educational effort of great importance, which is of as great relevance today as it was in his own life time.

His thought is by no means outmoded. In fact now more than ever is it timely, because we are stilt enslaved by our three internal enemies -the potentates (some of them now in the form of military dictators), the obscurantist Sufis (now propped up by new mystical cults in Imperialist countries), and the Mullahs (now organised into gangs of intriguers invested by Imperialists). And along with this we are up against an imperialism which has grown into a greater and much more sophisticated military machine.

What is worse, we have fallen prey to a new illusion. Previously, in Iqbal's time, we deluded ourselves with dreams of the past glory of our forefathers. Today, we are being deluded into believing that we have become great and powerful once again. It is only when we come up against such situations as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the humiliation of the Arab people, that we realise where we are and what we are.

Unfortunately our sense of reality too quickly is replaced by complacence and vainglory. And all the enemy forces join together to make us adopt this fatal attitude. Or we become totally cynical and give up thinking in terms of a Muslim people, or at least as a people who can even become free and organised.

And most of our intellectuals recognise our predicament. But again most of them fail to recognise the importance of Iqbal's thought in this context.

The real context for us, in intellectual terms, is the necessity of combining the factors both of "permanence" and "change" (as Iqbal called them) in our society and our culture.

The problem for us, as for Iqbal, was - how to be modern as well as Islamic. For a certain section of our intellectuals the problem has already been solved for us by time. In fact they believe that the time for us as a community is already over. As Intizar Husain has said, "The nation is not serious about becoming a nation".

In a way what these intellectuals feel in their mood of despair is not far different from the way Shah Wali Ullah felt about our destiny in the crises of the 18th century -" 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".

It seems for Intizar Husain that time has already come, and the only way is to submit to our fate - and cease to take our Islamic identity seriously.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this matter of shedding one's national identity is not so easy, as we have seen in the last two hundred years, since Shah Wali Ullah. In the India of the last two centuries, there have been so many occasions when it has appeared that we have arrived at a stage when for us to be Muslims or not has become immaterial and irrelevant. We have even evolved, in the form of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's Tafseer, a philosophy which implies that all religions are one - which implies that we might as well belong to any religion. But this kind of syncretism - which was sought to be used by Emperor Akbar - has not helped. By and large the present era has remained an era of nationalisms in spite of the great efforts of the Marxists to turn it into an international one.

Even within Islam, which is regarded as a universal brotherhood, national exclusiveness has continued to play its role. And what to speak of the Islamic Ummah even the Marxists have not been able to get rid of their national particularities, as we can conclude from the conflicts of China and Soviet Union , Viet Nam and Cambodia , etc. Nationalism, today deplored both by Marxist Internationalist and by capitalist Imperialists (even by some of us Pakistanis who consider all forms of nationalism as anti-Islamic) remains the one organisational principle on which the whole of humanity seems to be in agreement as a relevant social principle.

As for us in Pakistan , considering our experience of living within the Indian national context along with the Hindu nation, and our experience since our separation in 1947, what is the basis of our hope of living at peace with honour without having to fall back on our Muslim identity? Also considering the rise of militant Hindu fascist forces in India today, where is the hope, cherished by writers like Intizar Husain, and by organisers of bodies like Prem Sabha, that even if we wished to rid ourselves of our Muslim identity, we would be allowed to do so. 'Our Muslim identity may be only skin deep, and it may not be of any importance to us at all, yet for the "other" it is the only distinguishing line between "us" and "them" as Gandhiji, the great secularist, used to say.

A universal humanism may be a cherished ideal for most intellectuals in the world today, but it remains an ideal. For the time being it is national identities -racial, religious, geographical, historical, etc. - which hold sway. We may try to get rid of the blanket, but the blanket would not let go of us.

That is where Iqbal comes in, with his emphasis on the necessity for each nation to look within and transform itself from within, to recognise the factor in its composition both of permanence and change, and to reestablish our relation with reality as our forefathers did. This we can do only through realising in our own terms, which we can understand in the language of today, what our Islamic identity means in essence.

Iqbal has been perhaps the only modem Muslim intellectual who has had the insight and the courage to do so. His "Reconstruction" though a tentative one, can be a good beginning. So far no one in the Islamic world has gone so far on the path of making Islam meaningful for the 20th century man. We can at least catch up with him if not go beyond him.

NOTE:

1. Published in Mag. 23.9.82.