THE MESSAGE OF IQBAL

(21.04.1966)

Much is being written, and much more is being talked, from year's end to year's end, about the particular message of Iqbal for the nation whose independent existence he envisaged, and whose struggle for independence he identified himself with. Most of this interpretative literature and talk, unfortunately, is concerned with the peripheral part of Iqbal's thought, or with the merely negative aspects of it.

The lover of Persian classics is indignant over the scant respect he showed for the escapist element in the verse of Khawaja Hafiz. The progressive critic is angry that Iqbal eulogised Mussolini in one of his poems. The liberal is shocked that in the middle of twentieth century somebody should not favour the emancipation of women in the sense in which it is understood in the high society in London or Paris or New York . The orthodox consider Iqbal's pronouncements on the modernisation and rationalisation of Islamic law, after Shah Wali Ullah, as contrary to Islam. The modernists think that his stress on Islam and the Quran as the source of inspiration in all aspects of human life -- political, economic social and cultural -.negates the progress that humanity has achieved in these thirteen centuries of Islam. They specially charge him with being anti-rationalist, a hater of democratic principles and polity, and a protagonist of the cult of brute power.

Nothing is farther from Iqbal's thought than the unfortunate misunderstandings under which his message has been buried through the collective efforts of interpreters, critics, professors of literature, and politicians who make use of his verse for their personal ends. One is not too old to remember the first clarion call which awakened the Urdu reading part of our nation in the early years of the century. But I remember the thrill of that revitalising message .in my early youth when Bal-i-Jibreel was first published, and I can recall the transformation that was effected in the attitude of the people as a response to that voice of thunder. If I am not accused of balsphemy I can say that the experience resembled the inspiration under which dead matter was revitalised by the first command of life.

Iqbal continued to be the inspiration of our people for half a century for purposive action against the powers of darkness. He was an active participant in the struggle for independence and a guide, through the hazards of that struggle, towards independent nationhood.

With the coming of independence, however, we forgot what Iqbal stood for, and following him, what we stood for. Lip service took the place of genuine respect. The message of constant struggle as a community united by the equalitarian ideas of Islam was clean forgotten and replaced by the dog-eat-dog philosophy of capitalism which continues to rule our social ideals. Pakistan had come into being. No more needs to be done, so let us all build our separate homes and cultivate our own separate gardens. And if our gardens encroach on the land of our neighbours let us go to the court of law to get our due. And if a majority of our people have no gardens to cultivate then it is the will of the Lord. It is 'kismet'. It is 'taqdir'. And we started quoting the Quran to justify the exploitation of the poor by the rich and dug up legal authorities to maintain and justify the European systems of feudalism and capitalism. In the great struggle between imperialism and socialism which is shaking the world of humanity today, our divines quoted not only Islam but also Iqbal --its latest and perhaps wisest phil9sopher --to advocate a course which implied support to imperialism, rather than to the new emerging forces of socialism.

It is necessary, therefore, to look into Iqbal once again, to see for ourselves, without the help of interpreters, what his message really is. Our younger generation is profoundly ignorant of the work of Iqbal. Being young, and having a forward look, they are altogether taken up by the possibilities of the future. They regard a reference to Islam and hence to Iqbal, as a reactionary step, as trying to impose on the free possibilities unfolding in the coming times, an order which takes us back in time, an attitude of mind which is static, and which has nothing to do with the ideological struggles of today and tomorrow.

To prove that they are wrong in their estimation of both Islam and of Iqbal, who stood for an Islamic attitude, one can suggest a reading of his great prose work ‘The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam'. That he was aware of the necessity, for the young and the emergent, of an interpretation of Islam in terms of modern knowledge is revealed in his own words: "It seems as if the intellect of man is outgrowing its own most fundamental categories --Time, space and causality. With the advance of scientific thought even our concept of intelligibility is undergoing a change. The theory of Einstein has brought a new vision of the Universe and suggests new ways of looking at the problems common to both religion and philosophy. No wonder then that the younger generation of Islam in Asia and Africa demands a fresh orientation of this faith. With the reawakening of Islam, therefore, it is necessary to examine, in an independent spirit, what Europe has thought, and how far the conclusions reached by her can help us in the revision, and if necessary, reconstruction of theological thought in Islam". (1)

It is obvious that these are not the words of a diehard mullah, which class I may venture to suggest, is solely responsible for the misunderstanding of Islam by the young. Nor do these words belong to a liberal, who, in the interest of what he regards as modernity and the scientific attitude, is prepared to shelve the great revolutionary advance in the evolution of the consciousness of humanity which was brought into being by the Holy Prophet of Islam.

Iqbal does not apologise for Islam in the face of the great progress in human knowledge that has been registered since the great centuries of Islamic civilisation. Indeed he relates the scientific attitude of today with the Quranic teachings and the attitude to knowledge and thought reflected in the life of the Holy Prophet. Not that he seeks to infer the latest mechanical devices and inventions from the Quran, or seeks to derive a full developed and immutable, hidebound Islamic political and economic system as a panacea for modern times. He says: "Religion is not physics or chemistry, seeking an explanation of nature in terms of causation: it really aims (!t interpreting a totally different region of human experience --religious experience --the data of which cannot be reduced to the data of any other science. Both seek concrete experience as a point of departure. Their conflict is due to the misapprehension that both interpret the same data of experience." (2)

For Iqbal there is .no opposition between religion and science --be it the physical sciences or the social sciences, that developed under the Muslims in their first empirical and inductive glory, and were further developed, after the decay of Islamic civilisation, by the modern European nations, who profited from many of the scientific discoveries made hy Muslim physical and social scientists; but above all they profited from the scientific method of inductive reasoning which was the greatest contribution of Islamic faith Islamic civilisation to the knowledge of mankind.

The essential mental attitude that the Quran creates in its followers, according to Iqbal, is the searching after the knowledge of natural phenomena through "sense perception elaborated by understanding," and the recognition of the great fact of change --both of physical phenomena and of social forms of humanity. Iqbal dwells at great length on the concept of time --serial and pure time. He says: "The Quran opens our eyes to the great fact of change, through the apprehension and control of which alone it is possible to build a durable civilisation." (3)

But one might object that this is an altogether materialistic view of reality; where does the religious experience come in? For one thing, the view of reality which Iqbal has, presented to us is not materialism. That kind of mechanistic view of reality --without any place in its scheme for the spirit --died long ago in Europe , although our half educated mullahs continue constantly to parade this dead horse and beat it as an effigy of modernism. It is no more modern than the ideas of Newton on which it was based. As Iqbal says, and anybody with the least understanding of modern science knows "the notion of matter is entirely replaced by the notion of organism" while our- mullahs have been dozing. (4)

But to return to the religious experience, Iqbal, at the very beginning, warns us that: "Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man." (5) It is "thought in its quest for the Ahsolute." (6)

Now I have been knocked on the head for following the Absolute by my Marxist friends, who know only as much of Marxism as teaches them that everything in the universe, all knowledge of all phenomena is relative. There is nothing called absolute. Apart from the fact that this kind of mental attitude is the greatest breeder of opportunism --much abhorred and at the same time much practised by our Marxists --it is not true even in reference to the Dialectical Materialist philosophy. I shall quote only a few lines from Mao Tse Tung, and go on to my subject. Says Mao Tse Tung: 'The Marxist recognises that in the absolute, total, process of the development of the universe the development of each concrete process is relative; hence in the great stream of absolute truth, man's knowledge of the concrete process at each given stage of development is only relatively true. The sum total of innumerable relative truths is the absolute truth."

The only distinction that can be made between this attitude and the Iqbalian (Islamic) attitude is that Iqbal realises the recognition of this absolute truth as possible and necessary, here and now, through the mystic experience. To clarify this I shall give a rather longish quotation from the second lecture of Iqbal which is entitled, "Philosophical test of the revelation of religious experience."

Iqbal begins by defining the reality of nature: "Since objects are not subjective states caused by something imperceptible called matter, they are genuine phenomena which constitute the very substance of Nature, and which we know as they are in Nature." (7) There after he posits the relation of universe and God: "The true infinite does' not exclude the finite; it embraces, the finite without effacing its finitude, and explains and justifies its being." (8)

After discussing his concept of time in terms of Einstein's 4th dimension, he elaborates further: "The quality of Nature's passage in time is perhaps the most significant aspect of experience which the Quran especially emphasizes (9) … Pure time, as revealed by a deeper analysis of our conscious experience, is not a string of separate, reversible instants; it is an organic whole in which the past is not left behind but is moving along with, and operating in, the present. And the future is given to it not as lying before, yet to be traversed; it is given only in the sense that it is present in its nature as an open possibility." (10)

This interpretation of the Quranic view of history controverts all the criticisms which have made Islam out to be a quietist, totally deterministic, philosophy, without any possibility of freedom of action and of choice. Iqbal elaborates: “The world process, or the movement of the universe in time, is certainly devoid of purpose, if by purpose we mean a foreseen and --a far off fixed destination to which the whole creation moves. To endow the world process with purpose in this sense is to rob it of its originality and its creative character. It's ends are terminations of a career; they are ends to come and not necessarily premeditated. It is purpose only in the sense that it is selective in character, and brings itself to some sort of a present fulfillment by actively preserving and supplementing the past. To my mind nothing is more alien to the Quranic outlook than the idea that the universe is the temporal working out of a preconceived plan It is a growing universe and not an already completed product which left the hand of its maker long ago, and is now lying stretched in space as a dead mass of matter to which time does nothing, consequently, is nothing." (ll)

With this kind of dynamic attitude to reality, which, if we care to look into our history, was the attitude of our forefathers, and which clearly follows from the Quran and the life of the Holy Prophet, it is possible once again to make our community a creative community. The greatest contribution of Iqbal was to point out the possibility of such a growth. Unfortunately, we are still thralls to the spells of certain wise men who tell us that the entire message of Islam. is contained in the un-important details of ritualistic and social manners, and not in a call to freedom and power.

"0 community of djin and men, if you can overpass the bounds of the heaven and the earth, then overpass them. But by power alone shall ye overpass them." -The Quran. (55:33)#

NOTES:

Message of Iqbal: Published in the Pakistan Times Lahore 21.4.66, under the title "Metaphysics of Iqbal."

1. Reconstruction page 8

2. Ibid page 25

3. Ibid page 14

4. Ibid page 38

5. Ibid page 2

6. Ibid page 28

7. Ibid page 34

8. Ibid page 29

9. Ibid page 45

10. Ibid page 49

11. Ibid page 54-55