IQBAL AND MYSTICISM

(18.04.1964)

In the hard-headed, pragmatic, utilitarian world of today in which even religion must demonstrate "its uses before it can be accepted, any talk of the seemingly abstract metaphysic of mysticism generally evokes two kinds of response. The generous among us who have put a premium on success as the sole value of a man, regard "Tasawwuf' as the last refuge of a failure, an escape from the toils and troubles of a difficult world for those who have lost their nerve, who cannot continue the good fight for economic, political and social well-being. It is considered a sort of consolation for having lost the battle of life.

Those who are less kindly disposed towards the professors of such "outmoded" systems of belief, regard it as no more than an expression of crankishness, obscurantism, superstition, or downright charlatanism.

Both these responses to mysticism have an element of truth in them, and sufficient data can be collected from the lives and practices of mystics of the past and the present to justify the correctness of both these theses. Innumerable examples can be brought forward to prove that Sufis of all times have advocated a policy of withdrawal and escape. Thus Bishr bin al Harith Al-Hafi (the barefoot) who died in 841 A.D. says, "Beware of the people of thy time; it is not good to live with any that men today think well of, nor with any they think ill of either. It is better to die alone, than to live: for if any man thinks he can escape from evil and from the fear of temptation, let him know that there is no escape for him. So choose for thyself, and shun their society. I am told that the best counsel today is to dwell alone; for therein lies safety, and safety is a sufficient advantage".

Such thoughts from a good Muslim who lived barely two hundred years after the rise of Islam do not paint a happy picture of the society that was created by the empire of our forefathers. That this dissatisfaction of individual Muslims with Muslim society had started earlier is proved by the message of AI-Hassan at-Basri, a good hundred years before Bishr al-Hafi. He lived in the times of Umar bin Abdul Aziz, the Caliph who is said to have reestablished the pristine purity" and zeal of Islam so that his reign was compared to that of Umar bin al-Khattab. AI Hassan says, "Beware of this world with all wariness. The more it pleases thee, the more do thou be wary of it; for the man of this world, whenever he feels secure in any pleasure thereof, thee world drives him over into some unpleasantness, and whenever he attains any part of it and squats him down upon it, the world utterly turns him upside down",

These examples, with others, would amply prove the charge that Sufism is a negative tendency in Islam, and is the refuge of those who run away from the struggle for existence. Islam is a positive system of belief, quite unsympathetic to asceticism and lonely modes of salvation. The good Muslim of our times who regards such a negative attitude as un-Islamic, anti-Jama'at (anti-social) and an ungrateful rejection of the gifts of God has placed all kinds of constructions on the meaning of this tendency.

It has been suggested that these un-Islamic ascetic ideals have been introduced by the evil Christians into Islamic society for subverting it. A quotation from AI- Hassan AI Basri could be used by a Muslim inquisitor to brand him surely as a Christian infiltrator in Islam. Says he, "The Lord of the Spirit and the Word, Jesus, used to say: 'My daily bread is hunger, my badge is fear, my raiment is wool, my mount is my foot, my lantern at night is the moon, my fire by day is the sun and my fruit and fragrant herbs are such things as the earth brings forth for the wild beasts and cattle. All the night I have nothing, yet there is none richer than I.'

Apart from this theory of Christian infiltration, there are theories of Sufism as infiltration by the defeated Magis, the defeated Buddhists and the defeated Hindus. This view of Sufism as something alien to Islam which was introduced into it from without by hostile Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrain, Buddhist and Hindu elements has been given wide publicity in our times, not only by Muslim reformers, but also by European orientalists -for quite different reasons of course -so that by now it is accepted on all hands as the explanation of the phenomenon.

Iqbal's sufistic views (his constant reiteration of the principle of. "Love" as the fundamental aspect of his philosophy, the prime mover in heaven and earth and the motive force of all the integrative levels of the universe -the individual the collective, nature, angels, God) have been studiously avoided by his devotees, who read neither his poetry, nor the last (7th) lecture in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought, in which he presents Sufism as the metaphysic of Islam, giving it the name of "higher religion", and the final stage in the evolution of religious life, "which develops the ambition to come into direct contact with ultimate reality". (1)

Iqbal in his poetry and prose has been severely critical of the "Pir-worship", sloth, barrenness, and withdrawal of the prevailing systems of Sufism. He even accused such systems of the exploitation of the gullible and of collaboration with the imperialists. In his poems "Punjab Ke Pir Zadon Se" and "Faqr-o-Rahabi" in Zarb-i-Kalim, he counterposes the values of the true mystic with those of the salesman-Firs. Such poems, (and they are many) and his attack on Khawaja Hafiz in the first edition of 'Masanvi Asrar,' are regarded as his definite rejection of Sufism.

The enthusiastic ritualist and anti-Sufi politician present such pronouncements of the poet as his condemnation of all mysticism. But a reading of the poems as well as his prose leaves no doubt that what he was showing up was the false Sufi, as in other moods he showed up the hollowness and lack of understanding of the traditionalist Mullah, in exactly the same manner as the true Sufi has always done. In this unmasking of the hypocrisy of the false Sufi and the Mullah he was following in the footsteps of the great mystics Sheikh Farid, Shah Hussain, Bullah Shah, Fard Faqir and Bahu, and above all, his great master Rumi. He wanted to infuse into Sufism the dynamic role that it had forsaken, and raise it to a higher level in consonance with the new social system being created in our modem industrialised society. Hence his canonisation of Lenin. "Surely the present moment is one of great crisis in the history of modem culture. The modem world stands in need of a biological renewal. And religion, which in its higher manifestation is neither dogma, nor priesthood, nor ritual can alone ethically prepare the modem man for the burdens of the great responsibility which the advancement of modem science necessarily involves, and restore to him that attitude of faith which makes him capable of winning a personality here and retaining it hereafter (Reconstruction 189).” “Religion in this sense is known by the unfortunate name of mysticism, which is supposed to be a life-denying, fact-avoiding attitude of mind directly opposed to the radically empirical outlook of our times. Yet higher religion which is only a search for a larger life is essentially experience and recognises the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so. It is a genuine effort to clarify human consciousness, and is, as such, as critical of its level of experience as naturalism is of its own level”. (Ibid 181-182)

The definition and re-evaluation of the "higher religion", of Tasawwuf, was the life-long preoccupation of Iqbal. At the beginning of his career, in his thesis on Persian Metaphysics he refers to the popular theories of Sufism as extraneous to Islam which had been advanced by Oriental scholars: "These theories have been worked out under the influence of a notion of causation which is essentially false ("Metaphysics in Iran" 77) The full significance of a phenomenon in the intellectual evolution of a people can only be comprehended in the light of those pre-existing intellectual, political and social conditions which alone make its existence inevitable (Ibid 76) let us, therefore, in the light of a truer theory of causation, enumerate the principal political, social and intellectual conditions of Islamic life about the end of the 8th and the first half of the 9th century A.D. when properly speaking the Sufi ideal of life came into existence, to be soon followed by a philosophical justification of the ideal". (Ibid 77)

Iqbal discusses the political and economic unrest of the Abbasid times consequent on the accumulation of wealth and the formation of classes, groups, clashing communities which drove away "spirits of devotional character from the scene of continual unrest to the blissful peace of an ever- deepening contemplative life"(Ibid 78) Among other motive forces he enumerates the skeptical tendencies of Islamic rationalism and the un-emotional piety of the various schools of Islamic law. Similar conditions, he says, produced similar results in the case of neo-Platonism. Sufism was neither infiltration nor an alien fashion incorporated into Islam by misled members of the community. It was a positive attitude of mind in men of truth and integrity which started as asceticism and withdrawal, and ended as a complete metaphysic which had social, political and even economic relevance in the various communities professing Islam. Whatever it be to the Mullah and the Qazi, to the Sufi, as it is to Iqbal, Islam is the name of the unity of external piety and an inner apprehension of Truth, or "Al-Haq". Thus it is, as Iqbal says, "A restatement of Islam". (Ibid 82) Its essence is the transformation not only of the Will, nor of the mere understanding, "but of both by a complete transformation of feeling, of which will and Understanding are only specialised forms. In short, it is the recognition and acceptance of the principle of Love as the vital and vivifying basis of life. 'Love all,' says Rumi, 'and forget your own individuality in doing good to others. To win other people's hearts is .the great pilgrimage; and one heart is worth more than a thousand Ka'abas. The Ka!aba is a mere cottage of Abraham; but the heart is the very home of God". (Ibid 82)

It might be argued that in his later work Iqbal revised his ideas, that his "Love", is involved in ego centricity and the philosophy of the "self' has no use for the "God intoxication" of the Sufi. This kind of argument is a mere perversion of the humanistic ideals of Iqbal. True it is, that, following in the footsteps of Mujaddad Alf Sani, he deprecated the idea of Wahdatal Wajud, but how does it follow that his pursuit of the Ultimate Reality was given up or given a secondary position. If it were so Iqbal would have been a gross mechanical materialist, nor would 'he have said, in the lecture quoted above, that "The climax of religious life is the discovery of the ego as an individual deeper than his conceptually describable habitual selfhood; It is in contact with the Most Real that the ego discovers its uniqueness, its metaphysical status, and the possibility of improvement of that status". (Reconstruction 184)

This reconstruction of the finite ego on the experiential, not the intellectual, level, is the core of Iqbal's philosophy. It is intimately related with the problem of the "modern man in search of his soul". The neo Mullah of our society misses the whole point' of Iqbal's message when he makes the poet into an orthodoxy ridden Sufi baiter like himself. Tasawwuf was a restatement of Islam in the changed social conditions of Abbasid times; Iqbal's work is a re-statement of Tasawwuf in the much more complicated and critical period of our industrial civilisation.

Notes

Iqbal & Mysticism Published in the Pakistan Times 18.4.64.

1- Reconstruction, page 181