PREFACE

M. Safdar Mir

Most of the articles contained in this book were published in The Pakistan Times, Lahore , during the sixties in my regular weekly column started in that journal in 1961. This column continued to appear in Pakistan Times, with a few brief interruptions until July 1977, when the Martial Law of General Zia ul Haq put an end to my association with the Progressive Papers Ltd.

I had started writing my weekly column, "Cultural Notes," under the pseudonym "Zeno", as a part of my polemical resistance against ideological, literary and cultural reaction in the early sixties when the forces of obscurantism and irrationality were launching a concerted assault on the democratic and progressive elements in every sphere of social activity in the country.

This was a period in Pakistan 's history which was especially fertile in public controversy. All the attitudes and postures that had arisen in our social and political life during the first decade of independence came to be hardened into definite and intractable ideological trends in this period. The middle years of the era of President Ayub Khan's rule were especially noteworthy for a proliferation of political, religious, cultural, literary and ideological conflicts and polarisations.

Among other things the personality and thought of Allama Iqbal came to he a subject of hearted debate. One of the causes of the conflict over Iqbal & Iqbalism happened to be my advocacy in my columns of the progressive trend in the thought of Iqbal. This brought me to a renewed and deeper study of Iqbal's writings both in verse and prose, and especially his lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in .Islam, a book which has been completely ignored by his critics, both on the right and the left.

There were three trends in the appreciation of Iqbal's thought from the earliest times to the most recent. There were those who thought of him only as a great poet, but one who was confused and contradictory in his thinking. There were reactionaries who began by opposing him and ended up as his champions. There were progressives who started by appreciating his prosocialist utterances but later came to oppose him for his supposed advocacy of Nietzschean cult of power, and discovered a fascistic trend in him. As I came to discover through a careful study of his complete works, all three trends of criticism of Iqbal were mistaken in their judgement of him.

He had already acquired great fame as a poet and a thinker throughout the subcontinent before he published his first book, the Persian "Masnavi Asrari Khudi" in 1915. The preamble of this poem was critical of the quietist attitude reflected in the poetry of Khwaja Hafiz who was the most popular classical poet among the cultured classes of Muslim India. In Iqbal's opinion the poetry of Hafiz had created a life negating and politicaUy neutral tendency among the Muslims. The protagonists of Hafiz, both among the orthodox dogmatists as weU as the free thinking sufis, regarded the classical poet's works as second only to the Holy Book. They were up in arms against Iqbal, and attacked him as an enemy of Islam.

In his later poetry Iqbal continued to criticse both the orthodox dogmatists (Mullahs) as well as the sufi landlords (Pirs) as social parasites and political reactionaries. As time passed his political ideas emerged as clearly anti-feudal, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalistc. He presented an image of Islam and of Ouranic thought in terms which emphasised egalitarian, democratic and socialist values. This was the reason for the orthodox dogmatists' rejection of his poetry and his socio-political ideas in his life time. And this was also the reason why the youth and the politically advanced liberal sections of Muslims between the two world wars became his devotees. It made him the patron saint of the Pakistan Movement.

After 1947 and the formation of Pakistan it was but natural that he should be given the high position of being not only the national poet of Pakistan but also as the initiator of both the idea of an independent nation-state of Indian Muslims, and of the socio-political values of that state. These values were spelt out by the early ruling elite of Pakistan in terms of a democratic order. Some of the early ideologues of the Pakistani elite -- like Khalifa Abdul Hakim and Sheikh Mohammad Ikram -- emphasised Iqbal's advocacy of the socialist system of economy as the one near~st to the Islamic concept of society.

By the middle of the sixties, however, in the wake of the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the ideas of Mao Tse Tung, the charismatic leader of the Chinese Communist Revolution, had taken hold of the imagination of the Pakistani youth and masses. The 'ideal of a socialist society became the most popular political ideal in Pakistan .

This sudden reorientation of the Pakistani psyche frightened the intellectuals of the Pakistani establishment. As a reaction to the popularity of socialism among the masses the Islamist intellectuals belonging to the educational, journalistic and administrative sectors of society, adopted the theocratic ideas of Maulana Maudoodi as the most credible interpretation of Islam. It suited their purpose because the Maudoodite ideology had a strong admixture of anti-socialism, and in fact had been promoted by the British as a counter-acting force to the growing influence of communism and socialism in the subcontinent during the war years. The Pakistani establishment in the post 65 hectic period of socialist proliferation also found it very expedient as an antidote to the sudden influx of Maoism.

This was the way that Iqbal's ideas were pushed into the background and replaced by Maudoodi's ideas. Bu~ the Pakistani establishment was clever enough to continue to use the name of Iqbal for promoting the ideology of Maudoodi. This is how the Pakistani ideologues and the Maudoodite ideologues came to join forces against socialism, and started using Iqbal's name for opposing Iqbal's ideas.

The 3rd trend in relation to Iqbal was ,that of the progressives and the leftists. During the twenties and the thirties many poems of Iqbal, like "Khizr-i-Rah', "Lenin Khuda Ke Hazoor Mein", "Utho meri Duniya Ke Gharibon Ko Jago do," Saqi Nama", etc. were quoted by progressive critics as a proof of Iqbal's favourable attitude to progressive and socialist ideas.

There were, however, some dogmatic elements in the socialist and progressive ranks, who for various reasons, did not have a favourable view of Iqbal. It is very likely that were misled by some of his poetic metaphors (like "Shahin") into believing that he had become a convert of Nietzsche's ideology of force. If they had judged him on the basis of his works as a whole, and especially looked into his plain and simple political writings, they would have discovered in him a very uncompromising opponent of feudalism, monarchism, imperialism, capitalism and religious bigotry. A study of the totality of Iqbal's writings, especially his prose writings, can easily disabuse one of the notion that Iqbal was in any way under the influence of fascist ideas.

Unfortunately, the progressives in Pakistan , except for some honourable exceptions, did not study either Iqbal or the history of the complicated conflicts of nationalisties in the subcontinent. They certainly failed to analyse the most important of these -- namely the one between the Hindu and the Muslim nationalities. That is why they could not realise that like all national conflicts these were political conflicts based on class differences, class interests and class contradictions.

The simplification on which the Pakistani leftists have based their understanding of the difference between the class basis of India and Pakistan is the equation -- India equivalent to bourgeois nationalism; Pakistan equivalent to Feudal protectionism. This is a totally false idea of the root of Indian partition.

Pakistan 's national state, like the Indian national state, was a product of bourgeois aspirations. In the case of India it was the Hindu bourgeoisie, a strong and well integrated, politically mature capitalist class while the Muslim bourgeoisie, a weak and un-integrated, politically immature middle class, much of it still tied to its peasant and artisan umbilical cords, and led by an unorganised section of Muslim society composed of professionals of various kinds and petty officials in government service. The conflict between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League was a conflict not between a bourgeois class party and a feudal class party, but between a bourgeois class party and a petit bourgeois class party.

The feudal element among the Muslims was mainly concentrated in the Punjah and Sind . In both these provinces until the end the feudal leaders continued to oppose Pakistan movement. From Sikandar Hayat Khan to Khizer Hayat Khan they were opposed to the movement for India 's

a partition. The feudals of the Punjab made a coalition composed of the Congress, Akalis and Unionists to keep the Muslim League out of office as the majority party. Iqbal, who was the moving spir:it behind the Pakistan movement in the Punjab, although he had died in 1938; had the basis of his politics in anti-feudalism, and his lieutenants during his life time and later led the Muslims of the Punjab on the basis of an anti-feudal manifesto.

Iqbal's political, social and ideological views can be understood in relation to this background of complicated class struggles. It was the background on an all India scale that I made the subject of my study in the period when I was writing these essays. They are a discovery of Iqbal in the context of the class struggles in the Indian subcontinent over the last three hundred years, from the decline of the Mughal Empire to the rise of the British Indian Empire and the ultimate rise of the Hindu Indian National State , whose fullest realisation we are now watching with our own eyes.

Iqbal's progressivism as well as his Islamism are both elements of the reactions of a weak and impoverished peasantry and a proletarianised artisan class to the growth of a big bourgeois class assuming political power in an area which is more than it can swallow. And this has to do with the comprador character of the Hindu bourgeoisie, which was the mark of its under development as well as its political weakness. The Hindu bourgeoisie was strong in numbers and well organised. But it was politically so immature that it could not join hands with its natural allies --the peasants and impoverished artisans who were mostly Muslims in the Eastern and North Western under developed edges of India. This unity was possible as Iqbal had indicated in his earliest phase of poetry. Jinnah also signified its possibility throughout his political career, right up to 1946. Again and again it was the Hindu hourgeois leadership that failed to respond to the overtures for unity.

These articles are a preliminary effort to study Iqbal in a historical framework. Since they were written in the course of a polemical struggle they may not be quite comprehensive, but as a beginning they certainly deserve the notice of readers who are interested in a serious attempt to analyse Iqbal from a class point of view.