Understanding Iqbal

The writer is a social development and policy adviser, and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Commonly referred to as ‘Allama Iqbal – the most learned one – in South Asia, Dr Muhammad Iqbal remains one of the least understood writers, poets and scholars, with his political characterization as an icon of state ideology of nationhood. As a leading Urdu poet of South Asia, Iqbal imbibed the stark contradictions of his era in his poetry but with amazing mastery of articulation and musicality of language.

There is much to be contested academically and politically about Iqbal being a philosopher because of his scholastic approach and the primacy he accorded to faith over reason. For many, this contestation becomes an upsetting proposition because Iqbal has been framed as an icon of all possible material and spiritual knowledge in our mainstream education.

People of varying ideological pursuits, political bent and even academic persuasion have found something very close to their heart in the poetics and prose of Iqbal. Hence, he becomes a symbol of high intellect, wisdom and sanity emanating sublimity, ingenuity and humility – attributes that transcend the spatial and temporal existence of an individual to make him/her a universal figure. From this standpoint, Iqbal becomes an incarnation of Islamic revivalism and an icon of all cosmic knowledge for most of our compatriots who were taught to believe in transcendental roots of state ideology.

Having said that, without reading Iqbal most such attributions relegate him to some surreal world of a transcendental political ideology based on either hearsay or indoctrination through mainstream education. The unending but unfounded eulogies heaped upon Iqbal as an intellectual stalwart of an official religio-political narrative have reduced the essence of his thoughts to a political instrument of the official ideology of the state. If these officially instilled attributes of Iqbal were to become the guiding principles of his thoughts the very assertion of him being a philosopher of free thinking must invariably become an untenable claim.

By owning Iqbal as an icon of a politically contested ideology, the state has actually dispossessed many generations from appreciating the real Iqbal in the way he would probably have liked himself to be seen. Most of Iqbal’s work has become an officially close corpus only, with occasional political recourse to selected injunctions of his poetry and prose during national days.

Iqbal needs to be reread beyond the official interpretations of his thoughts, both as a poet and a scholastic genius of the modern Muslim thought. The domain of intellectual traditions of modernity that he was exposed to and was immersed in transcend the officially defined political narratives of a nascent postcolonial state.

Then there is another extreme too which tends to dismiss Iqbal as a hawk of orthodox Islam and a political protagonist of a bygone repressive ideology and a nostalgic of an imagined golden age. Like their religious rivals, these liberal readers of Iqbal place him as a conscious political practitioner of orthodoxy rather than as a poet with political sensibilities and the humanly fallibilities of passions and emotional outburst.

Some readers even draw some strange analogies between Iqbal’s Mard-e-Momin and Nietzsche’s Superman, identifying Iqbal with the inherent intellectual proclivities of fascism. However, his Mard-e-Momin is a purely religious being who transcends earthly compromises to find the sublimity of the spiritual world. He fights evil with his power of faith in submission to God to establish the writ of religion rather than relying on a sword like infidels for material gains only.

On the contrary, Nietzsche’s Superman transcends the duality of man and God to become an omnipotent character. Nietzsche wrote in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: ‘The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth’ the Supermen will live by their own values”. Nietzsche’s Superman manifests himself in the emptiness of a godless society to establish his own values but the Mard-e-Momin of Iqbal fights with the help of the warmth of faith to establish the writ of God.

Some critics of Iqbal even go to the extent to proclaim him as a proponent of the superiority of evil over good by equating his famous long poem Shikwah with John Milton’s greatest epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’. There is no doubt that Iqbal was influenced by a large swathe of intellectual traditions of modernity which shows his knowledge of contemporary Western thought and his deep understanding of Eastern mysticism and Sufism.

Iqbal strived to bridge the gap between modernity and mystic tradition, albeit granting an a priori status to the latter very much like what Kant did to connect empiricism and rationalism in a singular schema. However, unlike Kant, Iqbal was least interested in giving any philosophical foundations to his scheme of thoughts which were punctuated by a strong bent to rationalize faith rather than question it.

Iqbal also writes about Karl Marx and was also impressed by the idea of a cosmic spirit engaged in creating the dynamic universe with infinite continuity. It was somewhat similar to the idea of Evan Vital of Henry Bergeson in which the universe continues to manifest God’s power of creation and there is no end to the universe being created and recreated continuously. From this larger tradition of modernity, Iqbal at times makes radical deviations to become a proponent of pan-Islamism where he stresses upon Muslims to unite – from Kashgar to the coast of Nile – for the protection of the Kaaba.

In a nutshell, the personification of Iqbal as a symbol of universal knowledge has inherent dangers of losing the rigor of his actual earthly thoughts in the process. First, it is important to understand the context of the evolving political uncertainties of the colonial era which partly shaped Iqbal’s thoughts. It is also important to know that Iqbal was influenced by modern philosophical thoughts in addition to his in-depth knowledge of mysticism, Shariah, Islamic jurisprudence, classical forms of epistemology and genres of art and literature.

Iqbal’s poetry is a true representation of the inner strains of his thoughts and the visible duality in his expression of a cosmic soul that creates the universe and microcosm of a true follower of faith. The duality between a dynamic cosmic soul and an individuated Self permeates through his poetry and prose of Iqbal without much disputation.

Iqbal was born in an era characterized by political turmoil, the height of extractive colonialism and the decaying narratives of conventional knowledge in the Subcontinent. This was the time when the idiom and substance of indigenous expressions and worldviews were losing credence without finding viable alternatives to express the collective aspirations. Like many other Muslim thinkers of his time, Iqbal faced the dilemma of choosing between alternate ways of political transformation and religious revivalism, and he opted for the latter.

Iqbal can best be described as a great poet with many aberrations of thought but that does not belittle his creative brilliance.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com

Twitter: @AmirHussain76