Preface
Two of the highest modes of expression developed by humankind are poetry and philosophy. The poet speaks to us through verse, and the philosopher through prose, each one inviting us into their realm of communication as we try to tackle those great existential questions that have gripped us since time immemorial. Countless are the poets and philosophers that have preceded us, but few are the timeless among them to whom we routinely return in search of answers. Even fewer are those who collapse the distinction between “poet” and “philosopher” altogether, neither title suitable to encapsulate the fullness of their message. It is they, these great shapers of the human legacy, whose words transcend their time and space to speak to us today.
“Thoroughly critical of his Islamic tradition but also thoroughly rooted within it, Iqbal embodied a love that was as critical as it was embracing – the highest form of love. To explore this love, kindled both by anguish and by hope, is to explore what it is that kindles our own love.”
So recognizable are these poet-philosophers in our contemporary discourse that one need not even mention their full names for the listener to know who is being discussed. They include the likes of Rumi, Hafez, Dante, Goethe, Emerson, Tagore, and many more. One such figure in this pantheon of monumental poet-philosophers is Iqbal, the great “Poet of the East,” who spoke in deep conversation with all of the aforementioned names. As Iqbal’s son Javid once stated: “in its highest form, poetry is more philosophical than philosophy itself.”[1]
So, what relevance do the writings of this Muslim poet-philosopher of the twentieth century have for us today? What is there to unearth and draw from his writings as we attempt to understand our role as the shapers of our collective human legacy? What can Iqbal teach us as we try to grapple with the deeper existential questions posed to us now?
The following selected poem – for which I provide my own translation and commentary – is a deep meditation by a man who spent a lifetime in search of answers to the troubles of his time and who was not afraid to ask equally as troubling questions, even to God Himself. Thoroughly critical of his Islamic tradition but also thoroughly rooted within it, Iqbal embodied a love that was as critical as it was embracing – the highest form of love. To explore this love, kindled both by anguish and by hope, is to explore what it is that kindles our own love.
But before we taste the fruits, we must familiarize ourselves with the terrain. A short biography and a summary of Iqbal’s key works along with a brief discussion of their political impact precede the translation and commentary, which forms the body of this essay, before a conclusion with a list of further readings.
For the reader who is already familiar with Iqbal, we hope that this commentary will add further depth to your understanding of his thought, and for the reader who is completely new to Iqbal, it is our hope that this serves as your introduction to one of the most penetrating minds that the Muslim world has ever produced.
Introduction – Part I – Biography and Key Works
Muhammad Iqbal (1877—1938) was born in the town of Sialkot in the Punjab province of what was then British India (and is now modern-day Pakistan). His family was of Hindu Brahmin descent and of Kashmiri provenance, and like many Kashmiris of the time, had fled south toward the Punjab after the unsuccessful rebellion of 1857 which resulted in the end of the Mughal Empire and the British Crown’s subsequent forceful takeover of India.
Iqbal’s first teacher was the legendary Sayyid Mir Hassan, who taught him Arabic, Persian, and the religious sciences (Mir Hassan also taught Faiz Ahmad Faiz, another prominent Urdu poet of the twentieth century). After completing his early education at the Government College in Lahore, Iqbal taught at the University of Punjab and shortly thereafter traveled to Europe in 1905 upon the advice of his mentor, Sir Thomas Arnold. At this stage of his life he was already recognized as a burgeoning Urdu poet.
Between 1905 and 1908 he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge in philosophy and concurrently qualified as a barrister after studying law at Lincoln’s Inn. Immediately after, he acquired a doctorate from the University of Munich, through which he also learned German and graduated with his famous thesis The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, a prolific overview of the history of Persian metaphysics that is still read today. He then returned to Lahore to begin teaching once more. Because of his eclectic educational upbringing and his thorough exposure to the finest of both traditional and secular schooling, Iqbal was primed to blossom into a well-rounded thinker from a very young age.
The voluminous output of his intellectual production during the decades spanning his writing career complicate any attempts to identify an easy mapping of his ideas and require that they be contextualized with reference to his own intellectual trajectory as it developed. Iqbal can only be understood if the sociopolitical moment in which he toiled is understood. The particularities of his day, however, in no way preclude us from drawing lessons from his work in our day, as this commentary will aim to demonstrate. Iqbal is easily among the most favorably cited modern Muslim thinkers in the Muslim-majority world today and deserves our attention if only for this reason.
It is interesting and ironic to note that while Iqbal is considered a kind of pan-Islamic poet and intellectual, his “Islamic awakening” only took place after his stay in Europe. Among his most prominent early Urdu works upon returning to India include Shikwa (“The Complaint”), written in 1911 as a lamentation to God asking why He had forsaken his community. From a very early stage in his career, Iqbal was keenly aware of the global ruptures taking place all around him and sought – through poetry – to make sense of this turbulence. A year after Shikwacame Jawab-e Shikwa (“Response to the Complaint”), which was God’s response to Iqbal, reminding the Muslim community that they too had forgotten their responsibility toward Him. This style of bringing characters into a dialectic interaction with one another for the purpose of drawing broader points or levelling criticisms became Iqbal’s classic style of poetry.
A prolific Persian litterateur, he penned his Asrar-e Khudi (“Secrets of the Self”) in 1915, which was arguably the first in a series of successive groundbreaking works that punctuated his mark as a prominent global Muslim intellectual. In it, Iqbal expounded upon what he described as the notion of the “Self” – one’s core essence – whose purpose was, as we shall see in this commentary, self-actualization in a dialogic relationship with God rather than self-annihilation in the presence of God. The individual is God’s vicegerent on earth and is responsible for living out this purpose through engaging both with the material plane and the heavenly plane.
Iqbal’s Asrar was followed by Rumuz-e Bekhudi (“Mysteries of Selflessness”) which was published in 1917, also in Persian, with the aim of reminding Muslims as a whole (and not just as individuals) of their communal responsibility toward one another and the world at large: the Islamic ummah was “the seal of communities” in the same way the Prophet Muhammad was “the seal of prophets.”[2] While the Asrar focused on the individual, the Rumuz focused on the community. Both of these were written in the rhyming couplet style of Mawlana Jalal-al Din Rumi’s (d. 1273) Masnavi-e Manavi, a masterpiece work in classical Persian poetry which Iqbal took as an inspiration for his own poems.The Asrar was such a tour de force in the intellectual milieu of Iqbal’s time that the British Crown knighted him in honor of it, granting him the title of Sir Muhammad Iqbal.
In 1924, Iqbal penned a response to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (d. 1832) West-Östlicher Diwan (“West-East Diwan”), a tribute that Goethe wrote to the Persian and Muslim-majority world in the form of poetry, inspired by the classical poet Hafez. Though Goethe’s work itself was not atypical of the romantic orientalist writings of the time, Iqbal received it well for Goethe’s high praise of “the East’s” fidelity to its spiritual core. Iqbal’s response was entitled Payam-e Mashriq (“Message of the East”) and was intended as a reciprocal praise to Goethe, but also a rejoinder to “the West” that called on its people to recognize what they lost in the march toward secular modernity.
Other works of Iqbal’s poetry include the Bang-e Dara (“Sound of the Bell”) in 1924, a collection of his finest Urdu poems up until that point, and Zabur-e Ajam (“Persian Psalms”) in 1927, which followed in Iqbal’s classic didactic style of presenting existential or spiritual dilemmas and then offering solutions to them by drawing from the repertoire of the Indo-Persian and Islamic intellectual traditions.
As an active member of the Muslim League in India during the 1920s—30s, Iqbal was heavily involved in the political scene of his time, and his popularity grew as he lectured in various universities throughout his homeland of India and in Britain. It was in 1930 where he gave his famous “Allahabad Address” in the city of the same name (renamed to “Prayagraj” by the current Indian government) where he made the first public call for a separate and semiautonomous Muslim nation in northwestern India under an Indian federation.
In the early 1930s, he also participated in the London Round Table Conferences organized by the British Government and the Indian national congress. Upon concluding the Round Table Conferences, Iqbal had the opportunity to travel to Europe before returning to the Indian subcontinent. He traveled through France, where he was able to meet his philosophical inspiration, Henri Bergson, as well as the Islamicist Louis Massignon. Through his travels to Spain, he stopped by Cordoba, where he visited the former Mosque of Cordoba, which is now a cathedral. After asking for permission to offer prayer there and being granted it, he may have become the first Muslim to do so in seven centuries. His meditation there elicited the release of his Masjid-e Qurtuba (“Mosque of Cordoba”), an eight-stanza elegy to the Muslim world which became widely celebrated as one of his finest poems written in Urdu.
In 1931, he was invited by the Arab leadership in Palestine to the General Islamic Congress conference in Jerusalem, where numerous prominent Muslim figures were invited in a pan-Islamic venture to address the dilemma facing the Arabs of Palestine with regards to the expanding Zionist project. On the invitation of King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan in 1933, Iqbal visited the country to help with the founding of Kabul University and to advise on the country’s education system. This stint resulted in a short Persian work entitled Mosafer (“Traveler”). His final collection of poems in Urdu were the Bal-e Jibreel (“Gabriel’s Wing”), a poem which we discuss in this essay, and Zarb-e Kaleem (“Moses’ Rod”).
In 1932, Iqbal published what is regarded as his masterpiece in Persian, the Javid-nama, named after his son Javid. This work borrowed from the theme of the “Isra wa’l Miraj” in Islam, an event in which the Prophet Muhammad made a night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upward toward the heavens guided by Angel Gabriel. At each stage upward into the heavens, Gabriel is said to have introduced the Prophet Muhammad to a different prophet in the prophetic chain starting with the Prophet Adam and opened up Muhammad’s heart to the secrets of the heavenly worlds. It is here that it is said that the Prophet received the command for the five daily obligatory prayers in Islam. In the Javid-nama, Iqbal similarly chronicles a journey where he, the disciple, is guided into the heavens by the master, none other than Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, who introduces Iqbal to various prominent poets and philosophers, with Nietzsche being the last.
Extensive travel throughout his homeland of the Indian subcontinent, Europe, and then the Middle East in the early twentieth century gave Iqbal profound insight into the problems gripping the world at large. With his mastery of the key philosophies and languages of both “the East” and “the West,” he was able to formulate a systematic philosophical project of his own which he articulated in a series of lectures across India, culminating in his magnum opus and his most popular English-language work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1935). Iqbal chose this to be the title of his book as a tribute to Imam al-Ghazali, whose work Ihya ‘ulum al-Din (“The Revival of Religious Sciences”) is widely regarded by Sunni Muslims to be the authoritative masterpiece work of Islamic theology.
“It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the content and corpus of his Urdu and Persian works beyond this brief overview, though it suffices to say Iqbal’s poetry has earned him a reputation as among the most preeminent – if not the preeminent – Urdu and Persian poet of the modern period, such that he has been deemed the ‘Rumi of the Age.’[3]
It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the content and corpus of his Urdu and Persian works beyond this brief overview, though it suffices to say Iqbal’s poetry has earned him a reputation as among the most preeminent – if not the preeminent – Urdu and Persian poet of the modern period, such that he has been deemed the “Rumi of the Age.”[3]
Introduction – Part II – Poetry and Politics
The great scholar of Islam Annemarie Schimmel writes that what distinguished Iqbal’s Persian and Urdu poetry from that of his predecessors was that Iqbal’s poetry expanded beyond the realm of aesthetic pleasure into the realm of calling for action. Poetry served a higher purpose for Iqbal, as Schimmel writes: “… Iqbal’s poetry never strives at attaining that pure verbal beauty in which classical Persian and Urdu poetry excels. Yet he uses the vocabulary of traditional poetry very skillfully: roses and nightingales, the cupbearer and the tavern, are found as much in his lyrics as in those of earlier mystical poets. ”[4]
Iqbal maintained fidelity to the original symbolism and vocabulary of Persian and Urdu poetry of the classical periods, but while classical Persian poets like Hafez sought to entice their audiences and drive them toward rapture with the Divine, Iqbal’s Asrar-e Khudi (1915) sent shockwaves through the Persianate world when he argued that it is precisely this rapture which leads to stagnancy, and what is needed is dynamism, as Schimmel writes: “… Iqbal tried to change the content of this inherited vocabulary: the nightingale must remain separated from the rose in order to become active in its singing, i.e., to become creative; for creativity, the highest proof of personality, dies in union.”[5]
“Any discussion of Iqbal is inevitably colored by his role in inspiring the creation of Pakistan, a state whose birth he did not live to see, and whose political trajectory one wonders whether he would have supported.”
Any discussion of Iqbal is inevitably colored by his role in inspiring the creation of Pakistan, a state whose birth he did not live to see, and whose political trajectory one wonders whether he would have supported. Since the state’s founding, his poetry has often been instrumentalized as a weapon for political legitimation, which may lead some observers to conclude that it does not carry much relevance outside of that context. But to say that Iqbal’s poetry is limited to the context of Pakistan because the state has coopted it after him would be an anachronistic reading of Iqbal; a projection onto the past based on what has transpired in the present. As “Shaer-e Mashriq” (“The Poet of the East”) and “Hakeem al-Ummat” (“The Sage of the Islamic Ummah”), Iqbal transcends Pakistan.
“But to say that Iqbal’s poetry is limited to the context of Pakistan because the state has coopted it after him would be an anachronistic reading of Iqbal; a projection onto the past based on what has transpired in the present. As ‘Shaer-e Mashriq’ (‘The Poet of the East’) and ‘Hakeem al-Ummat'(‘The Sage of the Islamic Ummah’), Iqbal transcends Pakistan.”
His work continues to be cited by thinkers from various ends of the spectrum, from the modernist and reformer Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), who helped develop the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Studies program, to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei (b. 1939). That Iqbal’s message resonates with thinkers from such a wide range demands that we give him our attention.
Iqbal has become an enigmatic figure in the modern Muslim world today, and to cite him particularly in the Urdu and Persian-speaking worlds is to punctuate one’s own legitimacy and build one’s own cultural and moral capital. In this regard, it is pertinent to quote Schimmel once more:
“Iqbal’s work has been discussed in Pakistan and India, later in Iran and Turkey, and more recently in the Arab world, in an almost uncountable number of books and articles. He has been appropriated by almost every faction inside Indo-Pakistan for its own purposes: he has been regarded as the unsurpassable master of every virtue and art; he has been made a forerunner of socialism or an advocate of Marxism; he was anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist; he was the poet of the élite and of the masses, the true interpreter of orthodox Islam and the advocate of a dynamic and free interpretation of Islam, the enemy of Sufism and a Sufi himself; he was indebted to Western thought and criticized everything Western mercilessly.
One can call him a political poet, because his aim was to awaken the self-consciousness of Muslims, primarily in the subcontinent but also in general, and his poetry was indeed instrumental in bringing forth decisive changes in the history of the subcontinent. One can also style him a religious poet, because the firm belief in the unending possibilities of the Koran and the deep and sincere love of the prophet (in both his quality as nation-builder and as eternal model for man) are the bases of his poetry and philosophy. Perhaps one can summarize his role by saying that he wanted to remind Muslims of the fact that man was created as ḵalifat Allah, God’s vicegerent on earth, and was called to work and to ameliorate the world as a co-worker with God, without assuming that this earth was his own property.”[6]
Perhaps line six of Rumi’s Masnavi can illustrate the importance that Iqbal has had for such a wide range of people across time and space:
“har kasi az zann-e khwod shod yar-e man – az darun-e man najost asrar-e man”
“All befriend me hearing what they want to hear – none seek those secrets I bear within”[7]
With this background firmly in place, we may now move on to the substance of his poem, Jibreel-o Iblees, in his Bal-e Jibreel. The poem follows Iqbal’s classic dialectic style, bringing into dialogue the angel Gabriel and Satan. The two parties represent polar opposites: one is an archangel who in religious literature represents obedience to all of God’s commands and is tasked with the noble duty of delivering revelation (such as the Gospel, the Torah, and the Quran) to the Prophets of God throughout time. The other party represents the embodiment of evil; a being who occupied a high station with God as an “honorary angel” for his good deeds in spite of being a jinn [8] but was cast out for his refusal to follow God’s command to bow to Adam, earning a name synonymous with evil and a status as the eternal enemy of mankind.
Like all poems, especially those of great poets, this one is open to multiple interpretations. The following is a humble attempt by a student to try to make sense of it with reference to Islamic theology and the Quran, the themes of Islamic mysticism (used interchangeably with Sufism in this essay), and Iqbal’s philosophy of movement. All translations are my own attempts. The translation of Jibreel is highlighted in blue while the translation of Iblees is highlighted in red to make it easier for the reader to follow. At the conclusion of my commentary, there is a list of further readings in English for those who are interested in studying Iqbal, his ideas, and his impact in greater depth. After all, one essay on a short poem cannot do them justice.
I would like to give thanks to my Urdu professor at Columbia University, Aftab Ahmad, who helped me in accessing the treasures of Urdu poetry on an academic level. And a special thanks to my father, whose repeated insistence on holding on to our heritage has finally left its indelible mark on me, despite my stubborn resistance as a student and a son. Daddy continues to teach me in his own ways, and this is one fruit of his many painstaking endeavors. The translation and commentary would not be possible without these two individuals.
Jibreel-o Iblees(“Gabriel and Lucifer”), found in Bal-e Jibreel(“Gabriel’s Wing”) by Muhammad Iqbal
Transliteration, Translation, and Commentary by Asad Dandia
Transliteration: Hamdam-e dereena, kaisa hai jahaan-e rang-o-boo?
Jibreel: “[Hello], old friend! How goes the world of color and scent?”
Jibreel initiates the conversation with Iblees, asking him about affairs in the world of “color and scent,” i.e., the material world. There are a few things implicit in Iqbal’s choice to begin the conversation in this way.
In Islamic theology, angels are not said to have free will. They are said to have been created for the sole purpose of worshiping God, and they must obey whatever they are commanded to do by Him. Because of this fact, we can conclude either one of two things: Iqbal is suggesting that God ordered Jibreel to initiate this conversation, or that Jibreel has a degree of free will that allows him to initiate this conversation with an “old friend.”
Later we will see, as evidenced by the Quran, that angels do indeed have the capacity to question and are not entirely bound by this restriction. The title of “old friend” indicates the high status that Iblees once held with the angels long ago. Though the Quran refers to Iblees as “a clear enemy” to humanity, Jibreel clearly recalls a time when the reality was different.[9]
Transliteration: Soz-o-saaz-o-dard-o-dagh-o-justujoo-o-arzoo.
Iblees: “Burning and intense suffering, pain and wounds, constant seeking and constant desiring.”
The material world is described by Iblees in contrasting terms both as a source of pain and suffering but also as an object of pursuit and desire. Iqbal is once more drawing directly from Qur’anic themes which point to the world being a place where believers will be tested by great loss in terms of their wealth and even their lives,[10] but also a place where everything that exists is nothing more than a game or a diversion from what is the real life: the Hereafter.[11]
When Iblees replies with the above words, one would initially presume that he is lamenting the state of affairs in the material world, because it does not sound like a pleasing description. Perhaps he felt remorse and regret that he has been condemned to such terrible circumstances for eternity. However, as we shall see, within the wider context of the poem Iblees is actually extolling these conditions.
Transliteration: Har ghaddi aflak par rehti hai teri guftugoo // Kya nahin mumkim keh tera chaak-e daaman ho rafu?
Jibreel: “[Well] in every part of the heavens your mention is made. Can’t your torn cloth be sewn back together?”
In this passage we learn that Iblees is the “talk of the town,” an expression we use in English to mean that something or someone is constantly being discussed. There are angels and creatures in every part of the celestial world (“har ghaddi aflak”) who are asking about Iblees, and it appears that they are concerned for him.
When Jibreel asks, “Can’t your torn cloth be sewn back together?” (kya nahin mumkin keh tera chak-e daman ho rafu?”) he is speaking in metaphor: In Urdu, “chak-e daman” refers to a damaged or ripped garment and “rafu” means to heal or to repair, and by this, Jibreel wants to know if Iblees can come back to God and join the angels once again as a loyal worshiper. This shows us that in Iqbal’s poetic reality, even the angels have the possibility to have feelings, thoughts, and concerns.
Transliteration: Ah, aye Jibreel! Tu waqif nahin iss raaz se // Kar gaya sarmast muhjko toot kar mera suboo.
Iblees: “Ah, O Jibreel! You don’t have access to this kind of secret. I have already been made drunk by it and my wine glass has long since broken.”
Here, Iblees remarks at Jibreel’s naivete. “Ah, O Jibreel!” he proclaims. He is telling Jibreel that there is a secret which he has unearthed, and that it has been imbibed within him – and no angel can understand it. The secret is so powerful that it came and left Iblees permanently drunk and moved on long ago. The symbolism of the wine glass that has now broken alludes to the fact that the state of drunkenness has become the essence of Iblees’s being, inseparable from who he is.
“Iqbal is directly alluding to these Sufi motifs in a subversive manner by showing that Iblees has acquired secrets of his own, but rather than acquiring unicity with the Divine, as the Islamic tradition intends, Iblees’s secrets have positioned him in total opposition to the Divine.”
Here it is key to remember that the motifs of “secrets” (singular: sirr, plural: asrar) and “drunkenness” or “ecstasy” are central motifs of discourses within the Islamic mystical tradition. Those who seek to achieve closeness with God are called to strive toward acquiring God’s Secrets and intoxicating themselves through them until those secrets become a part of one’s very being, relinquishing the self and leaving nothing but God. Iqbal is directly alluding to these Sufi motifs in a subversive manner by showing that Iblees has acquired secrets of his own, but rather than acquiring unicity with the Divine, as the Islamic tradition intends, Iblees’s secrets have positioned him in total opposition to the Divine.
Transliteration: Ab yahan meri guzar mumkin nahin, mumkin nahin // Kiss qadr khamosh hai ye aalam-e-be-kaakh-o-koo!
Iblees: “Now my return to this place [the heavens] is not possible – not possible. How utterly dull is that world, without any palaces or streets!”
The conversation has now shifted from describing the material plane, where Iblees currently dwells, to describing the heavenly plane, where he once resided. He finds no reason to return to such a world because he finds it lacking, as he clarifies in the next part of the couplet. Iqbal uses the word “khamosh” for Iblees’s description of the material world, which can literally be translated as “silence,” but the literal translation does not quite encapsulate what Iqbal is trying to convey.
It isn’t just that the heavens are “silent,” it’s that they are dull, boring, and without any meaning or purpose. They have no “color or scent,” going back to the opening line of the poem. This is where the poem begins to acquire clarity. Iqbal is showing us that Iblees has no regrets about where he is now. In fact, he is proud of where he is and how he got there.
Transliteration: Jiss ki na-umeedi se ho soz-e daroon-e kaaynaat // Uss ki haqq mein ‘taqnatu’ acha hai ya ‘la taqnatu?’
Iblees: “The one whose despair gave passion to the world, what is better for him, ‘taqnatu’ (Arabic: despair) or ‘la taqnatu’ (Arabic: don’t despair)?”
In this couplet, Iqbal’s brilliance shines through, and one can only truly understand the full impact of this passage if one is familiar with Islamic theology and the Quran. Deep reflection over this couplet will lead the reader to ponder over the subversive nature of its message.
It begins with Iblees stating an incomplete clause with an implicit but strong message: “The one whose despair (or hopelessness) gave passion to the world,” with reference to himself. It was Iblees’s refusal to bow to Adam on the command of God – and his subsequent hopelessness in any chance for him to repent – that gives humanity hope and purpose in itself. The purpose of humanity is to defeat and overcome Iblees. Human beings have the possibility to have hope, but only if Iblees remains in a state of hopelessness – “na-umeed” as is written in the original Urdu.
The second line, a clause following from the previous one, carries even more depth. Here, Iblees says “What is better for him, taqnatu or la taqnatu?” Iqbal is directly referencing a verse from the Quran, wherein God says to those among His believing servants who have transgressed in sin that they must “not despair in the Mercy of God” (لَا تَقْنَطُوا مِنْ رَحْمَةِ اللَّهِ).[12] In this verse, God is telling humanity that they should always trust in God’s Mercy and never lose hope in it, because God is always prepared to forgive. To be hopeful in God is thus an obligation and to be hopeless in God is sinful.
“Iblees is saying that in order for such hopefulness to even be possible, he must necessarily be hopeless. Therefore, remaining in rebellion against God and in total despair and hopelessness is better for Iblees, because it is better for humanity.”
Iblees is saying that in order for such hopefulness to even be possible, he must necessarily be hopeless. Therefore, remaining in rebellion against God and in total despair and hopelessness is better for Iblees, because it is better for humanity.
Transliteration: Koh diye inkaar se toone maqamaat-e-buland // Chashm-e yazdaan mein ferishton ki rahi kya aabroo!
Jibreel: “You’ve lost such high stations [with God] through your rejection [of Him]. In the eyes of God, what dignity is left for the angels [because of what you did]!?”
In this couplet, Jibreel finally responds in the form of a complaint. In the Islamic tradition, Iblees is technically not an angel, but rather a jinn who was such a dedicated believer (Arabic: mu’min) that he occupied the same station as the angels, who have no free will and were created for the sole purpose of glorifying God. Iblees had free will and chose to exercise it in worship (initially), which made him better than the angels who had no choice in the matter at all. Though technically he was not an angel, he was also no different from an angel. Thus, once he was cast out of God’s grace, he humiliated even the angels. It is clear that Jibreel, as the Archangel, feels that Iblees inflicted harm not just upon himself, but upon the reputation of all the angels as well. In order to convince Iblees to return, Jibreel reminds him of the high stations (“maqamaat-e buland”) that he once occupied.
Transliteration: Hai meri jurrat se musht-e khaak mein zauq-e namoo // Mere fitne jaame-e-aql-o-khirad ka taar-o-pu
Iblees: “It is through myboldness that a piece of dirt gained the potential to grow. It is mymischiefs that weave together the very garment of [man’s] thought.”
It is remarkable that Iqbal is able to give so much character and agency to Iblees. What exactly is this piece of dirt (“musht-e khaak”) that Iblees is referring to? Human beings, of course! In this line, Iblees is framed as an active participant in the development of humanity, rather than a detriment to that development as is often portrayed in religious literature.
At the same time, Iqbal keeps true to the normative and orthodox portrayal of Iblees as an arrogant creature, indicated by his denigration of human beings in his reference to them as a “piece of dirt.” Iqbal is showing us that the haughtiness of Iblees has not subsided. In fact, it is this same sense of haughtiness that has kept him going all this time.
He then says, “It is my mischiefs (“fitne”) that weave together the very garment of [man’s] thought.” Within the Islamic religious lexicon, “fitne” (singular: fitna) refers to something which can pose a detriment to a person’s faith, whether it is a material object such as wealth or property, or an event such as a conflict or war, or even an evil thought which comes to one’s mind. Iblees is deemed to be the instigator of fitne (Arabic plural: fitan) on earth. But here, Iblees is telling Jibreel that it is that very instigation which pushes humanity to think and to contemplate, thus facilitating the generation of new thought, which itself fuels the progression of humanity.
” In order for men to transcend the status of angels, they must first come into conflict with devils. In the material world, there can be no development or movement in singularity – only in duality.”
This is a profound expression by Iqbal reflecting one of the prominent themes of his general philosophy. The message in this couplet is that in order for human beings to emerge as truly good, they must first be confronted with evil. In order to be the makers of their own fate, they must come into contact with the fate of another. In order for men to transcend the status of angels, they must first come into conflict with devils. In the material world, there can be no development or movement in singularity – only in duality.
Transliteration: Dehkta hai tu faqat saahil se razm-e-kheir-o-shar // Kaun toofaan ke tamanshe kha raha hai, main ke tu?
Iblees: “All you do is watch the battle between good and evil from the comforts of the shores, but who is it that must suffer the constant pounding of the storms – you or I?”
Iqbal uses the metaphor of the ocean as a representation of the world, with its strong currents and storms (“tufaan”) at the center, and its calmness at the peripheries, represented by the shores (“sahil”).
In this verse, Iblees chides Jibreel once more: Jibreel, as an angel, has the luxury of watching from the sidelines, while Iblees must endure the burden of suffering upon his own shoulders. What is Jibreel’s purpose except to obey and observe? What suffering must an angel endure? How could one who hasn’t endured suffering be like one who has? Through Iblees, Iqbal both extols suffering and laments it: life has no purpose without the presence of suffering, but it is also a painful thing to endure. And, according to Iblees’s logic, Jibreel has no right to comment on it at all.
Transliteration: Khizr bhi be-dast-o-pa, Ilyaas bhi be-dast-o-pa // Mere toofaan yam-ba-yam, darya-ba-darya, ju-ba-ju
Iblees: “Khizr is helpless before me, Ilyas is helpless before me. My storms strike – ocean by ocean, river by river, stream by stream.”
It is interesting that in this couplet, Iqbal chooses “Khizr” and “Elisha” out of all people he could have chosen to emphasize his point. He writes that both of these individuals (“Elisha” is the Biblical equivalent of “Ilyas”) are “without hands or legs” (“be-dast-o-pa”) before Iblees.
Khizr is regarded within the Islamic mystical tradition to be someone of great spiritual insight into the workings of God. There is a prominent story in chapter 18 of the Quran which features his encounter with the Prophet Moses, who joins Khizr through a series of events upon learning that he is a great man of knowledge. Each time Khizr performs a number of questionable or perplexing actions on their journey together, Moses questions Khizr’s wisdom. At the end, Khizr clarifies what the purpose was behind each action, humbling Moses. They key impart of this story is that Khizr, while not a “Prophet” in the proper sense, was nonetheless given insight to certain worldly events which even a Prophet did not have access to.[13] In the Islamic mystical tradition, Khizr is also said to have drank the water of life, granting him eternal life in the material world, where he wanders mysteriously aiding those who are lost and in search of a destination. Iqbal writes that Iblees’s cunning leaves even this great individual helpless.
Elisha is similarly held in high esteem in the Islamic tradition as a Prophet of the Children of Israel, and he is likewise said to be undying. In the Hebrew Bible, he is known to be a miracle worker, who, through the intervention of God, is able to perform miracles such as purifying water for drinking, multiplying the quantity of oil to help a person’s business, and healing leprosy. Both Khizr and Elisha, then, can be regarded as “veterans” of life in the material world, possessing enormous wisdom about its temptations as well as the experience to overcome them.
With knowledge of who these two individuals were, one is able to appreciate the gravity of Iqbal’s words: even the most gifted of God’s men are humbled before the power of Iblees, who says that his storms attack his victims “ocean by ocean, river by river, stream by stream.” This is reminiscent of a verse from the Quran, wherein Iblees is speaking to God Himself, saying: “I will assault them from before them and behind them, from their right and from their left”[14] after he is cast out of God’s grace. Iqbal is able to seamlessly weave this Qur’anic motif into his poetry through the deployment of the ocean as metaphor.
Transliteration: Gar kahbi khalwat mayassar ho toh pooch Allah se // Qissa-e Adam ko rangeen kar gaya kiskaa lahu?
Iblees: “If you ever find yourself in hard solitude, then ask God this: Whose blood fused color into the story of man?”
This couplet and the one that follows it may be the boldest ones in the entire poem. Iblees is now issuing a challenge to Jibreel through a rhetorical question: “If you ever find yourself in hard solitude (“khalwat” – a term that denotes solitude or seclusion so that one may worship God undisturbed), then ask God this: Whose blood fused color into the story of man?”
In other words, whose pain is it that brought meaning and purpose to humankind? Who sacrificed himself so that man could have this meaning? Who gave up his own position in high stations so that the position of man could be elevated to those very high stations?
This couplet arguably forms the second part of the answer to Jibreel’s question in the start of the poem: “Old friend! How goes the world of color and scent?” The first part of the answer was in Iblees’s initial reply, where he described the what, and the second part is in this couplet, where he describes the why. The celestial world or the heavens were too static and stagnant for Iblees. The material, earthly world on the other hand, is brimming with movement – and it is because of Iblees that it is so.
Transliteration: Main khatakta hoon dil-e yazdaan mein kante ki tarah // Tu faqat Allahu, Allahu, Allahu
Iblees: “I prick the heart of God like a thorn, while you merely shout, ‘Allahu, Allahu, Allahu!’”
Without a doubt this is the most provocative couplet of this short poem, both within the fictional world of the poem itself, and surely in the real world in which Iqbal inhabited.
We know that Iqbal lived during a time of great chaos for the Muslim-majority world. The Mughal Empire had fallen just a few decades before his birth, and he was born under direct colonial rule of the British Crown. The Ottoman Empire had crumbled in his lifetime, and a new Turkish Republic had been born. He had witnessed how World War I ravaged Europe. With the advent of great technological advances, mass migration, rapid urbanization, the formation of national identities, and burgeoning political movements, a new age was emerging, with pathbreaking social, political, and philosophical ideas coming to the fore. Iqbal felt as though the Muslim-majority world had fallen behind and suffered as a consequence. At the same time, he knew that it was precisely by recovering and reconstructing its Islamic tradition that the Muslim-majority world would be able to lead humanity toward clarity once more.
It is my interpretation that this poem, particularly the second half, is both a critique of and a plea to the Muslim-majority world. Jibreel is a stand-in for the Muslim mystic (Sufi) or scholar (‘alim), and perhaps even the common Muslim, who is frozen and stagnant in time, focusing exclusively on the outward dimensions of religion, which require little but the mechanics of ritual and perfunctory performances of piety. Jibreel’s concern for the dignity of the angels as expressed to Iblees was intended to depict the modern Muslim’s concern for the outward (Arabic: “zahir”) at the expense of the inward (Arabic: “batin”). Jibreel’s criticism that Iblees’s disobedience caused him to lose his high stations and fall from God’s grace is allegorical language that Iqbal deploys to represent the modern Muslim’s obsession with accumulating deeds and expecting a return like an employee expecting wages from an employer. Iqbal saw this mentality as an insult to faith, and to combat it, he deployed the character that represented the very antithesis of faith: Iblees – the devil himself.
Furthermore, the poem is a critique of a particular brand of Sufism, though it must be noted that Iqbal did not oppose Sufism altogether. His great respect for Sufism is evidenced in his reverence for Rumi, whom, as was mentioned, Iqbal takes as an inspiration and an interlocutor throughout his poetry.
A major theme in Sufism is the existence of “stations” (Arabic: “manazil”), and the highest station for the servant to reach is described as total “extinction” of the self (Arabic: “fana”), where there is nothing left but God. After this, the servant enters what is called “self-subsistence” (Arabic: “baqa”), returning to the world in this state.
For Iqbal, this approach to the Divine merited criticism because he believed it necessitated reaching an endpoint after which there was nowhere else to go. He believed that this mystical logic had unfortunately been translated into the material plane within history, where Muslims wrongly acted as though their repository of contributions to the world had come to an end and all that was left was a romanticizing of the past. Iqbal held that this approach had become an excuse for inactivity and stagnation in the Muslim-majority world, and that in order to revive the regenerative component inherent within Islam, it had to be challenged. Critiquing a prominent Sufi mystic, Iqbal writes in his Reconstruction:
““Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven and returned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned.” These are the words of a great Muslim saint, ‘Abd al-Quddus of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of “unitary experience”; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large. The prophet’s return is creative. He returns to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby to create a fresh world of ideals. For the mystic the repose of “unitary experience” is something final; for the prophet it is the awakening, within him, of world-shaking psychological forces, calculated to completely transform the human world.”[15]
As the revolutionary Iranian activist Ali Shariati (d. 1977), a stalwart admirer of Iqbal, mentions in one of his lectures:
“Sufism says:
As our fate has been pre-determined in our absence
If it is not to your satisfaction, do not complain.
Or,
If the world does not agree with you or suit you,
You agree with the world.
But Iqbal, the mystic, says:
If the world does not agree with you,
Arise against it!”[16]
Iqbal argued that instead of dissolving or immersing the self into the Divine, one must affirm the self (Persian: “khudi”) in a relationship that is in constant dialogue with the Divine. As the Columbia philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne writes in his interpretation of Iqbal’s philosophy of movement: “The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation from the limitations of individuality; it is, on the other hand, a more precise definition of it.”[17]
Iqbal wanted the human being to become the embodiment of the following Qur’anic verses:
[Prophet], when your Lord told the angels, ‘I am putting a successor on earth,’ they said, ‘How can You put someone there who will cause damage and bloodshed, when we celebrate Your praise and proclaim Your holiness?’ but He said, ‘I know things you do not.’
He taught Adam all the names [of things], then He showed them to the angels and said, ‘Tell me the names of these if you truly [think you can].’
They said, ‘May You be glorified! We have knowledge only of what You have taught us. You are the All Knowing and All Wise.’
Then He said, ‘Adam, tell them the names of these.’ When he told them their names, God said, ‘Did I not tell you that I know what is hidden in the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you reveal and what you conceal?’[18]
There are motifs within these four Quranic verses that are also to be found in Iqbal’s poem. In the above verses of the Quran, we see that the angels boasted of their ability to “praise and proclaim” God’s holiness. They foresaw the trouble that would come from God’s newest creation (human beings), implicitly asking God to reconsider. Again, here we have an attempt by angels to intervene in worldly affairs to no avail, exposing their own lack of insight. By responding that “I know things you do not,” God is directly telling them that He knows that there is a possibility for humanity to reach a higher station than the angels, similar to the station that Iblees once held. Perhaps the angels were still reeling from the loss of their “old friend.”
Someone reading this poem from the standpoint of Islamic orthodoxy may conclude that it is incomplete, because Iblees – being Satan – emerges victorious with the last word. How could the preeminent Muslim poet-philosopher – and the “Poet of the East” and “Sage of the Ummah” no less – allow such an outcome? It is my belief that this outcome was precisely Iqbal’s point: if the poem appears incomplete, then it was intended to be such, because the process of completing the story is one that is left to the human being. Iqbal is sending a message to his audience, telling them that they must now take up the task of completing the work left for them in the world. They must partake in the battle that Iblees instigates.
As Diagne writes elsewhere, “If one word was needed to condense the whole of Iqbal’s philosophy, that word could very well be incompleteness: incompleteness of the world, always in the process of happening; incompleteness of the human, always engaged in the task of accomplishing itself as a person.”[19]
Iqbal’s philosophy can be read in a Hegelian light, though this would be an imperfect framework. There is certainly within Iqbal’s poetry the theme of the human being self-consciously engaging with herself and with the world around her in an ongoing dialectic that erases old forms of understanding and living and generates new ones, but there is a crucial component present for Iqbal that was absent for Hegel. Iqbal had no intention for Islam – or religion – to eventually recede or to take a backseat in this progression toward higher stations of being. Rather, unlike Hegel, Iqbal believed that it was precisely through an organic synthesis between religion and man that man would reach his highest station. In one sense, Iqbal’s philosophy was the inverse of Hegel’s.
It should also be noted that the use of poetic license to deploy Satan as a vehicle to critique man is not a new method in the Islamic tradition. We find precedence for it in the work of Islam’s most prized medieval poet and Iqbal’s interlocutor, Rumi:
Once Adam looked at Satan with disdain
Filled with contempt and scorn, when he was vain;
Self-conscious, he thought he was in the right
And laughed at wretched Satan’s awful plight.
The Lord’s possessiveness cried, ‘Who are you?
About the hidden truths you have no clue!’
If He should turn your waistcoat inside out,
He’d lift a mountain from its base no doubt,
He would unveil a hundred Adams then
And cause cursed Satans to be born again:
Adam said, ‘I repent now for that glance,
I won’t presume again with arrogance.
In these lines, Rumi presents a dialogue between Adam and God, wherein Adam presumes that because of his status as a human being, he must naturally rank above Iblees – who is now Satan, the accursed: “I am better than him, for you created me from fire, and him from clay,” said Satan when asked why he refused to bow to Adam.[20] In the above lines quoted from Rumi’s Masnavi, the Qur’anic story is inversed: it is now Adam who is the arrogant one, and God reprimands Adam for his arrogant glare, reminding him that he does not know the hidden truths of which only God is aware. Being human alone is no guarantor of success, but rather success is found in the work one does in the material world. The following lines distinguish Adam from Iblees:
Now that I’ve begged, please lead me to decide
That wealth and knowledge don’t deserve our pride;
Don’t let a heart you’ve blessed now go astray!
Make evil fates decreed now fade away!
Please spare our souls from meeting wretched ends,
Don’t separate us from pure-hearted friends.
There’s nothing worse than life apart from You,
Filled with anxiety, and helpless too.’[21]
Iblees refused to repent and only went further in transgression. Adam, both in the Qur’an after he ate the forbidden fruit and in Rumi’s Masnavi after his arrogant gaze, chose the path of repentance. But that repentance only came about after sin, and if interpreted in the Iqbalian spirit: reconstruction only comes about after destruction.
Following Rumi, it is that reconstruction which Iqbal wants Muslims to understand, and he does so in the most provocative way. Instead of a dialogue between the angels and God as in the Quran, or between Adam and God as in Rumi’s Masnavi, this time the dialogue is between an angel and the devil, and once more the angels are shown to be lacking in the knowledge of man’s potential.
“Instead of a dialogue between the angels and God as in the Quran, or between Adam and God as in Rumi’s Masnavi, this time the dialogue is between an angel and the devil, and once more the angels are shown to be lacking in the knowledge of man’s potential.”
When you read this poem by grounding it within Islamic theology, Sufism, and Iqbal’s broader philosophy of movement, you cannot help but come to a profound conclusion that he is pleading to the Muslim people, saying, “Look, even Iblees the accursed is able to bring about great transformations on earth, despite falling out with the angels. You, O human, have been chosen by God as His successor on earth – above the angels – and yet you have fallen into slumber. Arise and act!”
One wonders how this great sage would interpret the events of today. How would have he made sense of the catastrophic crimes that were perpetrated through the twentieth century, from nuclear war and the Holocaust to the industrial-scale abuse of animal life and the environment? What would he think of the post-World War II global order, which today seems to be tested more intensely than it ever has, with the ever-encompassing reach of the neoliberal market economy and the rise of xenophobic ultranationalist movements? What would he make of the counterrevolutionary forces on the march across the world, emboldened by an American administration that seems to have given them the green light to declare their repression with an unapologetic fervor? What would he say to the Muslim-majority world, his primary audience, which is more fragmented than ever, with deep faults of division formed along national and sectarian lines, be it in the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia or the aftermath of the Arab Spring? In these conditions, the voice of an Iqbal is sorely needed. So, what would this great sage have to say to us today?
“If Iqbal teaches us anything, it is that only through acquiring a deep understanding and love for the other can we come to understand who we are. “
If Iqbal teaches us anything, it is that only through acquiring a deep understanding and love for the other can we come to understand who we are. Though he was passionate in advancing the qualities of his own tradition, the ambition he showed in learning from other traditions demonstrated a willingness to transcend the rigidities that characterize our world today. Iqbal’s call is thus not exclusively for Muslims, but for non-Muslims as well. It is true that there would be no Iqbal without Rumi or Ghazali, but it is equally as true that there would be no Iqbal without Nietzsche or Bergson. Thus, in the Iqbalian spirit, not only must humankind enter into a dialogic relationship with the Divine once more, but must ultimately recognize that it is with our fellow human that we must also enter into a dialectic.
We will never know how Iqbal would respond to our troubled and troubling times, and while the avenues for speculation are many, what is clear is that the impassioned calls of the Poet of the East ring as true today as they ever have before.
Asad Dandia is an M.A. student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. His interests include modern Islamic intellectual history, Islamic mysticism, and the transregional nexus and exchange of knowledge, culture, and ideas between the Middle East and South Asia.
Further Readings
Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal. Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2010.
Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition. Translated by Jonathan Adjemian. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Hillier, Chad, and Basit Bilal Koshul. Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Iqbal, Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Majeed, Javed. Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism. Routledge, 2016.
Ozturk, Sevcan. Becoming a Genuine Muslim: Kierkegaard and Muhammad Iqbal. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
Schimmel, Annemarie. Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal Academy, 1963.
Sevea, Iqbal Singh. The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
[1]Khwaja Abdur Rahim, The Poet of Tomorrow, 1968, p. 5.
[2]Qur’an 33:40.
[3]Lewis, Franklin. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teaching and Poetry of Jalâl Al-Din Rumi. Oxford: Oneworld, 2016, p. 484. Lewis notes that this title was given to Iqbal posthumously by Khwaja A. ‘Erfani (Tehran, 1953).
[4]Annemarie Schimmel, “Iqbal, Muhammad,” Encyclopædia Iranica, Vol. XIII, Fasc. 2, pp. 197-200; available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iqbal-muhammad
[5]Ibid.
[6]Schimmel, “Iqbal, Muhammad,” Encyclopædia Iranica.
[7]Lewis.
[8]Acreation of God analogous to human beings in terms of fallibility and accountability toward God, but made out of a smokeless flame, according to the Islamic tradition.
[9]Qur’an 2:208.
[10]Qur’an 2:155—157.
[11]Qur’an 57:20.
[12]Qur’an, 39:53.
[13]Qur’an 18:60—82.
[14]Qur’an 7:17.
[15]Iqbal, Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
[16]Khamenei, Ali, and Ali Shariati. Iqbal: Manifestation of the Islamic Spirit. Translated by Mahliqa Qara’i and Laleh Bakhtiar. Chicago, 1991, p. 50.
[17]Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal. (8). Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2010.
[18]Qur’an, 2:30—33 (A New Translation by M.A.S Abdel Haleem)
[19]Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition. Translated by Jonathan Adjemian. (88). New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
[20]Qur’an 7:12
[21]Rūmī, Jalāl Al-Dīn. The Masnavi: Book One. Translated by Jawid Mojaddedi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, lines 3908—3917, p. 237.