Sahitya Akademi
Iqbal — The Humanist
Author(s): K.A. Faruqi
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 22, No. 3, Aspects of Modern Poetry (May-June 1979), pp.
97-107
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
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Iqbal—The Humanist
K.A. Faruqi
Iqbal, thb humanist poet of the East and true embodiment of
the Asian Renaissance, is pre-eminent as a modern messenger
of hope and love and provides a channel of co-operation and
understanding between the countries of Asia.
Before the 19th century came to a close, many countries in
Asia and North-Africa had passed into the political or economic
control of Europe. The Italians and French held a dominant
position in North-Africa, the Germans in Turkey, the Russians in
Central Asia and the British in India, Iraq and Egypt. The East
was on the cross-roads of a new era and the torments of transi
tion had shaken many out of their roots but Iqbal stood serene
and erect with his deep faith in Man.
Thus Iqbal came at this very difficult moment to give cour
age and hope not only to the Indians but to the East,-sunk into
a state of bleak despair.
The direct impact of British domination is clearly percep
tible in the increased gloom and depression that mark the
poetry of the period. What deep-rooted causes had made this
sub-continent homeland of a defeated and humiliated people?
This is what Iqbal set out to discover. According to him the
main responsibility for oriental decadence during 1700 and 1900
lay at the door of those systems which inculcated self-negation
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INDIAN LITERATURE
and self-abandonment or blind imitation. In this East deserted
by happiness and even by the mere joy of living, Iqbal was the
Awakener, the prophet of optimism bearing the message of a
new and exhilarating Truth.
The kernel of Iqbal's teaching lay in his quest, in discover
ing the meaning of the evolutionary process for the develop
ment of a fuller and richer individuality.
In Urdu literature there has never been a period of slavish
imitation or total acceptance of western ideologies. In fact, this
has been a period of constant conflict and ferment. Here we do
not witness "a process of denationalisation" to borrow a phrase
of Sri Aurobindo or a loss of identity as in the case of early
19th century Calcutta students. After 1857 western iron, to
quote Toynbee, had "entered deeper into India's soul" and this
encounter with the West proved the most important event in
the literary history of India. The greatest pioneers of the new
movement, members of an urban middle-class, who appeared
on the stage of Urdu after 1857 are Sir Saiyyid Ahmad Khan,
Hali, Nazir Ahmad, Shibli and Zakaullah and the flower of these
endeavours is of course Iqbal who corrected the balance in
favour of the orient and remains to this day the best example
of selective assimilation of cultures. The Urdu response to
Western challenge has made a full circle from rejection and imi
tation to critical revaluation, selection and confident assertive
ness.
How, then, did Iqbal analyse the problem of the East?
According to Iqbal, the importation into the East of platonic
and neo-platonic ideas had sapped its vitality. The Greeks of
old considered life an illusion. They were overwhelmed by the
idea of fatality and freedom of the will did not exist for them.
It is impossible to evade one's destiny: such is the theme of
Greek tragedy, of many Indian poets and thinkers. They taught
renunciation of the Self and detachment from worldly riches.
This thinking penetrated into the East and led to "an explosion
of pseudo-mysticism". A complete divorce was thus effected
between Mind and Matter: the soul alone is important and the
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IQBAL —THE HUMANIST
body must be ignored as a shameful object. All this led to es
cape, ascetic inaction and fatalism.
Iqbal draws a line between the prophetic and the mystic
types of consciousness. He combines the life of this world and
the life hereafter. To him both are equally important. None can
be neglected.
Hazrat Shaikh Abdul Quddus of Gangoh, a great saint, and
a contemporary of Babur, the Moghul King, says: "Muhammad
of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven in Miraj (Muhammad's
journey to heaven) and returned. I swear by God that if I had
reached that point, I would never have returned." These are the
words of a great Muslim saint. In the whole range of Sufi litera
ture it will be difficult to find words which in a single sentence
disclose "such an acute perception of the psychological diffe
rence between the prophetic and the mystic types of conscious
ness." 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. The prophet
prayed to God in the highest heaven to return to the earth to
preach God's message and lift up His creatures.
Iqbal says in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in
Islam: "The Prophet Muhammad's return to earth 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 Sufi 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."
Iqbal raises a protest against this negative and paralysing
influence which prevents man from working to improve and
change his condition. Action is the fountain head of life, and
in order to act, the individual must cultivate his Self or Khudi.
The supreme object of Iqbal's philosophy is the production of
the ideal man by a rigorous training of the human faculties in
order to awaken the East from the deep slumber. Iqbal wants
"to transform the ape-man of Darwin into a Perfect Man." In
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INDIAN LITERATURE
order to achieve his aim, he takes the Quran as his guide:
"Verily, we have given honour and dignity to man." "We crea
ted you, we gave you shape and then we ordered the angels to
prostrate themselves in front of Adam."
¡ Iqbal rejects the traditional idea of the 'fall' of man which
makes of his earthly life a painful exile. The Coming of Man is,
in his opinion, a glorious event hailed by the whole creation:
Love acclaimed the birth of a being with a yearning heart.
Beauty trembled, for one gifted with vision was born.
Nature quaked, for from the helpless clay was born a self
creating, self-destroying and self-observing being:
Word went round from the heavens to the
solitude of Eternity;
Beware, ye who are veiled, the render of
veils is born at last!
Desire, unconscious of self, wrapt in slumber,
Opened its eyes in the lap of life,
And lo! a new world came into being.
The European expansion in Asia and Africa was mainly anti
Muslim. Against this political and economic background, Iqbal
placed man at the centre of his philosophy—man, who has "the
higher consciousness of his manifold relations with God and
His universe." He makes him the subject of his pre-occupations.
He sees in him a creator capable of transfiguring himself as
well as transfiguring the East, in fact the whole world. Man,
therefore, assumes inordinate proportions in his eyes; he even
claims to have improved upon God's handiwork. He says:
Thou didst create night and I made the lamp.
Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests.
I produced the orchards, gardens and groves.
It is I who turn stone into a mirror,
And it is I who turn poison into an antidote
Iqbal is acutely dissatisfied with man as he is now—divested
of spirituality, inferior in calibre, limited in intellect, full of
meanness and cruelty. He often raises his voice in challenging
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IQBAL—THE HUMANIST
lament against man's inferiority. He says:
Fashion a new pattern,
Bring a more perfect Adam into existence;
This making a plaything of clay
Is not worthy of God the Creator. ; , "
Iqbal has faith in his fellow-beings and in the power of the
right ideology and right education to transform them by deve
loping their inner richness:
The stars tremble in their courses over
man's upward march,
Lest this fallen star should become the
perfect moon.
Man must rebuild a world of his own choice: God decreed,
"It is like this and you have nothing to say."
Man said, "Verily, it is like this, but it ought to be like
that."
And the poet asks challengingly, "Is man destined to be
come the rival of God?"
Iqbal incites man to become what he really is: "Create if
thou art alive; seize, like me, the sky with your hands!"
How long will you beg light like Moses on Mount Sinai?
Let a flame similar to that of the Burning Bush leap out of
your being!
Break to pieces whatever is not worthy of thee,
Shape a new world drawn from the depth of your being!
Man of God, be as dazzling and as sharp as the
edge of a sword;
Be the architect of the destinies of the world!
The great Persian poet of the 13th century, Maulana Jalal
ud-Din Rumi, who was Iqbal's murshid, in the spiritual sense
had also dreamt of the advent of the Perfect Man, and, equip
ped with a lantern, like Diogenes, he had set out to find him.
Says Iqbal adopting the following lines from Shams-i-Tabriz:
Yesterday, the master with a lantern was roaming about the
city,
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INDIAN LITERATURE
Saying : "I am tired of the devil and the beast. I want a man.
My heart is weary of these weak-spirited companions. I desire
the lion of God and Rustam, Son of Zal."
They said, "He is not to be found, we have sought him long."
He said, "A thing that is not to be found—that is what I
desire." It is not by a mere chance that Iqbal placed these verses
at the beginning of the combined Asrar-i-Khudi and Rumuz-i
Bekhudi. All this philosophy is indeed a quest for the perfect
man who can change the destiny of the fallen East. The Perfect
Man is the end result of an impassioned search, and "the glo
rious affirmation of the dignity and even of the divinity, of the
creature who contemplates its Creator face to face."
"Through his self-realisation he becomes the hand of God.
And as he becomes the hand of God, he rules over the uni
verse " He then becomes the guide, the herald of a new era.
Says Iqbal:
The naib (i.e., man) is the Vicegerent of God on earth. He
is the completest ego, the goal of humanity, the acme of life
both in mind and body; in him the discord of our mental
life becomes a harmony. The highest power is united in him
with the highest knowledge. In his life, thought and action,
instinct and reason become one.
Iqbal did not want this Perfect Man (Insan-i-Kamil) to be a
myth, nor did he want him to be the excessive dream of a poet.
He had understood that man can only live in and for the society
and that he is closely linked to the group to which he belongs:
The individual exists in relation to the community.
Alone he is nothing,
The wave exists in the river.
4e;!e ■ Outsidé the river, it is nothing.
Iqbal had meticulously drawn the plan of this society. It
symbolised for him, "universal brotherhood and the fullness
of love." He suffered to see mankind divided into warring
camps and all his life he worked for the reconciliation of na
tions: "Greed has split up humanity into warring camps, so
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IQBAL—THE HUMANIST
speak the language of love and teach the lesson of brother
hood!"
Again he says: The intoxicated Faqir is neither of the East
flor of the West;
I neither belong to Delhi nor to Ishan,
I speak out what I consider to be the truth.
In Iqbal's eyes, discriminations based on colour and race
are a scourge for humanity. He kept repeating that a harmoni
ous life would remain impossible on the earth as long as such
distinctions exist.
Not Afghans, Turks or sons of Tartary,
But of one garden, of one trunk are we.
Shun the criterion of scent and hue,
We all the nurslings of one spring time be.
Political domination of the West and the economic exploi
tation of their merchants brought in a doctrine of racialism and
a feeling of European superiority against the Asians.
Iqbal dreamt of a society in which true brotherhood would
exist, and the social rank of man would not be determined by
his caste, his colour or his fortune, but by the kind of life he
leads: a world, says Iqbal, "Where the poor tax the rich, where
an untouchable can marry the daughter of a King and where
capital is not allowed to accumulate so as to dominate the real
producer of wealth."
Iqbal always condemned the nationalism of the West as
founded on mere animal ties of blood, instead of on harmony
of ideals.
Mrs. Sarojini Naidu once remarked: "The poems of Iqbal
have freed my soul from the narrow confines of nationalism
and have enabled me to love the entire humanity."
Iqbal is a seer and a humanist who has pondered deeply
over all the social, political and economic problems facing the
East and examined them in the light of his Quranic ideology.
By the Midas-touch of his genius, he turned to gold all that he
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INDIAN LITERATURE
wrote and enlarged the frontiers of poetic expression by sugges
tiveness.
A few critics who clearly ignore the anti-Muslim aspect of
European expansion in Asia have claimed that the message of
Iqbal was meant, above all, for the Muslim world and that it
would not have a universal value. The poet himself has explain
ed very clearly his point of view of this fundamental question:
The object of my Persian masnavis is not to attempt an
advocacy of Islam. My real purpose is to look for a better
social order and to present a universally acceptable ideal
(of life and action) before the world, but it is impossible for
me, in this effort to outlive this ideal, to ignore the social
system and values of Islam whose most important objective
is to demolish all the artificial and pernicious distinctions of
caste, creed, colour and economic status. . . . when I realised
that the conception of nationalism based on the differences of
race and country was beginning to overshadow the world and
that the Muslims also were in danger of giving up the uni
versality of their ideal in favour of a narrow patriotism and
false nationalism, I felt it my duty as a Muslim and a well
wisher of humanity to recall them back to their true role
in the drama of human evolution. No doubt, I am intensely
devoted to Islam but I have selected the Islamic community
as my starting point not because of any national or religious
prejudice but because it is the most practicable line of ap
proach.
Iqbal, like Kalidasa, Milton and Tagore, has borrowed all
traditions and the literary symbols from his cultural past. But
that does not make him narrow or less universal. On the death
of Iqbal, Tagore feelingly remarked: "The death of Iqbal crea
tes a void in literature that, like a mortal wound, will take a
very long time to heal. India whose place in the world is too
narrow can ill afford to miss a poet whose poetry had such uni
versal value."
Iqbal is ranked among the immortals of literary history. He
does not belong to an age. He is of all ages and of all climes.
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IQBAL—The humanist
With his deep love for life and mankind, the writings of Iqbal
conjure for us the image of the Olympian, the human hero.
A poet of deep, reflective wisdom and delicate sensitivity,
Iqbal occupies a very distinguished position among the men of
letters His poems, apart from their philosophic content, are
full of concentrated emotion. The poems have a dream-like
quality that penetrates the unconscious, a haunting quality
which characterizes all true poetry. They are a record of his
deepened insights and his experienced visions, a marvel of sug
gestiveness. Iqbal joined to the keen intellect of the philosopher
and the transcendental vision of the mystic, the exquisite ex
pression of the artist.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru held the view that Iqbal was a
poet, an intellectual and a philosopher of a great order. I quote
from his Discovery of India:
During his last years Iqbal turned more and more towards
socialism. The great progress that Soviet Russia had made
attracted him. Even his poetry took a different turn. A few
months before his death, as he lay on his sick bed, he sent
for me and I gladly obeyed the summons. As I talked to
him. about many things, Tfelt how much we had in com
mon, in spite of differences, and how easy it would be to get
on with him.
As testified by Nehru and Edward Thompson, Iqbal believ
ed in the unity of India. He sought this unity, "not in the nega
tion but in the mutual harmony and co-operation of the many.
It is on the discovery of Indian unity in this direction that the
fate of India as well as of Asia really depends."
These ideas of intense love for India find an echo in Zarbe
Kaleem or The Sword of Moses, which is one of his last books.
In Shua-e-Umeed or Ray of Hope, the Sun asks the rays to
return to his bosom as: "you are wandering in the vastness of
the atmosphere but the absence of love is on the increase in the
world, it is neither a happy experience to shine on the grains of
sand nor round the tulip and roses."
At this juncture, a ray of the sun, radiant and lively as the
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INDIAN LITERATURE
glance of a houri's eyes comes forward saying, "Give me leave
to scatter my light till every speck of dust in the East is lit up
like the sun. I shall not desert the dark recesses of India till its
darkness is converted into light and her slumbering millions are
stirred to life; for India is the beacon light of the hopes and
aspirations of the East, the land irrigated by the tears of Iqbal,
the land whose dust illumines the eyes of the Moon and con
stellations of stars and whose puny pebble equals the brilliance
of a pearl." Iqbal can be best understood in the context of
Asian renaissance. He exhibits the same patriotic fervour and
revolt as we find in Japan, China and Indonesia. Japan declared
Asia as one and laid the foundation of Asianism. In China, the
Communist Party was founded in 1921 and Sun Yat Sen de
clared, "We no longer look to the West. Our faces are turned
towards Russia."
Iqbal could not accept Marxism because of its atheism. But
he went so far as saying Islam as Bolshevism plus God. Going
beyond narrow nationalism and approaching socialism, Iqbal
envisaged the revolt of the downtrodden classes. In the follow
ing chorus, which is God's command to the Angels, they are
directed to burn down every ear of corn in the field which does
not provide subsistence for the cultivator who tends it:
Arise and awake the poor of My world,
Shake up the very foundations of the palaces of the rich!
Warm the blood of slaves with life-giving faith
Give the humble sparrow strength to fight the falcon!
Burn every corn of wheat in that field,
Which does not provide sustenance to the cultivator.
Modern civilisation is but a glass blower's work-house
Teach madness to the Poet of the East (so that he may smash it).
God almighty orders the Heavenly agents to rock the foun
dations of the society based on iniquity, and to awaken the
long suffering poor from their pathetic contentment. Lenin says
to God:
Where is the man whose God Thou art?
Is it the man of clay who lives beneath the Skies?
For the East, gods are the whites of Europe.
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IQBAL—THE HUMANIST
To Iqbal poetry was the "essence of true philosophy and a
complete science", whose object was to appeal to the finer side
of human nature and to awaken the slumbering people. For him
the true aim of all art is to make human life rich and beautiful.
His conception of art is conditioned by his great mission, to
improve the condition of his fellowmen:
The object of all art is to
attain the warmth of life immortal,
What availeth a spasm or two that
vanish like a spark.
In the words of Iqbal, "Man's glory consists in creativeness.
The moon and stars do what they have been doing. Poets not
only give us words that live but words to live by." Iqbal is
thoroughly human, he touches the man in man. His universality,
his compassion, his graciousness have modern relevance.
No time seems to have needed Iqbal as much as ours. In
order to arrive at a contemporary understanding of Iqbal, we
must consider the calamities of our situation and seek the
answers in Iqbal. The atomic weapons of total destruction are
steadily growing more awesome. The tyranny of science and
technology continues with the withering of individuality, its
contempt for the difference between right and wrong and its
dreadful unconcern for values. And the very existence of human
race is at stake.
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