A Philosophy-Troubled Sayyid Approaches Iqbal
Muhammad Iqbal in either Germany or Lahore in the early 1900’s (far-right).
After Iqbal moved to British India, completing his PhD in Heidelberg University, and training with famous Continental philosophers like McTaggert at Cambridge, Iqbal took up the practice of law at the British High Court of Lahore. He did not resume his previous tenure at Government College, Lahore, as a professor of Arabic and philosophy. However, his drive for philosophy continued, amid his legal undertakings, mainly in Persian poetry (his first book, published in the 1910’s was a critique Platonic idealism).
In an Urdu-Persian poem, Iqbal lyricizes how a Muslim Sayyid, a descendant of the holy Prophet ﷺ, from an old-guard family in India, approached Iqbal, in Lahore or Hyderabad, praising the intellectuality and merits of Western philosophy, and how decadent, lowbrow, unintelligent, insipid, and vacuous Islamic theology and philosophy were, after he was exposed to the German and French philosophers Hegel and Bergson, and their ideas on being and elan.
Iqbal was very hurt by this interaction, if only because, having studied both the kalām (discursive theology) of Islam, and having trained with actual Western philosophers in England and Germany, he felt that Islamic philosophy outlined a much richer and more cosmic production of philosophy than modern philosophy. Even more devastating, Iqbal writes, Iqbal was a descendant of Brahmin Hindus, and here was an attested descendant of the holy Prophet ﷺ— why was a descendant of Hindus more convinced of the intellectuality of Islamic thought than a descendant of the Prophet ﷺ?
Iqbal weeps:
In the name of a philosophy-troubled descendant of the Prophet ﷺ
if you didn’t abandon your own self (i.e. the repository of Islamic values within our souls)
you would not have been ensnared by Bergson’s spell
Hegel’s shells are all absent of pearls
his talisman? it is all imagination
(Iqbal is alluding that in Islam thought is linked to praxis— think of Sufi spiritual cultivation, which is totally divorced from philosophical speculation)
if you take up Hegel, how could your life ever be stable?
how could your self ever be timeless?
(Iqbal is saying through Quranic revelation, we are taught to live eternally, to elevate our gaze from temporality to eternality, which is the being of Allah. As only Allah’s being is ontologically stable and unchanging, by connecting our souls to dhikr of Allah, we ensure our own eternality. Western philosophers, by being unable to harmonize confused Trinitarian theology, divorced God, that is, reality, from their philosophy, and thus escaped to the imagination, the only ‘sanctuary’ from the being of God. It is interesting to note how Allah critiques various forms of imagination in the Quran as being linked to devilish insinuations).
Adam yearns for steadiness
Adam yearns for an ethic of life
the light that exile darkness of the world?
it’s the azān during the horizon’s weeping
(this recalls the discussions of ibn al-arabi and shah waliullah on the cosmic effects of worship on the world around us— as alluded to in hundreds of verses and prophetic reports— our namaz may be environmentally advantageous and healing.)
Don’t you know? My origin is all Hindu*
All my ancestors are Lāt and Manāt!
You are the progeny of the Hashemite Lord
In my hands? The dust of Brahmins!
(somnathi— a colossal gold-enamelled Hindu idol that the Afghan Sultan Mahmoud Ghaznavi shattered nearly a thousand years ago, which Modi still mourns to this day in rallies)
Philosophy bloods through my skin
it is thundering in every fiber of my body
even though Iqbal is wildly skillless
Aware is he to every vein in the body!
(oh Sayyid stricken by philosophy)
your passion for Western philosophy is flameless
Come, and listen to my heart-blazing counsel:
The aftermath of intellectual thought does not lead to the presence of God
philosophy is sloughed off from life
abstract thought’s songs have no music
but the zawq of action (amal) sees death only as a stage
Religion orders the ethics of life
Religion is the mystery of Mustafa and Ibrahim
(in these jolting lines Iqbal sees philosophy as a consequence of the trauma of Christianity, where it forced philosophers
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