Mohammed Iqbal — E M Forster
I met Iqbal once, thirty years ago, and only in passing. He is dead now and lies in honour outside the great mosque in Lahore, his own city. I visited his grave last winter. He is constantly mentioned in India — quite as often as Tagore, with whom he is contrasted. Over here he is little known; so I shall venture to allude to him, although I can only read him in translation.
Iqbal was an orthodox Moslem, though not a conventional one. He was highly educated, and partly in Europe; he was not cosmopolitan, and the basis of his culture remained oriental. By profession he was a lawyer. He wrote both prose and poetry. The poems are mostly in Urdu, some are in Persian, and a few in Punjabi. As for his politics, he was once in sympathy with a united India, but in later life he changed… Whatever his opinions, he was no fanatic, and he refers to Hindus and to Christians with courtesy and respect.
All the same he was a fighter. He believed in the Self — the Self as a fighting unit — and his philosophy is not an enquiry into truth but a recommendation as to how the fight should be carried on. Fight we must, for man is the vice-regent of God upon earth. We must fortify our personalities. We must be hard. We must always be in a state of tension and try to be supermen. In one poem, Satan complains to God that men are not worth tempting because they are weak and have never discovered their Selves:
O master of all…
Association with mankind has debased me…
Take back from me this doll of water and clay.
So might the button-moulder in Ibsen’s play complain of Per Gynt. Iqbal reminds us of Nietzsche too. Renunciation of the Self is a form of cowardice, and therefore a crime. We cannot bear one another’s burdens, and we must not expect to be redeemed.
Now he combines this doctrine of hardness and of the Self with a capacity for mysticism. The combination makes him remarkable as a poet. Even in a translation, one can see sudden opening-up of vistas between the precepts. It is not the mysticism that seeks union with God. On this point the poet is emphatic. We shall see God perhaps. We shall never be God. For God, like ourselves, has a Self, and he created us not out of himself but out of nothing. Iqbal dislikes the pantheism which he saw all around him in India — for instance, in Tagore — and he castigates those Moslem teachers who have infected Islam with it. It is weakening and wrong to seek unity with the divine. Vision — perhaps. Union — no.
Such — if an outsider may summarize — is his philosophy. It is not a philosophy I like, but that is another matter. There is anyhow nothing vague about it, nothing muzzy. It gives us a shock and helps us to see where we are. It is non-Christian. It is, in a sense, anti-humanitarian. It inspires him to write poems. They follow the orthodox forms, but they contain matter which is excitingly modern. Take, for instance, this poem in which Man defiantly address God on the ground that Man has proved the better artist of the two:
Thou didst create night and I made the lamp,
Thou didst create clay and I made the cup,
Though didst create the deserts, mountains and forests,
I produced the orchards, gardens and groves;
It is I who turn stone into a mirror,
Ad it is I who turn poison into an antidote!
Or consider this strange poem on the subject of Lenin. Lenin has died, and finds himself in the presence of the Deity who he had supposed to be an invention of the priests. He is not intimidated, but speaks his mind. God exists, to be sure. But whose God is he? The starving peasant’s? The God of the East, who worships the white man? Or of the West, who worships the Almighty Dollar?
Thou art All Powerful and Just, but in Thy world
The lot of the hapless labourer is very hard!
When will this boat of Capitalism be wrecked?
Thy world is waiting for the Day of Reckoning…
The Almighty is moved in his turn. He bows to the criticism of Lenin, and he orders the angels to burn every cornstalk in the field which does not nourish the cultivator, to give the sparrow strength to fight the falcon, and to smash up the glasshouse of modern civilization. Iqbal never identifies hardness with oppression, or the Self with selfishness. The superman he seeks may come from any class of society.
Mohammed Iqbal is a genius and a commanding one, and, though I often disagree with him and usually agree with Tagore, it is Iqbal I would rather read. I know where I am with him. He is one of the two great cultural figures of modern India, and our ignorance bout him is extraordinary.
*Edward Morgan Forster), 1879–1970, was one of the most important British novelists of the 20th century. After 1928 however he turned his attention increasingly to nonfiction. Notable collections of his essays and literary criticism are Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). This excerpt from his essay on Mohammed Iqbal was part of the latter publication. *
— Contributed by Wajahat Ali
— Source
