Pathfinders Series Editor: Dilip M. Menon Department of History, University of Delhi Books published under Pathfinders have been carefully planned to reflect India’s intellectual, literary, artistic and cultural traditions. Great care has been taken to make these accessible, lively, sharp and authoritative, yet not definitive. These slim volumes strive to reach a wide reading public and the expert alike. They have been written by leading scholars in the field. Individual books have been woven around a ‘path finder’ who is placed within a certain historical, biographical and intellectual context. One aim of this series is to publish accounts of celebrated names as well as those of lesser-known ones. The context and manner of presentation of these books unfold the nature, character and achievements of the protagonists. The series will thus serve to introduce these ‘pathfinders’ to new readers, but also be an event in scholarship. Put cover to cover, the series will be a veritable history of the key ideas and figures that have shaped India in a wide variety of fields,Muhammad Iqbal Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism Javed Majeed : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHIFirst published 2009 by Routledge 912-915 Tolstoy House, 15-17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi 110 001 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 © 2009 Javed Majeed Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited 5-CSC, First Floor, Near City Apartments Vasundhara Enclave Delhi 110 096 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-44578-8 Bayerische Staatsbiblicthek MunchenContents Glossary Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Broken Garden: Ruination and Iqbal’s Political Aesthetic 2. Selfhood’s Aesthetic 3, Khidt and Be-kl i: Selfhood and its Fluctuations 4, Pan-Islam, Race and Nationalism 5. The Aesthetics of Travel 6. Iqbal, Cosmopolitan Modernity and the Qu’ran 7. Islamic Hellenism, Selfhood and Poetry Conclusion Bibliography Index vii xxiii 19 40 58 90 116 134 146 152 159viii Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism andariin andaz Gn-e man ast ‘arifan Armaghdn-e Hijaz arzit asar asbab “ashobi_ as! asman Asrar-e Khiidi dzidgan aad shud bahr-e nar bairtin Bal-e Jibril Bandagi Nama Bang-e Dara internal, inner, inside measure, weight, style, manner, deportment ‘that is me’ plural of ‘@rif, meaning wise, skilled in divine matters; arifan refers to gnostics in the way of God. The Gift of the Hijaz (1936), a collection of Persian poems by Iqbal. desire, longing signs, traces, sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad nth , Wode accoutrements, baggage “ Ou tumult source, origin, principle the sky Mysteries of the Self (1915, second edition 1918), a Persian poem by Iqbal in which he sets out his thoughts on selfhood. free men ‘become free’ ‘the sea of light’ external, outer Gabriel's Wing, a collection of Urdu poems by Igbal published in 1936. The Book of Servitude, a Persian poem by Iqbal in which he explores the aesthetics of subjugation. This poem appeared in Zabiir-e ‘Ajam, or Persian Psalms (1927). ‘the bonds of directions’ The Caravan’s Bell (1924), a collection of Urdu poems by Iqbal. The Sufi terms fand (passing away, effacement) and baqa (subsistence, survival), denote stages in the mystic’s journey towards God. Fand refers to the passing away from the consciousness of the mystic of all things, including of himself, and its replacement by consciousness of God alone. It also refers to the annihilation of the imperfect attributes of the mystic and their replacement by the perfectbatil atin beganagi be-hijab be-khiidi bin bisyar biidagi chalak chand va chigiin Dagh dard-e rahi daryaeye“azim digaram digar— dikhlana dilon ka hazir dilon ki kashid din divan divar diirbin badshahi Manes falisifa Glossary ix attributes bestowed by God. Baga refers to the mystic’s persistence in these divinely bestowed attributes and the return of his awareness of the plurality of the created world. false, unfounded, devoid of virtue ‘Hidden, inner, esoteric’, as opposed to Zahir, meaning ‘outward, external, exoteric, manifest, apparent’. ‘alienation’ ‘without a veil’ loss of self, for Sufis being besides one’s self in an ecstatic state; for Iqbal, the selflessness required tomake a community out of individual selves. vision manifold being cunning, quantity and quality ‘Dagh’, an elegy for the Urdu poet Nawab Mirza Khan Dagh (1831-1905), composed in Urdu by Iqbal. This appeared in Bang-e Dara (The Caravan’s Bell, 1924), ‘the pain of parting’ ‘the vast ocean’ astory, fable, tale tent sight ‘lam another’ ‘another’ a causative verb, meaning to cause to show ‘the presence of hearts’ ‘the opening of hearts’ faith, religion a collection of poems by one poet walls The Royal Observatory distance the Arabic rendering of the Greek word for ‘philosophy’.x Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism fana faraviz fard farsiidan fasina firaq fitna-gar fitrat fitri gariban-e man ——garm va sard ritzgar gha'ib ghair —ghair qabil ul-i'tiraz ~~ gharq tahaiyur kasht ghazal ghazal Gulistan Gulshan-e Raz Gulshan-e Raz-e Jadid gunah had hadis hajj passing away, effacement; see also baqa the incumbent parts of one’s religious duty individual to consume, to diminish tale, story, romance, a narrative separation seditious, quarrelsome nature natural ‘my breast’ ‘hot and cold fortune’, a variable fate absent, invisible strangers, others irrefutable ‘lost in wonder’ gazelle, deer Anamatory poem, a love lyric The Rose Garden, a famous work composed by the Persian poet Sadi inc. 1311. The Secret Rose Garden, a Persian neo-Platonic and mystical poem composed by Mahmud Shabestari in 1311, “The New Secret Rose Garden’, a Persian poem by Igbal written as a rejoinder to Gulshan-e Raz. \qbal’s poem appeared in Zabiir-e ‘Ajam (1927). sin limits ‘narrative’, ‘talk’, specifically ‘Tradition’ in the sense of the collected sayings and acts of Muhammad, of what he said and did, or his approval of what was said or done in his presence, After a long historical process, ‘Tradition’ in this sense came to be considered as second in authority only to the Qur’an as a source of guidance, The annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, one of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam.hakimana ham nava hamara hagigat hasti hayat-e javadani hijazt hijaz hijra —hikmat himmat-e ‘ali hindi — husn-e andaz-e bayan Iblis Ifrangin ijaza ikhtiyar imanat dar ingilab insan-e kamil isatiza —— isharat ‘ishq ‘Ishq dsan namiid avval islah Glossary xi sagely, wisely fellow singers ours reality, truth being ‘immortal life’ Arabian, from the hijaz This refers to the north-western part of the Arabian peninsula as the birthplace of Islam and for Muslims also therefore its spiritual centre. The migration of Muhammad with his fol- lowers from Mecca to Medina in 622, which was later designated the first year in the Islamic calendar, science, wisdom “high courage’ Indian a beautiful style of exposition Satan the European permission liberty, choice trustee revolution ‘The Perfect Man’, an influential idea in Islamic mysticism, referring to man’s leading place in creation and his privileged relationship with God, for example in his role as divine viceregent on earth, and his being created in God's image. teachers, masters hints, allusions love ‘Love at first seemed easy’; a famous ghazal by Hafiz correction, improvement, amendmentGod’s unity. ——istinkam strength, firmness izafat A Persian grammatical construction whereby xii Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism istighraq ) drowning, immersion; in Sufi terminology the total absorption in God by the adept, who loses self-consciousness through concentration on two nouns, or a noun and adjective, or a noun and personal pronoun, are linked together through a vowel. jadid new —. jah va buzurgi status, position, high rank Jahan-e be-jihat ‘the undimensioned world’ jahiliyat For Muslims, the uncivilised state of pre-Islamic Arabia. jam acup, a goblet Jama‘at community, society, association jan soul, life —— jauhar essence Javid Nama The Book of Eternity (1932), a Persian epic poem by Iqbal reckoned by some to be his greatest poetic work. Jazbat passion jihad Derived from the Arabic root jahada, meaning ‘to strive’, ‘to exert one’s self towards a goal’. Within Islamic thinking, jihad is a complex religious and moral concept, with a range of meanings, but these meanings can be divided into spiritual or internal jihad, and physical jihad. ka‘ba The most famous sanctuary of Islam, situated in the centre of the great mosque in Mecca. It is around this sanctuary that Muslims make their ritual circuits during hajj. Kandr-e Ravi ‘The banks of the River Ravi’,an Urdu poemby Iqbal in which he contemplates the remnants of Indian Muslim power. This poem appeared in Bang-e Dard (1924). kashiid opening khak dust khandan familykhatam ~~ khayalat ~ khavari —Kahkashan kheva e ~—— khidmat va mahnat kitabkhana shah khabar Khizr-e Rah khofnak —khiid-gari kha khaid-parast khad-sar = khiid-savar Khurshid khdshtar khvab kisht I@'ig aur khibsirat admit —Mazhabi khayal zamin-e qadim aur zamanii-ye jadid kai mahfil — mahv-e hairat makan man kiyam Mantiq ut tair magam magdm-e khiid Glossary xiii aseal thoughts, ideas, imaginings, conceits an Easterner the milky way a boat ‘service and toil’ The King’s Library reports ‘Khizr on the Road’, an Urdu poem by Iqbal which appeared in Bang-e Dara. fearful ‘selfhood-seizing’ selfishness, conceit, egotism; Iqbal appropriates the term to mean selfhood. Khiidi is the central theme of his poetry. self-conceit self-willed obstinancy © 4 the sun : sweeter dream seed ‘a worthy and beautiful man’ ‘Religious beliefs in ancient and modern times’; the title of an article by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. an assembly, congregation, a dancing party, an assembly for the purpose of art ‘lost in wonder’ space ‘who am I'? The Conference/Speech of the Birds, a Persian mystical poem by Fariduddin ‘Attar (1145/6- 1221). astation, a place on a journey; a station on the mystic path towards God, ‘my own station’Aesthetics and Postcolonialism ms, goals dark-skinned Indian man’ ee man age he Mosque of Cordoba’, a pan-Islamic poem Iqbal in Urdu in which he meditates on the tins of the mosque at Cordoba. This poem »peared in Bal-e Jibril (Gabriel's Wing, 1936). long poem in rhyming couplets 1 epic poem in Persian by Jalaluddin Rumi 207-73), which consists of some 26,000 verses. te poem isa compendium of different aspects Sufism in the thirteenth century. asted-drunk’, in Sufi terminology the most tense level of intoxication ‘aves of the breeze’ ine ste, wit, sense of discernment bject matter; in aesthetics poetic themes and positions, Poetics the generation of meaning through © inflection of poetic subjects and lines of etaphor, dirty and savage animal’ ne radiant sun’ ommunity see mi'raj ‘he prophet Muhammad’s ascension as eferred to in the Qur'an 81: 19-25, 53: 1-21, ationalism lace of residence ‘he Ebb and Flow of Islam (1879), an Urdu epic oem on the rise and fall of Islam as a world ivilization by Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914), raveller he name of areligious movement founded at asra in the first half of the 8th century, which ecame one of the most important theological thools in Islam,muczari’ najat nalid — nasli imtiyaz navishton —nazr nasab nay nihayet nishan un ke qadmon ke nistan — nizim nar pahar paigham paimana —paimanagi paish got pareshan Payam-e Mashriq pir —aa'idat qanin — qaniin-e fitrat qaum qaumiyat ~ giyasi qiyam Qur'an — quvvat-e nafs-e insani rah paima rahravan ramid ~ rihla roshni Glossary xv acommon metre in Urdu poetry salvation weeping racial discrimination texts, writings gift family, tribe, lineage, race reed extremities ‘signs left by their feet’, footprints reed-bed system light a mountain missive, message measure, cup, goblet measurement predictive scattered, dishevelled, anxious Message ofthe East (1923), a collection of Persian poems by Iqbal, a spiritual master rules laws laws of nature nation nationality analogical stability, permanence, establishment The Muslim scripture. Qur'an is the verbal noun of the Arabic ‘he read’, ‘he recited’ (qara’a, to recite, to read), and may be etymologically de- rived from the Syriac word geryan-a, meaning ‘scripture, reading, lesson’, ‘anatural human power’ travellers travellers fleeing travelling for the purposes of learning lightxiv Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism magasid mard siyah hindiistani mard-e hurr —marhala Masjid-e Qurtaba masnavi Masnavi-ye ma‘navi —— mast-e kharab mauj-e nasim may — mazaq mazmiin mazmiin afrint meile aur vehshi janvar ~~ mihr-e munir millat miradj mira — mulki qaumiyyat — marz-biim Musaddas madd ojazr-e islam musdfir Mu'tazilite aims, goals ‘a dark-skinned Indian man’ free man stage ‘The Mosque of Cordoba’, a pan-Islamic poem by Iqbal in Urdu in which he meditates on the ruins of the mosque at Cordoba, This poem appeared in Bal-e Jibril (Gabriel's Wing, 1936). a long poem in rhyming couplets An epic poem in Persian by Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-73), which consists of some 26,000 verses, The poem is a compendium of different aspects. of Sufism in the thirteenth century. ‘wasted-drunk’, in Sufi terminology the most intense level of intoxication ‘waves of the breeze’ wine taste, wit, sense of discernment subject matter; in aesthetics poetic themes and propositions. in poetics the generation of meaning through the inflection of poetic subjects and lines of metaphor, ‘a dirty and savage animal’ ‘the radiant sun’ community see mi'raj The prophet Muhammad's ascension as referred to in the Qur'an 81: 19-25, 53: 1-21, nationalism place of residence The Ebb and Flow of Islam (1879), an Urdu epic poem on the rise and fall of Islam as a world civilization by Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914). traveller The name ofa religious movement founded at Basra in the first half of the 8th century, which became one of the most important theological schools in Islam.muzari’ najat lid — nasliimtiyaz navishton ——nazr nasab nay nihdyet nishén un ke qadmon ke nistan — nizam nar pahar paighdm paimana —~ paiménagt paish goi pareshan Payém-e Mashriq — qaniin-e fitrat qaum Qur'an quwvat-e nafs-e insani rah paima rahravan ramid rihla roshni Glossary xv acommon metre in Urdu poetry salvation weeping racial discrimination texts, writings gift family, tribe, lineage, race reed extremities ‘signs left by their feet’, footprints reed-bed system light a mountain missive, message measure, cup, goblet measurement predictive scattered, dishevelled, anxious Message of the East (1923), a collection of Persian poems by Iqbal. a spiritual master rules laws laws of nature nation nationality analogical stability, permanence, establishment The Muslim scripture. Qur‘an is the verbal noun of the Arabic ‘he read’, ‘he recited’ (qara’a, to recite, to read), and may be etymologically de- rived from the Syriac word geryan-a, meaning “scripture, reading, lesson’, ‘a natural human power" travellers travellers fleeing travelling for the purposes of learning lightxvi Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism rukhsat leave, departure, permission rulana a causative verb, meaning to cause to weep rumiiz mysteries Rumiiz-e Be-khiidi The Mysteries of Selflessness (1918), a Persian poem by Iqbal in which he outlines the con- stitution of communities in general, and an Islamic community in particular, through the Processes of selflessness. rusva disgraced, humiliated, dishonoured sabitan fixed, stationary sahib-e soz va sariid ‘a master of fire and melody’ sair-e davam ‘eternal voyaging’ sigi cup-bearer, page Saqi Nama ‘The Book of the Cup-Bearer’. Iqbal wrote two poems of this title, one in Persian which appeared in his collection Paydm-e Mashrig (The Message ofthe East, 1923), and the other in Urdu, which appeared in Bal-e jibril (Gabriel's Wing, 6). 1936). sar kushid ‘an upsurgence’ sariid melody saz implement, musical instrument, orname! harmony ‘sdz-e chaman ‘the instrument or ornament of the garden’ shagird apprentice, student Shah Nama The Book of Kings, an epic poem by the Persian Poet Ferdowsi, composed in c. 1000, Shahjahanabad The Mughal-built quarter of Delhi, shd‘irana khayalat ‘poetic thoughts, ideas’ and ‘imaginings’ ‘poetic proofs’ iri poetry shari'a In general terms, a prophetic religion in its totality; slim discourse the rules and regulations Soverning the lives of Muslims, derived mainly from the Qur'an and hadis, shart condition Shit The term comes from ShY'at ‘Ali, the party or partisans of ‘Ali, the Son-in-law and cousin of Muhammad, who was killed in 661 while trying it, ashokh va gustakh _— shu'ibiya — sift sihr — silsila simurgh — Sigilliya sitara sohbat — soz-edariin soz-e iraq tat — tab-eguftar Tab‘ion, ya necahrion ya fitration tafsir = Tahrir fiusul al-tafsir tajalli tajriba aur ‘amal talatum Glossary xvii to maintain his authority as the Fourth Caliph. The Shi'i developed into a religious movement that denied the legitimacy of all succeeding caliphs. ‘Complaint’, an Urdu poem composed by Igbal in 1911 in which he vents his frustration against God for his seeming neglect of Muslims worldwide. This poem appeared in Bang-e Dara (The Caravan's Bell, 1924), insolence “™%%*/-¥ Amovement within early Muslim society which denied any privilege to the position of Arabs. attributes magic, sorcery |= X%® a chain of succession, a genealogy Thirty birds, a fabulous bird; the pun is central to the mystical meaning of Mantig ut tair. ‘Sicily’, 1908, a pan-Islamic Urdu poem by Iqbal meditating on the place of Sicily in Islam's past. This appeared in Bang-e Dara (The Caravan's Bell, 1924), stars company, companionship, society inner fire, inner burning ‘the fire of separation’ obedience ‘complexities of discourse’ Nature; three different words for Nature are used, one is the term transliterated from English, the other two are Urdu terms derived from Arabic. This phrase is a title of one of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's articles. exegesis of the Qur'an Discourse on the principles of exegesis, 1892, a treatise in Urdu by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. manifestation, phenomena experiment and practice ‘the buffeting of waves’xviii Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism — talatum kosh tamsil ™ tand ri manand-e sail tagat va tab Tarana-e Hindi Tarana-e Milli tarbiyat Tarikh-e Tasavvuf tasavvuf va adabiyat tauhid tohfa ta Tulie Islam ‘ulema ~— ‘ullim-e jadida ummatan i rasiil-ré khatam va ma aqvam-ra ‘urs ustad ‘surge forward like a wave’ illustrations, similitudes ‘like a fast-flowing flood’ strength, endurance ‘The Song of India’, 1904, an Indian nationalist poem in Urdu by Iqbal, which appeared in Bang-e Dard (The Caravan’s Bell, 1924). ‘The Song of the Muslim Community’, 1910, a pan-Islamic poem in Urdu by Iqbal, which appeared in Bang-e Dara (The Caravan’s Bell, 1924), upbringing, training, education AHistory of Mysticism (1912), an incomplete Urdu treatise by Iqbal. composition, compound ‘sufism and poetry’; a section in Iqbal’s work, Tarikh-e Tasavvuf. mysticism and the arts the oneness and uniqueness of God, the act of believing and affirming that God is one and unique, monotheism. gift you (in Persian) “The Rise of Islam’, 1923, an Urdu poem by Iqbal which appeared in Bang-e Dard (The Caravan's Bell, 1924). Plural of ‘alim, denoting scholars of learned disciplines of Islam, but refers more specifically to scholars of the religious sciences. ‘The new sciences’, the term used by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan to refer to the modern experimental sciences, such as chemistry and physics. Persian plural of ummat, meaning ‘people’, ‘community’, ‘the seal of the apostles and we [the seal] of the nations’ a marriage feast, a remembrance celebration a mastervadi vasl viran wahdat wahdat al-wujiid watan ‘yamm-e tifan yaqini Yyaran judast yas zaban Zabiir-e ‘Ajam Zahir zaman zamin zarra zauq zaurag-e jan zikr-e haqq zinda rad ziyaret Glossary xix vale | union wasted, desolate unity ‘Oneness of being’, ‘unity of being’, a term associated with the position of Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). The issue at stake here is the ontological status of other beings in relation to God, who is conceived of as the only truly existent or absolute being. country the stormy ocean certain ‘separated from friends’ despair ||. ~ ¢ tongue, language X Persian Psalms (1927), a collection of Persian poems by Iqbal. outward, external, exoteric, manifest, apparent; See batin time earth, soil, ground, metre mote, particle taste, joy; for Sufis discernment and experience in spiritual matters. ‘the skiff of the soul’ the remembrance of God ‘Living stream’, Iqbal’s name as a character in his poem, the Javid Nama (The Book of Eternity, 1932). Pious visitation, pilgrimage to a holy place, tomb or shrineAcknowledgements 1am grateful to Dilip Menon for giving me this opportunity to write a study of Iqbal, and to Nilanjan Sarkar as Senior Commissioning Editor of Routledge India, and Jaya Dalal as copy-editor, for their efficient handling of the manuscript, especially with regard to transliteration. Lalso owe a debt of gratitude to Chris Bayly, who read the final manu- script and made helpful suggestions. Chapters 4-6 are considerably extended (and hopefully improved) versions of Chapters 3 and 4 of my Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (2007). Chapters 1-3 and 7 are new. An earlier version of Chapter 7 was presented at the conference on ‘Ancient and Modern Imperialisms’, Department of Classics, Stanford University, Nov 2-3, 2007, and appeared in Moving Worlds 8(1) (2008) in a special issue edited by Shirley Chew. This book is dedicated to my parents with thanks and love.Introduction For South Asians, Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) requires no introduc- tion. He was a pre-eminent twentieth-century Urdu and Persian poet, and also an influential spokesman for Muslim separatism in India. He gave the presidential addresses in 1930 and 1932 at the annual sessions of the All-India Muslim League, the party which spearheaded the movement for Pakistan. He was one of the delegates at the Round Table Conferences of 1930-32 convened by the British government to discuss India’s constitutional future.’ In his own lifetime his more influential poems were translated into English by eminent Orientalists, such as R.A. Nicholson and A. J. Arberry. The novelist E. M. Forster wrote a re- view of one of these translations, in which he discussed some of Iqbal's other poems.’ Given Iqbal’s role as a spokesman for Muslim separatism, he was well-known to eminent politicians in India. His correspondence includes exchanges with Jinnah.’ In his The Discovery of India (1946), Nehru discussed Iqbal's influence on Muslim separatism in India, noting that he played an important part in influencing the growing middle class of Muslims, leading them ‘in a separatist direction’, and providing them with ‘some anchor to hold on to’.' Nehru also recounts his last meeting with Iqbal, when the latter was on his death bed, adding that because he (Nehru) ‘admired him and his poetry... it pleased me greatly to feel that he liked me and had a good opinion of me’? Not surprisingly, Iqbal is seen in Pakistan today as one of its founders, the other being Jinnah. Annemarie Schimmel has pointed to his status as a ‘talisman’ in Pakistan, while Iqbal Singh has referred to Iqbal's virtual ‘canonization’ as the ‘prophet of Indo-Muslim renaissance’. How- ever, it is not for this reason alone that Iqbal’s work has considerable resonance today. His appeal is not confined to South Asia. In a speech delivered in Tehran on the occasion of the First International Confer- ence on Iqbal, Mar 10-12, 1986, the then president of Iran, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, stated that the Islamic Republic of Iran is ‘the embodiment of Iqbal’s dream’, He added that ‘our people have translated into action his doctrine of selfhood’, and ‘we are following the path shown to us by Iqbal’.” His speech ends by exhorting different ministries of the Iranian government to publish and disseminate his works. He suggests that Iran is in a better position than Pakistan to put Iqbal’s ideas into action®xxiv Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism Igbal’s work, then, has a transnational resonance today, from Pakistan, a Sunni-dominated nation state created through the partition of the Indian subcontinent, to the Shia-dominated Islamic Republic of Iran, one of whose presidents claimed Iqbal as that Republic's own. In add- ition, by virtue of his earlier Indian nationalist poems, Iqbal has also been claimed by post-independence India as one of its own poets.’ It is the complexity of Iqbal’s work that enables him to be appropriated in these different ways. This study's main aim is to uncover that complexity. It does not seek to paraphrase him or to endorse a simplistic position, often erroneously associated with his work. Instead, it shows how Iqbal combined a variety of positions in his texts, and how the tensions between these positions were kept in play in his poetry. It should be stressed that the bulk of Iqbal’s work consists of his poetry. The significance of this poetry was noted by Nehru who remarked that it was ‘Iqbal’s poetic and philosophic approach’ that prepared the ‘drift in a separatist direction’ by a significant group of Muslims in India. He ‘supplied in fine poetry, which was written in both Persian and Urdu, a philosophic background to the Moslem intelligentsia and thus. diverted its mind in a separatist direction’.!° In his address, President Khamenei concentrates exclusively on Iqbal’s poetry. When he appeals to Iranian government ministries to publish and disseminate Iqbal’s work, he refers specifically to his key poems, and recommends that these should be published as separate texts." However, Khamenei reads Iqbal’s poetry didactically, for an ex- tractable ‘message’ alone. In contrast, this study shows that the content of Iqbal’s politics cannot be separated from the formal devices and structure of his poetry. Hitherto, analyses of politicised versions of Islam have not engaged sufficiently with the aesthetic dimensions of its writings and thought. By analysing the intricacies of Iqbal’s political aesthetic here, I show how aesthetics was crucial to the articulation and formulation of politics in his work. His poetry was not a transparent medium for expressing that politics, or a by-product of it. It cannot be reduced to a pre-formed and extractable political ‘message’. Instead, it dramatises politics as a complex aesthetic process, If there is one idea which Igbal’s work is associated with, it is that of khidi or selfhood. This study examines the notion of selfhood in Igbal’s poetry. It analyses the creative labour of the imagination which went into the assembling of selfhood in his verse, without which that notion of selfhood could not be articulated nor understood. It shows how that selfhood is dramatised and enacted in his poetry, and how it wasIntroduction xxv defined in opposition to powerful strands both within Islamic culture and the colonial West. Khamenei describes Iqbal’s notion of selfhood as the ‘central theme of his poems’ and assumes that this was the basis of Iqbal’s pan-Islamic position.”” I consider the complex ways in which Iqbal’s notion of an Islamic collective life was drawn from a vision of that reconstructed selfhood. But while Iqbal’s political aesthetic articulates the links be- tween pan-Islam and a creative selfhood, it also reveals the tensions between that selfhood and the concept of a reconstituted Islamic polity. Iqbal’s notion of selfhood exceeds his own attempts to contain it. It retains a radically innovative potential which cannot be easily disciplined. while historians of Muslim separatism in India have produced ex- cellent work examining the politics of that separatism, the aim here is not to reproduce the insights and detail of that work." In his well-known Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that communities need to be distinguished not by their falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." This study shows how the style in which Iqbal’s poems imagine an Islamic community, both globally and within South Asia, distinguishes the nature of that community. It identifies how Iqbal used, and more importantly, inverted Persian and Urdu aesthetic traditions to imagine a global Muslim community and an Islamicised postcolonial identity. It was through complex inversions and appropriations of tradition that Iqbal created what | call harmoniously dissonant verse, in which the relationships between an innovative individual selfhood and a reconstructed Islam were figured. For both Nehru and Khamenei, the obvious context for Iqbal’s work is European colonialism. Khamenei stresses this context, arguing in addition that it was the colonialist domination of the Middle East and Asia that impeded the spread of Iqbal’s ideas outside South Asia, and accounts for the late reception of his work in Iran.'° Iqbal formulates one discursive terrain within what Susan Buck-Morss in her courageous and incisive book calls ‘Islamism’, that is, ‘the politicization of Islam in a postcolonial context ... dealing with issues of social justice, legitimate power, and ethical life in a way which challenges the hegemony of Western political and cultural norms’,’* He recasts Islam as a uni- versalising and postcolonial religion in terms of what he called its ‘deracialisation’. His poetry gives us an insight into the formation of an Islamist, postcolonial agency, and its many complexities, rooted in a reconstructed and self-reflexive faith. At the same time, Iqbal seesxxvi Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism his notion of selfhood as relevant to the postcolonial reconstitution of other communities (for example, a Hindu community) in South Asia. while he focuses primarily on the role of Islam in the modern world, in his work that issue sometimes extends to include the place of religion per se in modernity. But Iqbal’s engagement with the West was com- plex. There are numerous versions of the West in his texts. His work ranges from an oppositional, postcolonial Islam in relation to a globally dominant West, to a subtler and more constructive engagement with the latter’s philosophy and science, in which he also reworks Islamic Hellenism in distinctive ways. As such, he is one possible landmark for a cosmopolitan critical idiom, in which Islamism and Western critical theory can be considered, not as oppositional discourses, but together, with overlapping concerns, as critiques of and responses to colonial modernity.” This could also be extended to other religiously motivated and reconstructed discursive terrains, without thereby endorsing those positions in their entirety."* Notes . For Iqbal’s attendance at the Second and Third Table Conferences, see his Urdu letters in M.A. Qureishi, 1977. Rih-e Makatib-e Iqbal. Lahore: Iqbal Academy, Letter 707 to Chaudhuri Ghulam Rasul Mihr, Aug 16, 1931; Letter 707 to Sayyid Nazir Niyazi, Aug 19, 1931; Letter 709 to Sayyid Nazir Niyazi, Aug 29, 1931; Letter 718 to Dr, Abdullah Chugtai, Nov 3, 1931; Letter 720 to Hajji Seth Abdullah Haroon, Jan 16, 1932; and Letter 776 to Chaudhuri Ghulam Rasul Mihr, Jun 16, 1933. . EM. Forster, Dec 10, 1920, ‘The Poetry of Iqbal’, The Athenaeum, 4728: pp.803~4. }. Riaz Ahmad, 1976. Igbal’s Letters to Quaid-i-Azam: An Analysis. Lahore: Friends Educational Book Service. . Jawaharlal Nehru. 1946 (1989), The Discovery of India, Delhi; Oxford University Press, pp. 350-51. . Ibid, p. 352. 6. Annemarie Schimmel. 1963. Gabriel's Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 377, 385-86; Iqbal Singh. 1951 (1997). The Ardent Pilgrim: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Iqbal. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 134-35. . Sayyid Ali Khamenei, 1986. ‘Iqbal, the Poet-Philosopher of Islamic Resurgence’, Al-Tawhid, 3(4): pp. 130, 149-50, 8. Ibid, pp. 152-53. This position is in remarkable contrast to an earlier Iranian view that Iqbal was ‘only local poet’, for which, see Singh, Ardent Pilgrim, p. 122, see also pp. 26-27. 9, Singh, Ardent Pilgrim, pp. xii, 147. 10. Nehru, Discovery of India, p. 351. 11. Khamenei, ‘Iqbal’, p. 152.12 13, 14. 15, 16, 17. 18. Introduction xxvii Ibid., p. 138. For example, Ayesha Jalal. 1985. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Francis Robinson. 1974, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860-1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Benedict Anderson. 1983 (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, p. 5. Khamenei, ‘Igbal’, pp. 129-30, 133. Susan Buck-Morss, 2003. Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left. London: Verso, p. 3. This is the position outlined by Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, see especially, pp. vii, 43, 49, 100-1, See also Anouar Majid. 2000. Unveiling Traditions: Pest-colonial Islam in a Polycentric World, Durham: Duke University Press, p. 150, on how both liberation theology anda progressively defined Islam could address the injustices of the modern capitalist system and provide alternatives to failed Eurocentric models for social, economic and political arrangements, Ihave in mind here the work of Gandhi. Of course, there were key differences between Gandhi and Iqbal. Nonetheless, both shared one basic position, namely the need to reconstitute religion in the modern world as a viable alternative to, and critique of, a secularising modernity, See Javed Majeed, 2007, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru, igbal. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.1 The Broken Garden: Ruination and Iqbal’s Political Aesthetic Iqbal’s persona as a poet is a consciously divided one. On the one hand, his Urdu correspondence expresses his strong sense of connection as a major Persian and Urdu poet with his predecessors in these traditions. This is evident in his attendance at the ceremonies commemorating their lives and works. He made a point of going to Amir Khusrau’s (1253-1325) ‘urs (commemoration) in Delhi in September 1914, and also attended the centenary commemoration of Altaf Husain Hali’s birth (1837-1914) in Panipat, for which he wrote some Persian verses.' In one of his letters, he writes of how the spirit of the poet Munshi Hargopal Tufta appeared to him and inspired some Persian verses he wrote for the commemoration in Delhi of Mirza Ghalib’s (1797-1869) birth. This conceit of inspiration encapsulates his sense of a ‘silsila’ (or a ‘chain of succession’ and geneaology) of poets to which he belonged. His Persian verses as an offering to Ghalib are mediated through the intercession of another poet from the same genealogy, who was himself a pupil of Ghalib; This reinforces his connection with acommunity of poets formed through that lineage, and indicates how he filtered his own verses through a keen awareness of the presence of his predecessors, Igbal’s Urdu letters show how he was firmly rooted in the traditional conventions of classical Persian and Urdu poetry in other ways. The re- lationship between a master poet (ustad) and his apprentice (shagird) in poetic composition was crucial to the sense of poetic tradition as a lineage developed by transmission from generation to generation. A significant aspect of this relationship was the process of islah conducted by the master poet, which consisted of the correcting of technical errors, and the suggestion of specific improvements in diction. Pritchett has rightly pointed out that post-1857, poets no longer had the same kind cof access to the personalised technical training that they once had, and that the continuity of poetic lineages based on oral transmission was irrevocably ruptured.*Nonetheless, as in the case of Iqbal’s sense of poetic lineage, the process of islah continued to resonate in his sense of him- self, albeit in an altered form. A significant part of his correspondence2 Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism consists of his suggestions to others on how to improve the verses they have submitted to him for his criticism. In this context, Iqbal and his correspondents often use the term islah, with Iqbal referring to the works of poetic masters (isatiza) to decide on a range of matters, such as whether certain similes and metaphors have been articulated and used appropriately, whether specific compounds (tarkib) are correct or not, and how single words are to be precisely rendered.’ In addition, he comments on poetic themes and propositions (mazmiin), and the process of generating meaning through the careful inflection of poetic subjects and lines of metaphor in the works of poetic predecessors (mazmiin Gfrini).* He sometimes recommends his correspondents to another master for corrections, mindful of who has spent time in whose company (sohbat).’ He also recommends a study of the works of master poets of the past, stressing that such a study would improve an apprentice poet's sense of taste and discernment (mazaq).* In this way, although per- sonalised interaction was no longer available to Urdu and Persian poets in his time, Iqbal and his correspondents recreated the processes of islah in their correspondence. Igbal’s letters, then, are replete with the technical vocabulary and practice of traditional literary criticism, He was rigorously grounded in, and emotionally engaged by, the traditional universe of Persian and Urdu poetry. He also had a scholarly interest in the history of these poetries, occasionally suggesting interesting topics of research in the development of these literatures in South Asia. But his letters reveal another aspect to his poetic persona. While grounded in the tradition of Urdu and Persian verse and its critical practices, Iqbal also sought to differentiate himself from this traditional aesthetic, to such an extent that he denied he was a poet as understood in that tradition.” In his letters, he defined himself against what he saw as this tradition’s basic sense of poetry for poetry's sake, and of verse as an autonomous and self-referential art, In its stead, he argued for a politicised aesthetic and politically committed verse, whose main purpose was variously described as instilling in his audience a fresh sense of community through the recovery of an earlier sense of it, recreating in the hearts of others the agitation he experienced in his own, awakening his contemporaries to the condition of their nation, and treating language not as an end in itself but as a vehicle for articulating perspectives on ethics and communal rights and duties," This fault line in his poetic persona between tradition and innovation is neatly captured in the double sense in which he deploys the terms islah and mazmin. Alongside his use of these terms in their conventional meanings, heThe Broken Garden 3 also refers in one case to how his correction (he uses the term islah) of another's verse is made from the perspective of ethics and religion, and is not concerned with technical errors in metre or word choice. In another letter, he uses the term mazmiin in a way which captures the confluence of religion, politics and aesthetics in his work as a whole. He deploys this term to refer to the difficulties of rendering into his poetry the metaphorical connections between the circumambulation of the ka‘ba, the concept of God's unity (tauhid), and the world-wide unity of Muslims.” This kind of analogical correspondence, based on the generation of metaphorical equivalences between distinct categories, is key to understanding some of his influential poems, such as Rumiiz-e Be-khiidi (The Mysteries of Selflessness, 1918). Iqbal expands the key notion of mazmiin in traditional literary criticism and the craft of poetry by politicising it and giving it a distinctly Islamic flavour, while sim- ultaneously keeping in play its traditional meaning, The dual nature of Iqbal’s aesthetic is also evident in his critical judgement of the Persian poet Hafez (c, 1324-91), whom he describes as a great poet whose verse, though, has a deleterious effect on the mental and emotional faculties of his audience. He is able to appreciate Hafez’s poetry in terms of the subtleties of its craft, offering an elegant exposition of one of his difficult couplets, while criticising its effect on his audience from the perspective of his own political aesthetic."* Iqbal’s persona as a poet, then, incorporated two distinct notions of poetry. On the one hand, he had deeply assimilated the techniques and mannerisms of traditional poetry, with its careful stress on measure, and its subtle modulations of meaning and sound, to the extent that these were second nature to him. On the other hand, he strove to evolve a pol- itically committed poetry, a thetic art with a high level of abstraction which contained extractable ideas about selfhood and group identity ina modernised Islam, However, this creation of poetry which prioritised an extractable ‘message’ was itself a carefully crafted formal device. Com- mentators tend to focus on the ideas contained in his verse, and have ignored the poetic techniques and strategies which made possible the extractability of those ideas in the first place, and that are part and parcel of those ideas.'* The aim here is to consider these techniques, and to explore the complexities of his poetry as a whole. Tradition and Innovation in Iqbal’s Poetry These complexities of Iqbal’s poetry lie in the way he expresses his divided aesthetic. In Iqbal’s poetry there is an interplay between4 Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism aesthetic tradition and innovation. In this interplay, he enacts his rup- ture from tradition by incorporating the latter within his work. This is evident in anumber of his more effective poems, in which he transforms. the culturally influential image of the garden. The interaction between tradition and innovation also reflects Iqbal’s reconstruction of Islam. In The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934), he refers to the ‘delicate’ problem within Islam of balancing reform with the forces of conservatism, so as not to reject the past totally: ‘in any view of social change the value and function of the forces of conservatism cannot be lost sight of." In general, the trope of the garden in the classical Urdu and Persian tradition represents that tradition’s sense of itself, as a carefully laid out space in which the linguistic and formal properties of literary texts are assiduously cultivated, Sa‘di’s ‘Gulistan’ (‘The Rose Garden’, composed 1258), and Mahmud Shabestari’s neo-platonic mystical poem, ‘Gulshan-e Raz’ (‘The Secret Rose Garden’, composed 1311), are just two examples of works whose titles refer to this aesthetic sensibility.” This tradition’s sense of itself as cultivated artifice is also neatly summarised in an anecdote related of the Mughal Urdu poet, Mir Taqi Mir (c. 1722-1810), by Muhammad Husain Azad (1830-1910) in his history of Urdu poetry, Ab-e Hayat (The Water of Life, 1880). The poet was given a house with a garden by one of his patrons, but never opened the shutters of the windows overlooking it. On being asked why this was so, he gestured to the drafts of his ghazal lying nearby and said, ‘I'm so absorbed in think- ing about this garden, I'm not even aware of that one’, Iqbal dramatises his transition to a politically committed aesthetic by radicalising the mental and artistic space of that garden. This transition occurs in a number of ways. The image of the garden is sometimes reproduced in his verse as a broken and exhausted one. Inhis poem ‘Shikva’ (‘Complaint’, 1911) in which the poet complains to God about the decline of Islamic civilisation, the garden is represented through a series of telling absences, from its odourless atmosphere in which the scent of flowers has departed, to the sorry state of its roses and trees, the desolation of its old paths, and its silence as a result of the migration of its turtle-doves (verses 28-29). At the centre of this picture of neglect lies the broken implement of the garden (‘saz-e chaman', verse 28, couplet 2). The compound ‘saz-e chaman'’ is apt because of its multiple connotations. As denoting ‘implement’, it calls atten- tion to the techniques and labour of cultivation, but the word ‘saz’ also means musical instrument, and so evokes the harmonies of traditional poetry in its modulation of sound through the handling of metre.The Broken Garden 5 The word has further connotations of ornamentation and concord, and is thus suggestive of the sophisticated sense of artifice and the values of consonance in the Persianate aesthetic tradition as a whole. The verse is also apt because of the way it brings together a reference to broken- ness with and within a compound formed through the grammatical construction of the izafat, or the linking vowel between its two nouns. Asa linking device which created compounds, the izafat was an indis- pensable tool of classical poets. ‘Saz-e chaman’, then, resonates with that classical tradition in its very grammatical construction and not just in its multiple connotations. Its brokenness is suggestive of a de-linking which is necessary for the enactment of Iqbal’s own radicalised and modernised aesthetic. Thus, in the couplet ‘The age of the rose has closed, the instrument of the garden has broken / The singing garden birds have flown from its branches’, Iqbal skilfully links together aesthetic tradition and innovation through brokenness. The broken instrument is suggestive of the uncoupling which is necessary for the performance of Iqbal’s own radicalised and modernised aesthetic, but it is articulated through the linking device of the izafat. This paradoxical linking through breakage reflects the play between continuity and discontinuity in relation to aesthetic tradition in his work as a whole, The other way Iqbal intervenes inthe conceit of the garden is to transform it into a referential term. As is evident in the anecdote of Mir, in the classical tradition the garden symbolised the autonomous, self-referential world of poetry, in contrast to gardens in the empirical world. Iqbal, however, reverses this, In the Persian poem entitled ‘Saqi Nama’ (‘The Book of the Cup-Bearer’) in Payam-e Mashriq (Message of the East, 1923), the conventional image of the garden is beautifully rendered in the first half of the poem.” Here, the series of metaphorical equivalences between aspects of the garden (suchas its streams and fountains, and its flower buds) and the polished ornaments of artifice (such as diamonds and burnished mirrors) blend together discourse and garden into one composite entity. Similarly, the sounds of the nightingale and the starling are fused with the harmonies of melody and song, The second half of the poem, however, registers a break from this luscent picture. The garden becomes emblematic of the natural beauties of a politically oppressed Kashmir, in which the Kashmiri is depicted as habituated to servitude and ignorant of his own selfhood (‘khiidi’). The dialectic of innovation and tradition in Iqbal’s work means that the poem incorporates a skilful rendering of the image of the garden in the traditional manner, before transforming6 Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism that tradition through its politicisation. Iqbal’s poems, then, are not mere exercises in political didacticism; they are also exercises in self- reflexivity, in which they articulate their innovativeness through the re-enactment of the tradition which they depart from. Iqbal intervenes in the space of the garden in other ways too. His identically entitled Urdu poem, ‘Saqi Nama’ in Bal-e Jibril, or Gabriel's Wing (1936), forms an instructive contrast with the landscape of the poems of that name by the eighteenth-century Urdu poets, Mir Taqi Mir and Sauda (c. 1713-81).” Iqbal’s poem is composed in the same metre as Mir’s, and thus in its metrical form recalls its predecessor. However, in content it is radically different. Mir’s poem creates a three-way meta- phorical equivalence between the intoxication of wine, the creativeness of poetry and the exhilaration of spring, within the closely circumscribed space of the garden. The landscape of Iqbal’s poem is immediately different, It opens out onto naturalistic landscape of plains, mountains and rivers, The latter are especially prominent in Iqbal’s landscapes and are wholly absent from Mir’s and Sauda’s poems. Iqbal’s depiction of a mountain stream through an accumulation of verbs of powerful motion is representative of the dynamism in Iqbal’s landscape in general, and, ‘as we shall see, of the stress on dynamism in his thought as a whole: ‘That mountain stream, bounding, faltering, twisting, sliding / Leaping, slipping, steadying itself, twisting around great bends, emerging / If it is stopped it cleaves the rock / It cleaves the heart of mountains’ (part 1, couplets 5-7). In the Urdu text, the verbs all have feminine endings to agree with the grammatical gender of the subject. The grammatical agreement underlying the variegated senses of motion typifies the tense combination of harmonious consonance and dynamic dissonance in Iqbal’s verse as a whole. The depiction of the movement of the river is also in sharp contrast to the use of the word ‘frozen’ or ‘congealed’ (‘afsurda’) in Bandagi Nama (The Book of Servitude, couplet 35) to describe the aesthetic quality of those fine arts produced by the artists of an oppressed population which perpetuate habits of servitude.” Instead, he argues, what is needed are songs (‘naghma’) which are like a fast-flowing flood (‘tand ri manand-e sail’, couplet 49). In this case, then, Iqbal’s poetic intervention in the trope of the garden represents a mobilising of the landscape of the garden through the imagery of fast-moving torrents, which reflects the stress on dynamism in his poetry and thought as a whole, and is in contrast to the fixed and carefully tended landscape of classical poetics.The Broken Garden 7 There are other ways in which Iqbal disrupts the garden of classical poetics. As we have seen, in his Persian ‘The Book of the Cup-Bearer’, Iqbal concretises the garden by transforming it into a geographically specific symbol for Kashmir and its oppressed condition, In this trans- formation, the subjugated condition of Kashmir is geographically extended, by linking the voice of Kashmiris to those in all the lands from Kashgar to Kashan. The word used for ‘voice’ here, ‘nava’, also means song and musical tone or mood, so that the word calls attention to how this geopolitical imagining is aesthetically structured. Thus, one important strand in Iqbal’s transformation of the garden lies in the role it plays in the geopolitical imagining of a global and resurgent pan-Islamic community. In ‘Tuli‘e Islam’ (‘The Rise of Islam’, 1923, in Bang-e Dara [The Caravan’s Bell]), the poet refers to a possible Islamic resurgence in terms of agitation in the courtyard of the garden, in the nest and in the leafy branches.” He exhorts his readers to make every particle of the garden a martyr to a quest (part 1, couplets 6, 8), As we have seen, the visual frame of Iqbal’s Urdu ‘The Book of the Cup-Bearer’ is much larger than the sharply focused vision of Mir’s and Sauda’s poems. This panoramic enlargement is the basis of an explicit engagement with the global politics of the time between Europe and Asia, in which an Asian resurgence is pitted against a colonialist West (see the second section of the poem, which refers to both China and the Middle East), A political imagination is entirely absent from Mir and Sauda. Iqbal also reproduces the imagery of the garden to imagine the extension of Islam and its evolution as a faith over the centuries. He fuses its image with an Islamicised historical narrative. In ‘Complaint’, the poet refers to the spread of early Islam in terms of Muslims as a breeze spreading abroad the scent of the flower which was the ornament of the garden (verse 3). As usual, though, the poetic diction of this verse is complex, The com- pound ‘zeb-echaman’ (‘the garden's ornament), formed through the izafat, is doubly eloquent of classical poetics, both in registering the garden as a polished artifice, and in its grammatical construction tying literary artifice and gardens together. Iqbal brings this together with an image of dispersion, so that classical tradition and aesthetic innovation are linked through the image of scattering. Even as he reproduces the garden, then, Iqbal disperses it. However, the word Iqbal uses for scattering is ‘pareshan’, which also means disheveled (in terms of one’s coiffure) and distressed, The word brings to the mind of the reader of Urdu and Persian poetry the figure of the lover, whose tossed hair is a sign of his distressed condition at the cruel fickleness of his beloved. The word can also refer to8 Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism the effect the ensnaring tresses of the beloved have on the lover's heart. Finally, ‘pareshan’ resonates with the poet's own distressed condition in this poem, as a faithful lover of his beloved God whom he upbraids for His neglect of Muslims worldwide, whose decline and suffering the poem vividly brings to the fore. In addition, the audacity of the poet's complaint against God, which he refers to in the second verse of his poem in terms of breaking the custom of praise and habit of obedience, is transgressive. This is expressed in the opening verse when the poet locates himself in the garden and compares himself to the rose, only to then dislocate himself and disavow that simile: ‘Should | listen to the nightingale’s lament, and remain all ears only? / My friend, am I also some rose that I should remain silent?’ This association of the preserved, unaltered garden of aesthetic tradition with passivity is expressed in another poem, ‘Khizr-e Rah’ (‘Khizr on the Road’) in Bang-e Dard, in the section on ‘Capital and Labour’, when the labouring man is asked ‘Like a bud, forgetful one, how long will you merely accept dew in your lap?”* Here the quiescent traditional image of the garden, in which the poet has not intervened, becomes a symbol of political acquiescence. In ‘Complaint’, then, the garden of classical poetics is reproduced as a point of departure, and this departure is enacted in the poet's complaint against God in which the geopolitical image of a once globally powerful Islam is resonant. The image of the garden, then, is reinforced even as it is dispersed, In addition, the sonority of the poem, with its smoothly rhyming couplets in the ramal metre, reproduces the playful tension between continuity and discontinuity. The harmoniousness of the verse is at odds with, but also controls and structures, the passionate audacity of the angered poet's lament. However, there are other ways in which Iqbal intervenes in the image of the garden, in order to express his own sense of a progressive Islam through the recasting of Islamic motifs. In the Qur'an, the garden is used as an image of paradise in a number of places (11:108, 18:32, 2:25, 4:57). In his five-part Persian poem, “Taskhir-e Fitrat’ (‘The Subjugation of Nature’) in Payaém-e Mashriq, Iqbal celebrates the expulsion of Adam from Paradise as a necessary step for the development of human beings in their conquest of nature.” The poet depicts Adam on the morning of the resurrection as justifying the Fall in terms of the technological and scientific advances made necessary by that episode. Here Iqbal also refers to the specific intellectual and emotional qualities which he prizes in his articulation of selfhood.” Iqbal also reinterprets the Fall in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, where he discusses how the legend in the Qur’an differs fromThe Broken Garden 9 that in the Bible. He then interprets it in the light of his notion of selfhood, arguing that Satan tried to keep man ‘ignorant of the joy of perpetual growth and expansion’.” In ‘The Subjugation of Nature’, then, the expulsion from the garden of Paradise becomes a celebration of the narrative of progress which Iqbal attempts to appropriate for his own brand of Islam. Here again, a conventional image of the garden is reproduced, but within a framework of inverted dispossession, when the poet writes that the streams of Paradise have dispossessed Adam of the ecstasy of toil and action, and of the labour of distilling wine from vineyards. The Qur’an’s picture of Paradise as a garden flowing with streams and abundant in wine is thus inverted, and in Iqbal’s handling of it, the original garden is emblematic of both dispossession and a paradisal condition. This duality in the image typifies the play between rupture and continuity in Iqbal’s poetry as a whole. The interplay between aesthetic tradition and poetic innovation in Iqbal’s verse, then, enacts his political aesthetic as a process, This aesthetic is nota readymade category, butis instead always in the making in his poetry. Iqbal’s intervention in the trope of the garden, which reproduces that trope as it disrupts it, is emblematic of the character of his verse as a whole. There are, of course, other examples of Iqbal’s technique. One striking instance is his redeployment of aspects of the conventional imagery of the beloved in another of his pan-Islamic poems, ‘Siqilliya’ (‘Sicily’, 1908, in Bang-e Dara).”* Here, Sicily is pivotal in the geographical imagining of a globalised Islam, in which other places resonant of the past history of Islam, such as Delhi, Shiraz, Baghdad, and Granada, are linked together through Sicily. In this imagining, Iqbal reworks one feature of the face of the beloved, namely the mole on his or her cheek as a sign of beauty. The poet, addressing Sicily, expresses the hope in the first hemistich of couplet 8 that ‘the cheek of the ocean be adorned by your mole’. Likening the island of Sicily to a mole on the face of the ocean produces a composite geography, through the fusion of the face of the beloved in the world of the ghazal, and the empirical geography of cartography. It also evokes the smoothness of the beloved’s face as an emblem for the charming and seductive geography of pan- Islam. This fusion points to the role which a distinctively reworked notion of love plays in Iqbal’s sense of pan-Islam, and in the relationship between selfhood and selflessness in the community of Islam, which will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. It also points to the nature of the poet's relationship to his subject matter in the poem, and to the presentation10 Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism of his own persona as part of the play between tradition and innovation in his work as a whole. The Creativity of Decline The dual nature of the plotting of decline in Iqbal’s verse is particularly revealing of the tense and productive interplay between tradition and innovation in his work. His Urdu poem, ‘Dagh’ (1905, in Bang-e Dara) is an elegy for the famous Urdu poet, Nawab Mirza Khan Dagh (1831-1905), to whom, according to Singh, Iqbal sent his early verse for correction.” The opening verse of the poem links the death of the poet to the passing away of other poets, such as Ghalib, so that the poem is an elegy for the decline of classical Urdu poetry as a whole. This is underlined by the reference to Dagh in the fifth couplet as the last poet of the Mughal-built quarter of Delhi, ‘shahjahanabad’, Iqbal presents himself asa member of the community of Urdu poets in this poem, but this entire community is united in mourning, and is pictured as carrying Dagh’s coffin on its shoulders in a funeral procession, The burden of the decline of classical Urdu poetry, then, is shared equally by all the remaining poets. The elegiac tone is also expressed in the third couplet in terms of the tie between the garden and classical discourse, when the poet, addressing his fellow singers (‘ham nava’), writes of how the whole garden and the assembly of poetry is in lament. The death of Dagh is also likened to the ‘departure’ of perfume from a colourful rose, and the effect of his death is expressed as the trampling of the garden of poetry's assembly by autumn (couplets 17 and 18). However, the poem is deliberately ambiguous, The word used for Dagh’s departure from the garden is ‘rukhsat’, which means ‘leave’ in the double sense of that word, that is, both departure and permission. Dagh, then, is soliciting Iqbal for permission to leave, and Iqbal's elegy at his departure is a granting of that permission. While the poem is suffused with a sense of decline, that decline also creates a space for Iqbal’s own aesthetic to emerge. Hence, his reference not just to how more nigh- tingales of Shiraz will be born in the garden (couplet 12), but also to how new cup-bearers will now serve measures of new wine (couplet 13). Here the use of the word ‘paimana’, which means both measure (and is thus suggestive of metre) and a cup or goblet, refers to both the forms and the content of poetry, and is thereby suggestive of how Iqbal ties together innovative content with traditional metrical forms, These couplets also enact the play between continuity and discontinuity in his verse as aThe Broken Garden 11 whole, since they deploy conventional images to generate innovative possibilities from within themselves. Iqbal also inscribes into the structure of this poem (in couplet 11) a future aesthetic choice between moving others with pictures of the bitterness of time, or disclosing new worlds of the imagination. The use of the causative verbs ‘dikhlana’, ‘to cause to show’, and ‘rulana’, ‘to cause to weep’, heightens the sense of poetic agency and reinforces the possibilities of choice. In this regard, it is important to note that one of the features of the arts of servitude which Iqbal comments on in the sec- tion entitled ‘Music’ in The Book of Servitude is its addiction to grief and lamentation, which he argues deadens one’s emotive and experiential capacities, and obstructs the development of agency for future-oriented possibilities (see couplets 35, 38 and 41). However, as is demonstrated in his elegy for Dagh, this is not an either-or choice for Iqbal, since this elegy and the rehearsal of grief at decline is tied to the creation of future possibilities and his own arrival as a poet. In the same way, the map- ping of an alternative poetry to the arts of servitude in The Book of Servitude is tied to the replication of these latter arts in the very act of defining a poetic against them. Hence, in the penultimate couplet of ‘Dagh’, Iqbal writes of how his tongue/language (the word ‘zaban’ means both) cannot utter any complaint, since the hue of autumn is a cause for the garden’s permanence as well as its establishment (‘qiyam’ means both permanence and establishment in the sense of founding; it also means rising up). He also refers to his own elegy as a creative act of ‘tilling the ground of poetry with the seeds of tears’ in couplet 16. Here, the word for ground, ‘amin’, means both soil and the pattern of metre and rhyme in a poem, so that the imagery of the garden is again tied to the artifice of poetry even as it is elegised to create innovative possibilities. This creation of harmonious dissonance is captured by the relationship between the harmonious form of his poem, a ghazalin rhyming couplets in the symmetrical ramal metre, and its constructed ambivalence to Dagh’s death as both saddening and yet affording scope for the poet’s own innovative voice. Igbal's political aesthetic, then, incorporates the autumnal decline of the classical poetry of Shahjahanabad asa point of creative departure, ‘The creativity of decline preserves and displaces the garden of poetry. This constructed ambiguity is eloquent of the ruptured continuity created by Iqbal between his political aesthetic and traditional poetics, Italso informs the creation of his dual and willingly divided persona as a poet. On the one hand, the elegy mourns the way in which the assembly