Gabriel’s
Wing: Dr. Annemarie Schimmel’s Masterpiece
on Allama Iqbal
By Dr. Ahmed S. Khan
Addison, IL
Dr. Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) was
one of the great thinkers of the 20th century.
Dr. Iqbal was an amalgam of an oracle, a seer,
a poet, a philosopher and a thinker. Dr. Ali Shariati
describes him as “a man of religion and
a man of this world, a man of faith and knowledge,
a man of intellect and emotions, a man of philosophy
and literature, a man of God and people. A devotee
during the night and a lion during the day.”
He further states that “Iqbal is considered
to be a contemporary thinker and philosopher of
the same rank as Bergson in the West or the same
level as Ghazzali in Islamic history.”
The message and the writings of Iqbal have many
dimensions: literary, religious, political, social,
educational, and economic. Iqbal’s poetry
and philosophy are aimed at humanizing the world.
The central theme of Iqbal's philosophy is the
concept of “Khudi or Selfhood.” It
is the source of feeling and knowing one’s
inner capabilities and potential through contemplation,
introspection, self-cognition, self-realization
and determined action. It is the sense of human
identity in the individual as well as the society.
In the words of Iqbal:
When ‘self’ embraces the energy of
life
The stream of life is transformed into an ocean
According to Iqbal science, culture, poetry, literature,
and law --- everything --- is the product of human
aspirations actualized through continuous struggle.
Dr. Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003) was an internationally
acclaimed scholar who dedicated more than fifty
years of her life to explain Islam to the West.
Her interest in Iqbal dates back to her student
days at the University of Berlin. She says, “My
long lasting love of Iqbal has let me to publish
a number of works which are more or less relevant
for a study of his contribution to Muslim thought…
In many articles I have tried to show Iqbal in
context of Islamic modernism, or deal with his
imagery.”
Her scholarship served as a bridge between East
and West, cultures and religions. Dr. Schimmel
was an avid scholar of the poetry and philosophy
of Allama Iqbal and Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi. She
considered Iqbal as one of the greatest poets
of the East.
Dr. Schimmel served as the professor of religious
studies at the University of Ankara, Turkey (1954-59).
During her stay in Turkey her translation of Rumi’s
poetry furthered her interest in Iqbal. On the
insistence of her Turkish friends she translated
‘Jawednama’ into Turkish. This led
to her first visit to Pakistan in 1958, which
opened a new door in her scholarship and inquiry
that ultimately took her to the Harvard University.
During her tenure at Harvard (1967-1992) as professor
of Indo-Muslim culture, she authored volumes of
articles and dozens of books covering a wide spectrum
of topics and issues related to Islamic studies,
Sufism, Iqbal and Rumi.
Dr. Schimmel wrote her first article on Iqbal
in 1954, and later she wrote on Iqbal in various
languages and on different aspects of his message
and philosophy.
But her book Gabriel’s Wing –
A study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad
Iqbal (E.J. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands, 1963
& 1989) is considered a superb example of
her scholarship and insight in Iqbal studies.
In the foreword (1962) of Gabriel’s’
Wing Dr. Schimmel writes, “During the
25 years which have passed since the death of
Muhammad Iqbal, hundreds of books and pamphlets,
articles and poems in honor of the poet-philosopher
of Muslim India have been published, most of them
in Pakistan, the country which is proud of calling
him a spiritual father. In the West, too, his
fame has spread perhaps more than that of any
other modern Muslim thinker and poet.”
Commenting on the approach and the style of the
books, Dr. Schimmel states that “although
it would be easy to quote to a larger extent from
earlier publications I have tried to avoid that,
making rather Iqbal himself speak than his commentators.
Since only part of his work is available in translation,
full quotations were considered useful.
“I simply want to give a picture of Iqbal’s
way of thinking, arguing, suffering, and again
finding mental peace in the security of his religion
--- suspending judgment as far as possible though
the book will be, in any case, an account of any
personal experience with Iqbal’s work.”
Dr. Schimmel also acknowledges her indebtedness
to a large number of friends and colleagues that
include Prof. Dr. A. J. Arberry, Cambridge University
and Prof. Dr. Hamiduallah, Paris, for their help
in preparing the manuscript.
Dr. Schimmel’s Gabriel’s Wing
has five parts. In the first part she provides
the historical background of Muhammad Iqbal, his
life, the aesthetic side of his work, and his
religious motives. In the second part she discusses
Iqbal’s interpretation of the five pillars
of faith. In the third part she expounds on Iqbal’s
interpretation of the essentials of faith. In
the fourth part she presents some glimpse of Western
and Eastern influence on Iqbal’s thought,
and on his relation to mystics and mysticism.
And in the final and fifth part she sums up her
work on Iqbal by synthesizing the poet’s
message and philosophy.
Dr. Schimmel regards Iqbal the spiritual father
of Pakistan and the best example of a modern interpretation
of Islam. His poetry was on everyone’s lips
in India in the 1930s, for the largely illiterate
masses could be reached only by the poetical word
which could be memorized easily. She believes
that Iqbal had tried under the influence of Goethe
and Rumi, to postulate a dynamic Islam; he was
aware that the human being is called on to improve
God’s earth in cooperation with the Creator,
and that one should exhaust the never-ending possibilities
of interpreting Qur'an in order to survive changing
circumstances.
Dr. Schimmel further observes that Iqbal also
taught that one should never rely exclusively
upon intellect, as much as modern technology and
progress can be admired, and that man is called
on to participate in it. In a central poem of
Iqbal, “Message of the East,” his
answer to Goethe’s “Divan,”
Iqbal writes that science and love, that is critical
analysis and loving synthesis, must work together
to create positive values for the future. And
regarding the status of Iqbal, Dr. Schimmel states:
“Iqbal has been praised – to quote
only one instance – by a leading Pakistani
as ‘the triumphant missionary, the high
priest of humanity,’ (A. K. Bokhari, Iqbal
Rev. April 1961) and one of the first authors
in this field has held that if the peacock
throne is cause of pride for Iran, and the Kooh-i-noor
means glory and dignity for British crown, then
is Iqbal, of necessity, the decoration and ornament
of poetical court of very country.“
And in response to Iqbal's critics regarding the
difficulty in his expressions, Dr. Schimmel tells
the story that after her publication of the Turkish-prose
translation of the Javidname, she received a letter,
in very bad Turkish orthography, revealing that
the letter writer was an unlearned man; but he
expressed his admiration for Iqbal's work, and
asked her for more books of his in Turkish translation.
Dr. Schimmel writes that “the person wrote
that he was a bearer in a restaurant in a small
town of Eastern Anatolia – that seems to
be sufficient proof for Iqbal's unquestionable
appeal to simple minds too, who do not grasp properly
the philosophical implications of his poems but
are moved just by the energy they feel, even through
the medium of a translation.”
Commenting on the background of his philosophy,
Dr. Schimmel writes:
“No doubt, Iqbal cannot be understood without
the religious background of his homeland. He’s
firmly rooted in the prophetical tradition of
Islam, and in the mystical thought of India. He
has struggled against whatever he thought wrong
in this mysticism and has rediscovered the personal,
dynamic God of Prophetic revelation who is described
best not in the abstract philosophy of the lectures
but in the poet’s deep and pathetic prayers.”
Discussing the nature of Iqbal’s philosophy,
Dr. Schimmel observes that “as to the question
of this philosophy one should not forget that
a difference exists between a scientific philosopher
and a prophetic philosopher. Iqbal was certainly
of the second type, endowed with an extraordinary
capacity for assimilation, and for synthesizing
seemingly divergent facts into a new unity that
may look, at the first glance, surprising enough,
but has, in any case, proved as stimulating formative
of the Weltanschauung of Pakistan.”
Dr Schimmel observes that “sometimes one
gets the impression that his study of European
philosophy leads him, in the course of his life,
more and more to the conviction that all the good
and appropriate ideas launched by Western philosophers
had been expressed centuries ago in a somewhat
more ideal from by Islamic thinkers. As he writes
in 1916:
Yesterday, I saw the Mathnawi of Maulana Rumi:
Every thought devours another though,
One idea grazes upon another idea---
God gracious! In a special chapter he has put
this idea that every being besides God Almighty
is devouring and being devoured and has brought
into consideration so beautifully Shakespeare’s
philosophy that Shakespeare’s spirit itself
would tremble!”
Dr. Schimmel observes that “this way of
interpretation provided him with new possibilities
of combining harmoniously Islamic tradition with
the most recent scientific research. Only thus,
he thinks, Muslims can become interested in Western
science and discover that Europe is indebted to
Islam, and that therefore the adopting of recent
scientific results from the West does not do any
harm to primacy of Islamic thought.” As
Allama Iqbal has said, “If Muslim scholars
were aware that Einstein’s most thrilling
ideas are already existent in Islam, they would
like to take more interest in them and study them
carefully.”
Dr. Schimmel observes that “Einstein granted
Iqbal the proof for his view concerning the relation
of God and universe --- that the universe is limitless
but finite --- and his theory of relativity has
impressed Iqbal’s theories of time and space.”
She further observes: “…thus the European
philosophy and scholarship becomes, in Iqbal’s
reading, a medium for leading back the Muslims
to the sources of their own culture, and giving
them the feeling that these conceptions are nothing
but their own heritage. Interpreted in this way,
European civilization is no longer a danger for
the Muslims but a stimulant for their awakening.
Dr Schimmel states that Iqbal has tried to answer
in poems the claims of different philosophers
and political leaders during the different periods
of his life, and the nasqsh-i-frang (the picture
of Europe) in the fourth part of Payam-i-Mahriq
contains short poetical sketches, skillfully characterizing
thinkers and poets of the West. The philosophers
whose names have occurred most in Iqbal’s
prose and poetry are Hegel, Bergson, and Nietzsche.
In the concluding pages of Gabriel’s
Wing Dr. Schimmel remarks, “Whether
or not the Muslim or non-Muslim readers will approve
of Iqbal’s ideas, or his way of expressing
them, they will have to acknowledge that Iqbal,
to quote Kenneth Cragg, was ‘the spokesman
of something deep within the contemporary soul…The
age them must have felt its need of him.’
Dr. Schimmel compares this sentence with Iqbal’s
words which he used to characterize the prophetic
revelation: ‘The world-life intuitively
sees its own needs, and at critical moments defines
its own direction. This is what, in the language
of religion, we call prophetic revelation.’
Dr. Schimmel observes that “the similarity
of the two sentences springs in the eyes. It is
this very kind of representing the needs of an
age of a society which can be witnessed in Iqbal
whose whole personality tended to a prophetical
interpretation of religion. Nobody will assert
that he was a prophet…but we may admit that
he has been touched by Gabriel’s wing.”
Gabriel’s Wing is a comprehensive
study on Iqbal’s thought and philosophy.
It is an illuminating and fascinating read for
all seekers of truth and wisdom. Today, the world
needs people like Dr. Schimmel who can build intellectual
bridges to promote global peace, harmony and coexistence.
[Dr. Ahmed S. Khan (khan@dpg.devry.edu) is a senior
Professor in the EET dept. at DeVry University,
Addison, Illinois. He is the author of The Telecommunications
Fact Book (2E) and the co-author of Technology
and Society: Issues for the 21st Century and Beyond(3E)].
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