Faiz on Iqbal - 2
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
TCCI
Chicago, IL
4. During the WW1 years and later, with a number of anti-imperialist developments in India and in the world (notably the Khilafat Movement etc), we see the unfolding of the third significant phase of Iqbal’s poetic evolution, with a clear Pan-Islamic interest. During this phase he wrote long “almost epics poems” on the problems of the Muslim world, poems “he recited himself annually to a tremendous gathering in Lahore,” each of which “published as a separate booklet and sold out immediately.”
By this time Iqbal’s developing thoughts go through what Faiz calls “integration” and “then everything, the whole universe, is really welded together by the single concept that Iqbal has evolved with regard to the role of man in the universe and his destiny,” and “everything falls into its place.”
5. These were the times (abolition of Caliphate, emergence of Marxism in Russia, expansion of challenges to capitalistic states), that Iqbal spent in deep study and meditation “resulting in the fourth and the last most important phase,” his “philosophical humanism,” in which his poetic genius took up “his final theme, Man and his Universe.” The essence of this was: “Human life is a continual process of evolution and that the evolutionary potentialities of the human species are unlimited… [and his] domain “is not confined to this earth [but] it extends to other unexplored worlds in the universe…., no final goal …each higher stage of evolution, merely a step to the next stage.” In the dynamics of this evolutionary struggle, Iqbal brings in “Ishq,” a passion and “dedication to a humanist ideal,’ and “Amal, or action as opposed to more passive contemplation or meditation, advocated by the mystics and idealist philosophers.”
Then Faiz expounds on Iqbal’s goal of this struggle: “The realization of fulfillment of what [Iqbal] called ‘Khudi’ or the Self, but the individual Self could attain… its full potentialities in the ideal collective social order, an unattainable goal, because no social order could remain ideal if it failed to move forward,” or as Faiz also called “a dialectical process,” in which “man was both a heroic and tragic figured challenged from all sides by forces bigger than himself but accepting this challenge with undaunted courage in the passionate belief of his eternal and instantly triumphal march.” And here, as Faiz makes it clear, “Iqbal’s Mard-e-kamil (Perfect Man) disengages himself from Nietzche’s superman, for Iqbal’s categorical imperatives rule out all forms of nationalist chauvinism, imperialist domination, racial discrimination, social exploitation, and personal aggrandizement, since all of them make for the debasement and perversion of human personality.”
6. Faiz also thinks that because “Iqbal’s approach and exposition of these themes was abstract and philosophical, it frequently gave rise to contradictory expositions by his followers and admirers. But there is no denying the fact that his poetry contributed a great deal to the rise of the progressive movement in the Urdu language.” By “its high and purposeful seriousness and because “the core of Iqbal’s humanist thought held up for admiration, the great human ideals of freedom, justice, progress, and social equality,” Iqbal’s poetry demolished many decadent notions including ‘Arts for art’s sake’. Early 1930s saw the final phase of his philosophy in his three volumes Baal-e-Jibreel, Zarb-e-Kaleem, and the posthumous Armaghan-e-Hijaz.
7. Faiz talks about a few other things that we now think are characteristic of Iqbal, but “no one has attempted [them] in Urdu poetry” before:
(a) One is Iqbal’s use of ‘proper names’. Other than Laila-Mujnoon, Shirin-Farhad, names which have been a traditional part of Urdu poetic vocabulary, Iqbal often brings up Koofa, Hejaz, Iraq, Furat, Isfahan, Samarkhund, Koh-i-Adam, Nawah-i-Kazima, Qurthaba --- and with these names he evokes an image, a romance with that image for which you need no simile or metaphor, for instance: “Ghar mera na Dilli na Safahan na Samarkhund / Misr-o-Hejaz say guzar, Paras –o-Sham say guzar” [Baal-e-Jibreel].
Faiz believes this use of proper names seem to “compensate for the absence of other ornamentation in Iqbal” of later poetry. These, Faiz, think, are Iqbal’s literary “weapons.”
(b) Another “rather new” thing that Iqbal does is the deliberate use of “words which are simple but unfamiliar, words which are neither difficult or obscure, words which are crystal clear and yet were never used before – words like Nakheel, Tailson, Parnain. For instance: “Khatoot-i-Khamdar ki numaish / Mariz kaj-e-dar ke numaish” [Zarb-e-Kaleem].
Katoot-i-Khamdar is a familiar word, but Mariz is much less so, but somewhat intelligible, as such.
(c) The third new ‘weapon’ that Iqbal used is: “unfamiliar meters” as in Masjid-i-Qurtaba. Iqbal “has used at least half a dozen meters in this poem which were not used in Urdu poetry before and which he introduced for the first time.”
8. Faiz also sets us right on another matter: “In spite of Iqbal’s deep devotion to reflection he never mentions the other world or hardly ever mentions the other world except symbolically. There is very little talk of the hereafter in his poetry. `There is no mention of any rewards or any punishments in the other world, for the very simple reason that since he is the poet of struggle, of evolution, of man’s fight against the hostile forces of nature, the forces hostile to the spirit of man, the hereafter in which there is no action, in which there is no struggle, is entirely irrelevant to his thought.”
9. Faiz describes Iqbal’s unique stylistic brand succinctly, interestingly, yet confusingly: Iqbal “creates a sense of unfamiliarity by unfamiliar meters, by unfamiliar words, by the use of proper names and. above all by a very contrived pattern of sounds. I do not think any poet in Urdu has used the patterns of consonantal and vowel sounds deliberately as Iqbal has done. He does not go after the obvious tricks like onomatopoeia and assonance…. The only other poet who does it in that way is, as far as I know, Hafiz. But in Urdu no such thing was known before Iqbal. Nobody has used a whole line or passage as a deliberate sound spectrum.”
Faiz adds that “this was the only style which could fit the theme that Iqbal evolved during the course of his poetic career. ….the final theme that Iqbal arrived at was the world of man-man and his universe, man against the universe, man in the universe or man in relation to the universe.” (To be continued)
