Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal an Epitome of Universal Consciousness
By Dr Basheer Ahmed Khan
Garden Grove, CA
Those who visit the impressive Mausoleum of Allalma Iqbal at Lahore and watch the pageantry of change of guards every day may presume that Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal was an aristocrat. Very few know the austere life he lived because of his principles and his mission in life. Many recite his couplets in social discourse and public speeches to establish their standpoint and their status as connoisseur of literature. Yet we are oblivious to the mental agony which this creative and reformative writer had to undergo. To bring the people of the world divided on every issue on principles that could unite them for the good of mankind was the job which even prophets dreaded, but he tried to do it in modern times. It is a tragedy that very few people put effort to understand him and his mission and those who are inimical to the bases of building a solid, meaningful universal order that works for all are destroying the world trying to base it on their innuendos.
Universal Consciousness was personified in the being of Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal. He was an epitome representing universal values and was a messenger of universal change for peace and progress based on universal justice. He was the gift of the Indian subcontinent to humanity. He owed it to his Brahmin heritage, Indian tradition, and conversion of his ancestors to Islam. His modern education in the universities of Liberal Britain and Conservative Germany gave him a deep understanding of the economic, political, religious and cultural merits and demerits of both the liberal British and the conservative German societies in grooming his balanced personality.
Brahmins were Aryans who migrated to India from Central Asia. Aryans were the Nordic People who migrated to the south during the war between Greeks and the “Barbarians”, and later migrated to Central Asia. They migrated with the consciousness of Europe and Central Asia to India to rejuvenate its Aboriginal Dravidian Culture.
The Aryans came to India with the enterprising nature of Gothics, the Greek theories of knowledge, Spartans’ way of establishing it, and the spiritual consciousness of all these people. Interaction of God consciousness inherent in every soul in every society, in every part of the world of which India was no exception, gave the ancestors of Iqbal a new dimension and a new vision in mankind’s quest to establish a just and orderly society; and Dr Iqbal was the zenith of this consciousness.
Dr Iqbal and his ancestors with all their spirituality were mired and confused with the plethora of philosophies of the occident and the orient etched on their genes. Their interaction with the simple Muslims of Kashmir led his ancestors to embrace Islam to shed their confusion fueled by conflicting philosophical ideas. His father who was a tailor moved to Lahore to educate Iqbal where he got his Islamic education from Syed Hassan who was also the teacher to Faiz Ahmed Faiz later. Iqbal was picked up by Prof. Arnold at Lahore and encouraged him to go to England to study law. After obtaining his law degree from Liberal England he went to conservative Germany to do his doctorate in philosophy on Iranian thought. Germany at that time was reeling under the defeat in the First World War and was trying to find solace in Iranian poetry (See my article Fikre Iqbal in Pakistan Link of September and October 2015).
The Iranian Civilization was an old crucible where Zoroastrian, Roman, Mongolian and Arab thought had interacted and evolved into a new culture represented by great thinkers and poets like Firdosi, Saadi, Rumi, Khayyam, etc. This matured the consciousness of Dr Iqbal further and gave him a new paradigm in understanding the true message of Islam and the history of Muslims.
When he returned to India to practice law, he was confronted with the problem of Muslims in Colonial India in a Hindu-majority country. As a thinker he could not avoid facing it. He tried to rationalize the various trends in the society and the world to find out a solution to the problems faced by his country, his people, and the world. While doing this he became the personification of universal consciousness; universal values and became a messenger of universal change for peace and progress based on universal justice. About ten volumes of sensible poetry discussing vividly the metaphysical and mundane subjects, written over the rest of his life in Urdu and Persian, are its record and a testimony to his greatness.
As his consciousness was greatly molded in the frame of religions, especially Islamic thought, most of the symbols and idioms of his poetry are religious and Islamic. The result is that those who were unaware of it because of the secularization of education in the world did not get the benefit from it and he did not get the credit that was his due. While adversity kills the hollow spirits, it is a blessing for the genuinely spiritual beings inspiring them to work harder to present a correct understanding of the realities in a vivid form in the medium of their thoughts; in the case of Dr Iqbal it was Urdu and Persian poetry.
Dr Iqbal’s life as a writer, thinker and poet in a way is akin to Tipu Sultan’s life as a warrior and a ruler. Tipu Sultan by switching his loyalty to British Raj might have lived long as a prisoner of his conscience in the British Raj. Likewise, Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal could have used his academic and literary credentials from Europe to live like a Lord.
The historical backgrounds of the life of his ancestors, and his accomplishments as an academician, were not aimed to reach the zenith of status or riches by supporting the status quo, but to bring about the change based upon it. He tried to bring about a meaningful change in the legal field but the forces of status quo sidelined him and failed him as a barrister. He tried to change the mindset of the academicians to enlighten their thoughts with God Consciousness instead of basing it on their whimsical thoughts, and the academicians sidelined him. He tried to build a new world on the bases of universal consciousness about which he wrote relentlessly in his poems, ghazals and rubaiyath for more than 60 years, but those controlling the destinies of the world did not pay any heed. He was not a rebel, but he refused to be a conformist and accepted a simple humble life and continued to show a mirror to the people of his time to see their faces.
Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal refused the opulence that waited for him with all his degrees from prestigious European universities because he knew everything was not well with Rome and he did not want to live like a Roman while in Rome. Living in Rome like Romans was not loyalty for him but a travesty of Rome. Rome was in quest of human solutions to problems created by human weakness. Iqbal tried to persuade the Roman thinking reigning over the world under different religions in its fold to be more humane in these solutions by invoking consciousness of a Universal God caring for good of all mankind and not based on a partisan god caring for its clique in a region.
While the secular elite ignored him, some pseudo religious elite doubted his Islamic credentials attributing them to many silly and unfounded reasons. The following two instances establish his belief in God and love of Prophet SA.
Mirza Ghalib was reputed for his waywardness in many ways which is frowned upon by his “self-righteous” critiques. Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal whom Muslims revere as Allama was humble to recognize the good which he saw in Mirza Ghalib and had great admiration for him. The depth of Iqbal’s thought is unfathomable, and its expanse is unsurmountable. He was willing to give all his literary work to Ghalib in exchange for just one couplet of his and that was:
JaanTho Thee Hu-wee Oosi Ki Thi
HaqThoA Hai Kay HaqAdaa Na Hu-wa
It means that I can never repay God for His favors even by sacrificing my life for Him because even this life I enjoy is His gift, not my own. This couplet represented the state of mind of Iqbal at the end of his life. It is his humility before God that he was not able to work enough to establish a Universal Order based on Universal Consciousness, Universal Values that were given to mankind through the prophets and wise men all through human history. This was despite all the sacrifices which he made. This was also his gratitude to God for the gift of a pure and sincere life with a perfect consciousness amidst all the confusion and keeping him content and comfortable despite all that he had to suffer. May his soul rest in peace and may we be continuously guided by his remarkable poetry.
Allama Iqbal loved all the prophets and revered all people of wisdom. He revered the final prophet Muhammad SA the most. He was conscious of the services of Nabi SA to mankind so much so that in one of his couplets he said to Allah:
Thoo Agar Dani Hisbam Na-Guzeer
Us Nigahay Mustafa Pinhan Bay-geer
Meaning: If you have to take my account in the Hereafter take it away from the sight of Nabi SA because I don’t want to disappoint him by my lackluster performance on his teachings even after knowing it well. This love of the Prophet and this fear of accountability before God in a Western-educated lawyer and philosopher is seldom seen even in the scholars of seminaries and madrassahs.
This article is an attempt to give a glimpse of this image of Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal. At a time when it is difficult for us to understand the universal message of the universal God because of the varied interpretation of scriptures casting shadows over the lives and teachings of Prophets, poetry of Iqbal when studied critically can guide us to it. (Continued next week)
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