Muhammad Iqbal

Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism

Javed Majeed

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000084481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Bringing together Islamic studies, a postcolonial literary perspective, and a focus on the interaction between aesthetics and politics, this book analyses Iqbal's Islamism through his poetry. It argues that his notion of an Islamist selfhood was expressed in his verse through the interplay between poetic tradition and creative innovation. It also considers how Iqbal expressed an Islamist geopolitical imagination in his work, and examines his exploration of the relationship between the modern West and a reconstructed Islam.

For the first time, Iqbal's personal letters have been drawn upon to provide an insight into his inner conflicts as articulated in his poetry. Concentrating on the complexity of his work in its own right, the book eschews the standard appropriation of Iqbal into any one political agenda — be it Indian nationalism, Muslim separatism or Iranian Islamic republicanism. With its analytical and in-depth reading of Iqbal's verse and prose, this book opens a fresh perspective on Islam and postcolonialism. It will be a fascinating study for general readers and readers with interests in the intellectual and political history of modern South Asia, colonialism and postcolonialism, Islamic studies, and modern South Asian literature (especially Urdu and Persian poetry).

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.¹ 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.² 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.³ This reinforces his connection with a community of poets formed through that lineage, and indicates how he filtered his own verses through a keen awareness of the presence of his predecessors.

Iqbal’s Urdu letters show how he was firmly rooted in the traditional conventions of classical Persian and Urdu poetry in other ways. The relationship between a master poet (ustād) and his apprentice (shāgird) 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 iṣlāḥ 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 of access to the personalised technical training that they once had, and that the continuity of poetic lineages based on oral transmission was irrevocably ruptured.⁴ Nonetheless, as in the case of Iqbal’s sense of poetic lineage, the process of iṣlāḥ continued to resonate in his sense of himself, albeit in an altered form. A significant part of his correspondence 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 (isātiza) to decide on a range of matters, such as whether certain similes and metaphors have been articulated and used appropriately, whether specific compounds (tarkīb) are correct or not, and how single words are to be precisely rendered.⁵ In addition, he comments on poetic themes and propositions (maẓmūn), and the process of generating meaning through the careful inflection of poetic subjects and lines of metaphor in the works of poetic predecessors (maẓmūn āfrīnī).⁶ He sometimes recommends his correspondents to another master for corrections, mindful of who has spent time in whose company (sohbat).⁷ 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 (mazāq).⁸ In this way, although personalised interaction was no longer available to Urdu and Persian poets in his time, Iqbal and his correspondents recreated the processes of iṣlāh in their correspondence.

Iqbal’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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ In his letters, he defined himself against what he saw as this tradition’s basic sense of poetry for poetry’s sake, and ofverse 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.¹¹ This fault line in his poetic persona between tradition and innovation is neatly captured in the double sense in which he deploys the terms iṣlāh and maẓmūn. Alongside his use of these terms in their conventional meanings, he also refers in one case to how his correction (he uses the term iṣlāḥ) 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 mazmun 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 (tauḥīd), and the world-wide unity of Muslims.¹² 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 Rumūz-e Be-khūdī (The Mysteries of Selflessness, 1918),¹³ Iqbal expands the key notion of maẓmūn in traditional literary criticism and the craft of poetry by politicising it and giving it a distinctly Islamic flavour, while simultaneously 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.¹⁴

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 politically committed poetry, a thetic art with a high level of abstraction which contained extractable ideas about selfhood and group identity in a modernised Islam. However, this creation of poetry which prioritised an extractable ‘message’ was itself a carefully crafted formal device. Commentators 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.¹⁵ 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 aesthetic tradition and innovation. In this interplay, he enacts his rupture from tradition by incorporating the latter within his work. This is evident in a number 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 ’.¹⁶

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 ‘Gulistān’ (‘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.¹⁷ 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, Āb-e Ḥayāt (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 thinking about this garden, I’m not even aware of that one’.^l8 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 ot the garden is sometimes reproduced in his verse as a broken and exhausted one. In his 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).¹⁹ At the centre of this picture of neglect lies the broken implement of the garden (‘sāz-e chaman', verse 28, couplet 2). The compound ‘saz-e chaman’ is apt because of its multiple connotations. As denoting ‘implement’, it calls attention to the techniques and labour of cultivation, but the word ‘sāz’ also means musical instrument, and so evokes the harmonies of traditional poetry in its modulation of sound through the handling of metre. 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 brokenness with and within a compound formed through the grammatical construction of the iẓāfat, or the linking vowel between its two nouns. As a linking device which created compounds, the iẓāfat was an indispensable tool of classical poets. ‘Sāz-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 iẓāfat. 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 in the 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 ‘Sāqī Nāma’ (‘The Book of the Cup-Bearer’) in Payām-e Mashriq (Message of the East, 1923), the conventional image of the garden is beautifully rendered in the first half of the poem.²⁰ Here, the series of metaphorical equivalences between aspects of the garden (such as 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 (‘khūdī’). 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 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 intervene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Broken Garden: Ruination and Iqbal’s Political Aesthetic
• 2. Selfhood’s Aesthetic
• 3. Khūdī and Be-khūdī: Selfhood and its Fluctuations
• 4. Pan-Islam, Race and Nationalism
• 5. The Aesthetics of Travel
• 6. Iqbal, Cosmopolitan Modernity and the Qu’rān
• 7. Islamic Hellenism, Selfhood and Poetry
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index