CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF THE ASRAR-O-RUMUZ

The Asarar-i-Khudi and the Rumuz-i-Bikhudi were published in 1915 and 1918 respectively. Iqbal started composing them in 1911. Thus the years from 1911 to 1918 may be treated as Mathnavi period of his life. It was rather during this period and in the course of composing them, that he felt himself to be at the threshold of a new vision of life and reality. His father had asked him in 1910-11 to write a mathnavi in Persian after Bu Ali Qalandar. He complied with the advice and applied his poetic talent to the task, which, in the words of Atiya Faizi “enlarged his scope of vision, and made him direct attention to philosophical literature in great strength, his lyrical mood seemed to drop from him… Poets like Shelley and Byron were receding in the background.”[1] Thus he was led to new conclusions about the nature of man and the living reality.

Being very first mark of his newly acquired sense of reality, the conceptual model of the Mathnavi formed only a passing phase of his advancing thought which gradually culminated in the Six Lectures delivered in 1929 and the Javid Nama published in 1934, definitely written and composed mostly beyond the metaphysical categories of the Mathnavi.

It is remarkable to note that a large part of the Piyam i-Mashriq published in 1923 and important poems of the Bang i-Dara, published in 1924, were written in or had the dominant strand of the Mathnavi phase of Iqbal’s life. Zubur i-Ajam published in 1927 belongs to the advanced stage of the evolution of his thought and Armaghan-i-Hijaz, his last work, glitters with a new conceptual model. Here, our main purpose is to analyse the conceptual model of the Mathnavis, and expose its limitation for the purposes of Iqbal’s philosophy. The problem is all the more important because most of the popular and technical version of Iqbal’s philosophy returns to Mathnavi model as basic frame of reference for explaining and systematizing his outlook and metaphysics.

Fortunately, we are in possession of an important testimony about the nature of Iqbal’s sensibility in 1918 as radically departing from the metaphysical postulates of the Mathnavi. While translating the Asrar into English, R.A. Nicholson felt it necessary to seek clarification from Iqbal about the most subtle points of his philosophy. The latter prepared a statement of his philosophy, not of course a complete statement, as he himself estimated it. In that statement, which Nicholson included in the Introduction of his Translation, Iqbal spelled out his sensibility, i.e. fundamental world-feeling of his own as ‘All life is individual. There is no such thing as Universal life’. But, theoretical discipline of the Mathnavi shrouds this basic intuition. And what more? It is encumbered with a consciousness which is stirred up by the feeling of a Universal life.

In terms of antiquity, it were a Vedic model ; in terms of the Muslim past a legacy of the Magian encrustation; and in terms of the modern Western Civilization a hiatus of Fichte and Hegel in the body of Muslim Culture. Thus, it includes:

By the self, the seed of opposition is grown in the world! It imagines itself to be other than itself.

For the sake of a single rose it destroys a hundred gardens. For one sky, it produces hundred new moons.

One Universal sway, in short, pervades and manifests itself in every thing. Since antiquity, this conceptual manifold dominates every articulation of those cultures, which germinate from the magnitudinal consciousness, having its prime life symbol painted in Universal sway Being under its influence at that time, Iqbal. also poetized the image of universal life as under “Falsafa i-Gham”, included in Bang-i-Dara (p. 168):

“Singing flows down the rivulet from mountains. Glitters its mirror like the face of a haurie. Then, it has a fall upon the rock, and breaks apart its mirror into lovely gems. Out of the episode, now the water is become stars. Thus the current-in-surge surge is spread into a world of droplets. But in this very ration of theirs lies the message of Union. After a few Pace, the current regathers its course like a silvery thread ... The stream of life, in reality, is one. By descending from height it has dispersed (itself) into the multitude of human beings.”

This image of reality is what we mean by the magnitudinal consciousness, and metaphysically speaking, it denotes what we call the universal life or Cosmic Sway. Its postulational core rests on the feeling of limitless, indistinct, undifferentiated continuum as underlying essence of being or substratum of reality behind the veil of every phenomenon. The feeling is also saturated with a kind of dialectic of some germinal episode due to which distinctions have emerged from the continuum, and the harvest of multiplicity is reaped in the valley of nothingness. To this feeling, emerging individualities strike as if they are passing moments of the Universal thrust and are nominal in existence. Thus, they are only for a while. No matter what they are, for they are limited forms of the same sway, and are destined to be naught after a while in its collective rushing on.

This model erupts into its own prototype of time theories. Reality, peeped through it, appears as a cycle. Its collective thrust moves the wheel of time which may be represented as moving along an oscillating linear track of rising and falling individualities patterning into a cycle of change from not being into being and from being into nothingness.

Representing the living dialectic of the Cosmic force, the pattern is designated as arrow of time What is time? It is one with the dialectic of the collective, cosmic, universal continuum.

Like many of the poems of Bang-i-Dara, most of the Payam-i-Mashrig projects Iqbal of the Mathnavi period as we have earlier pointed out. In it is a beautiful poem “Nawa-i-Waqt” conveying this theory of time as mentioned above, natural to the philosophy of Universal life. Thus, speaks Time:

In my sleeve is the Sun, in my robe the stars: If thou looketh within me, I am nothing.

Being the universal sway itself, Time is arbitre upon all things. As generator of history, it permeates every aspect of being. Consequently, it cannot be held externally. The ripples at the surface of being contain it from within. Thus, ‘if looketh thou in thyself,’ ` Time is life itself. ‘It asks you to “see the strange phenomenon.

I am at rest and yet in motion. “On the image of ocean, the universal life is a continuum. There are ripples and waves, but underneath is quiet, calm, and unfathomable spread of water: ` I am at rest and yet in motion. ‘In its melody, you will hear the notes:

From the cup of my present get the glimpse of Tomorrow. See hidden within me hundreds of glorious worlds Hundreds of whirling stars, and hundreds of sky Azure.

Thus, in the philosophies of Cosmic Sway, the swaying force in the ocean of being is identified as Time; and Time produces everything. Yester and morrow consequently, spring from it. A deeper penetration within allows you feel its thrust in all hither and thither, within every phenomenon including your own self. According to this way of thinking, your metaphysical status, the ontological nature of human ego, is just like that of a bubble or wave. If you look at a dancing bubble or a wave in motion, from within, it is all but a parametre of vibration of the ocean, and looks like a point in a dynamic field; the field of which has it been a determination. Thus, the time sings as: Thou loveth a Laila, I am the desert wherein thou roamst wild.

There is a romantic fervour in the song. But it retains object-true representation of its theme:

I am the traveller ‘means that Time or thrust of the Cosmic force is fashioner of all things. All change is from it; the revolution of history, rise and fall of nations. And it does not work from without, like an external force invading from without. It works from within us. `In thy soul I lie hidden, and out of thy soul I arise.’ In the succession of phenomena, in the unceasing transition of accidents, it is Time, its Arrow, the Cosmic urge, which appears into new dawn and changes day into night, and then turns night into day. It lies within and works from within.

The above conceptual model has certain irresistible implications on which a superstructure of thought might be raised as follows:

(i) All things, at their bottom, are expressions of a single elan vital, or cosmic sway;

(ii) Being expressions by their nature, they are also elan vital in their particularity; and

(iii) Therefore, their being lies in their being elan vital, i.e. unceasing thrust.

An expression is, however, different from a mark or seal. The latter is cold and dead as soon as it is marked or sealed, whereas an expression is alive and continuously moves. Bubble and wave, being vibrant with the life of the ocean during their existence, are true expressions in their essence. Time-philosophies view things as of the status of expression, while some of the old philosophies viewed them as of the nature of a mark or seal; once marked, they are no more Living. Time-philosophies, as modern version of the Cosmic sway postulate, advance beyond by taking all phenomena as living and humming with drive.

In the Asrar Iqbal posited his intuition in the ready made system of the above mentioned conceptual model, and thereby conditioned his meanings with the limits imposed by it. Thus, though he had felt that ego is ultimately inexplicable fact of experience, yet, by versifying it in the conceptual model of the cosmic sway, made it an explicable fact. In the model, ego degenerates into a dancing bubble, a living effect, a mere expression. The bubble lies in its dancing. The ego on the like of it, lies in its activity. The dancing bubble from within is bottomless. Dive into it, the unceasing flow of the formless ocean is there. The bubble ceases to exist. On its like is the bottomless ego. The unceasing thrust, in surge beneath it, is cosmic life itself, in which every limit is naught. In this model, ego cannot have a claim to be an in-itself. It is a mere stirring or a vibration; i.e. a complete function of the cosmic force. It remains activity, no doubt; but, by its essence, it must be finally identical with the universal life. The relation between it and universal life is that of a part and the whole. The part has no self-possessed essence of its own. Being a mere partial discrimination within the whole, only a form it has. By essence, it is identical with its whole, though the whole is not identical with its part; for the part being limited, cannot contain the whole.

Such were the conceptual commitments of the Mathnavis, at a time when Iqbal was under the exposure of a powerful vision that “ego is a finite centre and this finite centre is the fundamental fact of the Universe.” This radical insight into the nature of ego however entailed that the essence of ego lies concentrated within its own being, and that negating both, its being a mark or its being an expression, it must be an unbreakable monad. In its depths, the ego is thus, unlike a roaming wave or dancing bubble with opening into the unfathomable ocean of being, the indefinite or indistinct continuum, existential continuum of the cosmic life. The conceptual apparatus of the Universal elan vital is summarily banished by the birth of this new consciousness of the monadic character of ego, which was born with Iqbal.

In the choice of his poetic similes, if not in that of his conceptual tools as vehicle of his vision, Iqbal exercised extraordinary acumen in the right direction. He scrapped the simile of bubble and used instead that of jewel for ego. Its significance and symbolic content has not been duly realized by popular commentators of Iqbal. It was selected by him, not so much to teach the cult of power as to convey the metaphysical idea, viz. ontological character of ego as an ultimate truth, well bounded on all sides, inexplicably concentrated within its own fold, and existentially different from and other than the larger reality. In the light of what precedes, we may use another simile: that of pearl. A pearl is different from tide. It is small, too small, but having its essence identical with what it is in itself, existentially it preserves itself in the limitless ocean. On the other hand, the surge of the mightiest tide has no essence and self-preserving identity of its own. Being thoroughly bottomless, it rises from and recedes into the unlimitable continuum that underlies it.

Iqbal’s Mathnavi provoked many of the Indian mystics, especially his remarks on Hafiz were source of much indignation to them. Polemics, statements, and poems appeared against him in different papers. He was forced to write rejoinders, in which those features of the Mathnavi Asrar were brought into light which were not quite manifest in it, yet which were very much pertinent to its theme fur the representation of his new image of reality. In his rejoinders, Iqbal emphasized the stand-point of distinction as pivot of his philosophical outlook. It means that the image of falling and disappearing wave into infinite continuum was no longer part of his idea of ego. It does not however mean that he renounced the model of universal life. as means of his philosophical outlook. Indeed, the model was common ground between him and the Indian Sufis at that time. He was using an advanced model of the same genre, gradually perfected as it were, in the evolution of the modern western thought, especially since Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, of whome his Sufi contemporaries had no idea. This advanced model of the cosmic life had its own method for accommodating the particulars and their distinctness. It did not involve sacrifice of the premises of Cosmic permeation of one reality, in any significant way. Thus, a schema emerged in which no rising wave perishes. In other words if a bubble is formed in the splashes of water, it continues to exist. But the cosmic sway, the limitless continuum of the ocean does not thereby ceases to pervade the being or to be the essence of the bubble. So also in the vibration of the wave and movements of all the entities which lie within it, it is universal force which permeates inexorably and manifests itself untiringly in their expressions, though the latter do not die out. In this way, at its metaphysical foundation the model retains Life Force as ontologically unmultipliable and indivisible Agent in all the diversification of phenomena and of all the multitude of forms and names. Thus, modernziation of the Cosmic Life allows only that much existence to things which pertains to mere forms and distinct names. The Cosmic Life alone is true actor behind all the finite things; the latter enjoying only instrumental existence. This explanation makes it clear that may it be extinction or distinction, informing the being of a particular, ontologically speaking, the world-feeling and the conceptual model born of it as inherent in the magnitudinal consciousness does not change. Thus, one may harbour no doubt about the things in their having separable designations, without dragging oneself into negation of the same old model. All particulars, as gleaned through this view, are immersed in and at the mercy of the Cosmic Power working immanently through each of them. Each distinct thing unfolds some particular aspect, empirical or phenomenal position of the same indivisible universal life. At this place we are exactly describing the image of reality in terms of Hegelian and post-Hegelian Monism. It produces the spell of its closeness with the intuition which filled Iqbal’s heart. In it as in the older model of the Cosmic life, ego is just a thrust, a dynamism; all of its being is an urge: it is an act. But what does it posit? It posits a moment, a here and now of the universal elan vital. Thus, the advanced model is all but a simulation of the type of philosophical feeling which aroused Iqbal with a new theme for his Mathnavis. Iqbal’s assertion of distinction even within the limits of this model, enraged the Sufis of India.

Iqbal drew on Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1034/1624) for defending his position. It may be noted that Indian Sufis of the time were protagonists of extinction while the Shyakh had distinguished himself by upholding the principle of distinction. But there was no logical rapport between Iqbal’s sensibility and the philosophical idioms of the Shaykh, who had viewed the things as only distinct forms in the mirror of nothingness. Later, Shah Waliullah (d. 1176/1762) correctly and exhaustively proved that no significant difference in the positions of extinction and distinction, in that of Ibn al Arabi (d. 638/1240) and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1034/1624), could be ascertained. To Iqbal, ego is not a form in the mirror of nothingness, but is a distinct, finite existent. Obviously, his sense of reality was different in its texture from that of the Shaykh. It is further remarkable to note that Iqbal denounced Plato’s general and particular theory, viz. the mystic theory of reflection making the world a reflection of the generals. Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi’s philosophical views exactly rested on this very theory. Platonism in spirit is however a philosophy of distinction. The particulars are distinct from the Universals themselves, according to its premises. In Muslim tradition Platonism was absorbed in knowledgeable circles as the philosophy of Ishraq. The Shaykh’s philosophy represented a curious system of ontology on its basis. At no stage of his life, Iqbal showed an inclination towards this philosophical system though he always kept the Shaykh in very high esteem as a saint, restoring who strove its after the reforms of Muslim society, particularly all trials for his communal identity; and heroically passed mission. Iqbal’s anti-Platonism shows that the bare idea of distinction in itself is of no value in the spirit of his philosophy.

The Sufi tradition of India mostly followed the Cosmic Sway model of Ibn-al-Arabi. It was a static model, while Iqbal of the hs Mathnavi period as has been said a short while ago, expressed thought through an advanced systematic of the same model. In the atrwetional model, as of ibn al Arabi type, the underlying have emphasized earlier, is identical with none of its parts, though i.e. with the waves or manifestations. In other words, Consequently, is manifest in the parts, yet Reality in its totality ‘produces the strange phenomena of being at rest and yet in motion.’ This was the outlook of the believers in Wahdat al-Wujud with Immanence and Transcendence as its integral moments. The perfectly dynamical model, which becomes complete in the Rumuzi-Bikhudi, differs from it by obliteration of the distinction between immanence and transcendence in the Cosmic Sway which means that all has emerged in wave, and the wave is in Sway (d. 1831) who visualized reality to be of this motion. It was Hegel (d. 1831) who visualized reality to be of this nature. Since the time of Hegel, this model has been the main spring board of the philosophical flights in western Culture, in whose depth lies the magnititudinal consciousness determining the evolution of its thought, as it were, in our time. Its premises may be put in ordinary language as (1) there is no transcendence beyond the appearance; (2) the real is completely immanent in its appearance; and (3) the totality of appearance is reality. Thus the unmultipliable cosmic life is absolutely one with and manifest in the manifold of its expressions, according to these premises. This was Hegelian revolution in outlook, whereas the earlier Stereo-Type had allowed the distinction between the ocean and the wave in the metaphysics of existence. Now the Noumenal reality, the limitless ocean of being, is completely identical with and is given in the phenomenal actuality of its momentary waves. This model, since its very inceptionprofoundly modified the feel of the magnitudinal consciousness inherent in the Western Civilization and has caused its most splendid systems of thought as of Schophenhauer (d. 1860), Hartmann (d. 1903), Bergson (d. 1941), and Samuel Alexander (d. 1938). According to these, the Cosmic Life is a principle not behind but within the phenomena. Whatever it is, it must be a thoroughly immanent principle, living manifestedly in its appearances. Being indivisible and all-pervading immanent causality, it binds together all existent expressions of its being in one irrevocable mighty flow, towards a Single Cosmic destiny. It is Time. The immanent cosmic life is Time. The Model is embellished with a thorough-going Historicism, entailing that there is nothing beyond History, Change and Time; not at all. All reality, in the totality of its expressions, is posited in its now, which is inevitably surpassed in a next now. The Cosmic force gushes forth, its moments splash into being and exhaust themselves in its flow. It is incessant becoming with infinity of distinctions rising and falling. Like waves, all things emerge and submerge in its universal drive. There is no timeless reality beyond it. All is in the wheel of time. The Collective Force, universal life, is all in all. Everything is a bloom of its temporality. The egos are its phenomenal channels. It traverses its path through them, and blows them to its own (cosmic) destiny. All history is dust storm of its march.

This model preserves the egos, but perforate them by a universal causality. It concedes to their distinct existence, but no deeper than a form or an expression or a particular name. Their will to act is phenomenal expression of the thrust of the cosmic life, which untiringly displays the character of its incessent flow in the dialectic of the rise and fall of people, composition and corruption of the moments of time, generation, degeneration and regeneration of nature. This Historicism is absolute collectivism, objectified in the infinity of individual expressions, all tossed together in the numerical unity of its drive. Absolutely, there is no difference between extinction or distinction of a particular thing in its limitless continuum. Every distinct soul is just extinct in the massiveness of the collective force, the limitless drive of the unlimitable continuum. Thus the ego qua ego, in Historicism, is an existential stillness and qua dynamism is an aspect of an infinite surge. It is however, an open possibility. But, of whom? Not of its own I-amness, never; it is open possibility of the Cosmic Drive. Its being as such, its self consciousness is only a mode, a particular arrangement, of the all-Pervading cosmic thrust, which permeates all and is of the essence of the universal life. That this particular arrangement is ultimate mode of the universal force having all of its unfathomable aspects realized in it, is a necessery prop of this model raised by Hegel and fortified by his right wing successors.

The Rumuz i-Bikhudi posited its thought contents in the above architechtonic. In scope and aims, the Rumuz was rendering of a complete theology and philosophy of religion for the Muslim community, expounding in its verses relation between the individual and community; the constitution of the Ummah, the law of Islam ; Change, Decadence and Conformity ; Social Solidarity ; visible focus of group life ; collective ideals and perfection of the community ; ete., etc. And it was all stuck to Historicism, the post-Hegelian replica of collective sway; all against the spirit of Iqbal’s own sense of reality. The Six Lectures delivered in 1929 some ten years after its composition, re-exploring more or less the same field of discussion embodied more faithfully the spirit of Iqbal’s vision. The intuition which had been only in a nascent State during 1916-18, by now bloomed into maturity and became articulate. Iqbal of the Lectures was a philosopher, who stood on his own grounds and was in no need of the borrowed models to state his meanings or to build up the philosophy inherent in Islam. Consequently, the thought content of the Lectures was free from the conceptual encumbrances of the Rumuz. To state the principle of movement in Islam, he was not now required to duplicate a Hegel or a Schopenhauer or a Royce as in that “the perfection of communal life is attained when community, like the individual, discovers the sensation of self”; and in that “the propagation and perfection of this sensation can be realized through guarding the communal tradition”—he had stated in the Rumuz.

Historicism had been part of his philosophical make, when he composed the Rumuz but not now, when he prepared the Lectures. According to Historicism all Life is history. A self is different from other selves by its biography and a community is individuated from other communities by its history. Communal tradition is conservation of the past in the present as inner core and main dynamics of its existence. If you change your tradition, you change your identity; if you disown your history, you disown your-self. The past all in all accompanies you and it is you what you are; your composition, life and meaning. It is your particular genius—genius of a people. You cannot overcome it. The preceding deductions are necessary inferences and immediate conclusions from historization of the universal life. Thus, the ego, or I-amness, bulging out into the future, is all a particular collection and conservation of yesters. What it has to be is result of what it has been. Its destiny is accomplishment of its origin. Then Iblis was right to boast of his genesis ! By historization, the Cosmic Sway model sprouts into a genesis-looking civilization. The present as such has no value of its own. Its being lies in its being a thorough-bred effect of the past, in its being a vehicle of the movement of Time, of the elan vital flowing into the future, but all from past and along with past. No instant of the self transcends or escapes this binding chain of time and therefore I-amness from all sides in all of its aspects is fettered by it. Ego, in this model, has no ontological composition except by way of a memory condensed in I-amness‑Similar is the nature of human groups. They are condensation of collective memory in a nucleus of collective I-amness---all past organizing into a complex super—monad. This conception of the life of ego deeply infiltrates the Mathnavis. Iqbal expounded his idea of self and social philosophy in the Mysteries of Selflessness, on its basis:

Know then it is the connecting threads of days That stiches up thy Life’s Loose manuscript. This self-same thread sews us a shirt Its needle the rememberance of old yarn. What thing is history, O self unaware A fable or a legendary tale?

Nay, it is the thing that maketh thee aware of thy true self, alert unto the task.

A seasoned traveller; this is the source of the soul’s ardour. This is the nerve that knit The body of the whole Community. This whets thee like a dagger on its sheaths To dash thee in the face of all the world. What is life? A wave.

Iqbal surmounted this philosophical model in the Reconstruction. Memory or historical genius of a people does not occupy a metaphysical place in the Lectures. Memory now appears as simply an aspect of knowledge. Being reservoir of experience, it is an instrument of the adjustment process just like all other species of knowledge. But, there, in the model of Cosmic Life, in Historicism as it were, memory or history is constitutive ontological principle, the very life, essence, building material and the form of ego. And it is rooted in collective unconscious —the formidable infinite Continuum on the surface of which, the Cosmic Life bulges out in the frame of an I-experience. Iqbal progressively went beyond the limits of this model. Thus, in the end, he was successful in formulating a new exposition of the nature of ego, as basic principle of his monadology, free from historicism. Ego exists beyond memory. It is not a function of the memory. On the other hand, memory is the function of ego. By its nature, ego is of the nature of volition, which is essentially different from rememberance or retention. I-amness is a will in action focussed in its own fold. In experience, it presents itself as a tension, and not as a record or an experience of continuity, hence its power of de-identification from the pull of history-According to the premises of Historicism, in contrast, ego, being an integration and condensation of the past, has no power to rise above the chain of Time and shape itself according to its own image. Iqbal’s exposition of ego and its life in the Reconstruction implies its generic freedom from history and provides foundation to a telesis-looking civilization. In line with it he restated his social philosophy, which in the Mathnavis had been under the shadow of the History-bound metaphysics.

To understand the metaphysical bases of the social philosophy as stated in the Mathnavi Rumuz, we must discuss one more aspect of Historicism. If we look into the earlier simple models of the Cosmic Sway theories, more particularly, their emanationistic and Sufi models. We find them very poor in content, so poor that phenomena of social life are just out of their comprehension. They had no provision for totalities. And since, society is an aggregative phenomenon, they cannot represent it. Thus, if a wave emerges, according to their image, it appears from the infinite continuum, and returns to it. But, Historicism gives an ingenius twist to the image and makes it marvellous. It takes note of the totalities, or collectivities. A wave does not rise, but waves, many waves rise. Each rising wave diffuses into others. All of them emerge into a big tide. The tides, by diffusion into one another, produce storms. These are the tides and storms, and not single waves, which exhaust or disappear into the limitless mass of the ocean. This enriched imagery is the main contribution of Historicism for ontological re-presentation of the Cosmic life in social phenomena. Every individual I-amness has to surge into the social tide. No earlier model of the Cosmic Life had implied that the return (=forward) journey of the individual is through the tide, the collective, but Historicism implied it as necessary aspect of the life of ego. Iqbal adopted it for stating his social views in Rumuz. Let us peep reality through it. Ego is not a simple thing. Thousands of memory prints melt into one another and ego is born. A multitude of individual egos merge likewise, with one another and collective ego flows out; it is society. The model preserves its postulational rhythm; undifferentiation - differentiation - undifferentiation. The life force scatters into tiny life centres, which in turn submerge into a big whole, a collectivity, an expanded ego - I-amness. Thus viewed, Society is not a ‘we’; it is ‘I’, super-individual I-amness. The individual limits are abrogated, the selves have become selfless, but by this, they have passed into a collective unity; thus they have expanded. The collective ego is indivisible unity of I-amness which permeates everything, every memory, every experience, every frame, which earlier was a separate monad. Themultitude of the phenomenal life centres is manifestation of a noumenal active principle; the collective ego. Philosophy of this kind is modern mysticism, rather contemporary wandat al wujud. The Mathnavi Mysteries of selflessness was fastened to it.

This super individual self, the collective monad must have a law, a visible focus, an ideal. Iqbal expounded all those important requirements in that Mathnavi. He faithfully stated the Islamic props of social organaization. But as this statement was stuck to the metaphysics of collectivism, interpretaion of its important concepts was liable to the distortion imposed by the collectivizing categories.

As it has been clarified earlier, society according to the categories of collectivism is one will, one thought, one action, one indivisible I-amness, a massive sway. As it grows, the individual egos are segregated and submerged into its unity and indivisible I-amness. Their autonomies and volitions are simply abolished in this wandat al Wujud, continuously in evolution from less socialization to more socialization, from a superficial collection to a more and more intensive collectivism, until the perfection and complete existence of the super I-amness is in realization before which no individual I-amness is in existence. All are cancelled, negated and summated at its height. It is the station of Jama al Jama of con-temporary mysticism, prescribing a particular sense of social solidarity. One voice, one opinion, one experience, one party, one property, one conscience become its logical implications. At its height, it negates every sub-group, every party, every opinion, every conscience beyond it. Now, if the Muslim Society is cast on this model, then Kaba as visible focus and shariah of Islam as its law mean very little in terms of Islam; they cannot impart life to it. Fortunately, the Muslim people never practised this kind of theory of Social solidarity in their history. Iqbal’s further development as we have emphasized earlier, consisted of clarification of his philosophical concepts and restating them in terms of more appropriate categories. His monadology, as it finally evolved, had no scope for collectivism no mystification of society. Like all the orthodox muslims, he believed that ‘differences of the Ummah or dissension in opinion is a mercy. ‘He developed an organic sense of unity as principle of social organization and discarded the view that society is a super individual monad. According to him, society is a mode of living of the individual egos, a necessary mode of course, in which the individuals are more powerful than they are in their lonliness. Similarly, social system is a policy of producing living unity between them. Only in a good social system, the individuals are in their individuality. A healthy society overcomes and removes all obstructions which are source of weakening the individuals. Socialization is a process whereby individual persons intensify their individual I-amness, and overcome extinction. Thus, the concepts of unity, social solidariy, discipline, individualism. etc. attain their own constructive and healthy meanings in the evolution of Iqbal’s thought as he expressed them in his maturer works:

The I ‘is truth, it is no illusion Don’t look upon it as a fruitless field. When it ripens, it becomes eternal.[8]

In order, therefore, to maintain intact His Ego society, I saw in my dust the seed of selfhood. And keep a constant vigil over my ‘I’.[9]

Society is union of these egos and separation-in-union. We have to reinterpret the mathnavis on the basis of Gulshan-i-Raz-i-Jadid. All answers in the latter are against the philosophical postulates of Cosmic Life, Historicism and Collectivism. Iqbal gave positive answers in it straightly on the basis of his own ontology. It cannot be said of his monadology that it was a reproduction of Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel or Bergson. The latter were philosophers of Cosmic sway, Iqbal finally was not. He took time to develop his own model and came out of their influence. Thus all of his deductions and conclusions have to be reinterpreted in terms of his own ontology and monadology.

*. A. H. Kamali, Deputy Director, Iqbal Academy. 1. Atiya Begum, Iqbal (Lahore, 1969), p. 75.

[1] Zabur-i-Ajam, p. 235 if.

[2] The Secret of the Self, 11. 187-8.

[3] Ibid., pp. 239 f ; Dar's translation, pp. 45-50.

[4] Ibid., Invocation, Arberry's Translation.

[5] Translation by Prof. M. M. Sharif, Po yam i-Mashriq, p. 102.

[6] Arberry’s translation, pp. 59-60.

[7] Arberry’s translation, p. 7.

[8] The Secret of the Self, 11. 187-8

[9] Ibid., 189-192.

[10] Ibid., 193-96, 201-2.