A SURVEY OF THE ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS OF PAKISTAN DURING 1955

ISLAMIC MODERNITY AND THE DESIRING SELF: MUHAMMAD IQBAL AND THE POETICS OF NARCISSISM*
Yaseen Noorani

The Indian Muslim poet and religious thinker Muhammad Iqbal (c. 1877-1938) provides the most extensive and fully realised vision of an alternative, Islamic version of modernity that has yet appeared. His critique of Enlightenment rationality, and particularly his cogent linkage of it with Imperialism, anticipates an important line of post-War thinking. Above all, his apparent success in casting modern European civilisation as a dead-end offshoot of the authentic modernity engendered by Islam has earned him great admiration throughout the Muslim world, leaving aside the Indian subcontinent, where he has become an institution of Muslim culture. Iqbal’s achievement goes beyond the mere dressing of a pre-existing conception of modernity in Islamic garb. In the manner of European Romantic and Modernist writers, he was able to generate a critique of Europe’s rationalist and capitalist social order out of a distinctive figuration of the human condition. Like his European counterparts, from whom he learned a great deal, Iqbal founded his alternative version of modernity on the poetic representation of an ideal modern self characterised by its fundamentally aesthetic or creative mode of being rather than by any capacity for “ratiocination.” He derived this representation, however, not from the Romantic artist or hero of European literary traditions, but from the desiring self of the classical Persian ghazal. In order to do this, Iqbal had to turn what I will characterise as the “Dionysian” self of the classical ghazal into a modern form of subjectivity radically distinguished from nature and inscribed with a historical trajectory. By changing the polarity of the classical representation of the desiring subject, Iqbal produced a “narcissistic” self which served as the basis of the doctrine of selfhood (khudi) that he propounded in his masnavi poems and his book, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.[1] The transformation that Iqbal worked to create in the narrow compass of the ghazal is therefore the key to his hegemonic vision of an authentic, Islamic modernity destined to transform the world.

In recasting the ghazal for political purposes, Iqbal’s challenge was to turn a lyrical genre centred on passionate love and the subversion of social norms into a blueprint for communal self-realisation, a tool for the moral reform of the Muslim nation. The political potential of the classical ghazal, however, comes not out of any vision of a communal ideal, but out of a fundamental alienation from the world of everyday time that governs social existence. We can see this impulse in the way that the ghazal represents the escape from everyday existence.[2]

The drinking-song motif expresses the poet’s wish to reorder the universe according to his own desire in the feeling of intoxicated euphoria. Freedom from the tyranny of fate takes the form of a condition condemned by society and religious law. The association of freedom with a position outside society is characteristic of the ghazal, enabling the poet to denounce those with moral or political authority and their institutions. For moral and political reform, however, the ghazal is a problematic genre. Unlike the qasida, to which it is closely related, the ghazal depicts fulfilment primarily in individual and temporary images. Instead of tracing a linear progress from personal desire to communal fulfilment, the ghazal takes the fixed existential condition of the desiring self and explores its modulations. In other words, the ghazal rejects what I have previously called the mechanism of poetic sublimation constitutive of the qasida.[3] The movement of the qasida, diverts desire from the language of love to the language of social virtue, from the erotic to the heroic. The ghazal, however, absolutises the language of love, turning it into a symbolic language capable of representing the human condition in its entirety. The erotic and individual subsume the heroic and communal. The language of the ghazal lends itself to “sublimated” interpretation, but remains the language of love. This results not only in moral ambiguity but in the absence of any representation of a communal ideal.

In the context of colonial domination and the rationalist order which it ostensibly inaugurated, the ghazal came to be viewed increasingly as a national liability. It appeared more as a manifestation of national decadence than as a potential means of national rehabilitation. The ghazal’s moral and political deficiencies were of particular importance in India, where it remained the dominant genre of Persian and Urdu poetry through the nineteenth century. The most influential statement of the case was made by Altaf Husayn Hali (1837-1914), the founder of modern Urdu literary criticism, in his Muqaddima -yi shi‘r o Sha‘iri (“Introduction to Poetry”). Half, a close associate of the celebrated Muslim reformer Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khin, extends Khan’s conception of “Nature” (nechar), adopted from British Enlightenment thought, to the examination of the nature and purpose of poetry. Taking up the psychological doctrine of the influence of poetry on the moral sensibilities through the emotions, he elaborates the view that the function of poetry is the moral refinement and political inspiration of nations.[4] Natural poetry elevates nations, while artificial poetry corrupts them. He attaches this argument to the narrative of Muslim greatness and decline, seeking to show that the present degenerate state of the Indian Muslim community finds both cause and symptom in the sort of literature that Indian Muslims presently value. Half takes issue with the ghazal for its artificiality and preoccupation with lust. It is artificial because it is imitative and detached from reality, both external and emotional. Its preoccupation with lust is the morally damaging consequence of this artificiality. Since the ghazal is so popular, it cannot be eliminated, but it can perhaps be morally improved or at least rendered innocuous. Hali calls upon poets to desexualise the ghazal by taking up non-sexual forms of love for their theme. He is concerned that they make the beloved as abstract as possible by eliminating all reference to the beloved’s sex and body. Wine imagery should be given up unless obviously metaphorical. Denigration of religious authority should also be cast aside. In general, the ghazal should give up erotic motifs (‘ishqiyya mazamin) and turn to moral (akhlaqi) ones, because this is what the present day requires. In the past, Muslims may have had the luxury to find their entertainment in voluptuous images and precious language. In the present they are struggling for their communal existence.[5]

Hali’s attempt to clean up the ghazal by trading eros for agape and erotic images for moralistic sententiae merely sidesteps the problem of sublimation by obscuring the animating impulse of the desiring self without altering or eliminating it. His programme, if followed through, results in a poetic form that is to the ghazal what muzak is to the symphony. Iqbal, who took up the mantle of literary reformer from Hali and that of Islamic reformer from Ahmad Khan, rejected the Enlightenment solution of repression in favour of the more Romantic solution of narcissism. Iqbal does not seek to desex the ghazal because it is precisely in the tropes of the ghazal’s language of desire that he conducts his attack upon Enlightenment Reason. Nor does he wish to leave it in the traditional form found by Hali to be so politically devastating. Instead, Iqbal attempts to harness the full heat of the ghazal’s passion for the sake of an ideal community by making its symbols signify the self, the individual ego. Rather than give up the primacy of eros, he seeks to inscribe sublimation into its essence. Political orientation, which is to say, an unseverable bond with communal identity, is to lie at the core of the desiring self. Iqbal’s ghazal works to over determine the meaning of eros so that it signifies love of this ideal communal self intrinsically. As in the traditional ghazal, the language of love and the condition of the lover are absolute. Iqbal’s ghazal, however, seeks to eliminate the problem of sublimation by changing the object of the lover’s desire and thus the nature of desire itself. Iqbal took as his criterion for the value of poetry not its conformity to Nature but its enhancement of “Life,” which is to say, its strengthening and consolidation of the ego. This is precisely what he found lacking in the classical ghazal. We can clarify Iqbal’s project by first considering his objections to the classical ghazal and then examining his attempt to refashion it.

In the first edition of his first Persian mathnavi, Asrar-i khudi (“Secrets of the Self”),[6] published in 1915, Iqbal boldly attacked the doyen of Indo Persian ghazal poetry, Hafiz:

The passage continues to find in the sixteenth century poet ‘Urfi a life-affirming antithesis to the decadent Hafiz:[8]

Here Iqbal reveals an important “secret of the self.” “Manly ambition” (himmat) is the direct product of the sublimation of eros. In the traditional qasida the poet transforms his desire for his beloved into desire for martial glory. This is what Iqbal claims here to find in ‘Urfi and find lacking in Hafiz. Though both poets are from Shiraz, ‘Urfi aspires toward higher states of being, while Hafiz is content to remain in (and sing of) the gardens of his hometown. ‘Urfi is a poet of the aspiring self, while Hafiz is a poet calling for self-extinction.

These verses were so controversial that even Iqbal’s close friends demanded explanations from him. For this reason, Iqbal retracted them, and they do not appear in any subsequent edition of Asrar-i khudi; he replaced them with a general indictment of decadent poetry for its role in the downfall of the Muslim community. These deleted passages, as well as Iqbal’s epistolary defences of them, are important because they reveal explicitly what the general indictments interspersed throughout Iqbal’s works only intimate that the sort of ghazal held in the highest esteem by Iqbal’s contemporaries is precisely the sort responsible for their present moral degeneracy.

Iqbal explains in one of his letters that his criticism of Hafiz is “purely literary” and has nothing to do with Hafiz’s “private personality” or “beliefs.”[9] The point of the criticism is merely to elaborate the literary principle that beauty alone cannot be the purpose of art. “If the basis of literature is that beauty is beauty, be its consequences beneficial or injurious, then Khwaja [Hafiz] is of the world’s greatest poets.”[10] Iqbal then expresses his dissatisfaction concerning the comparison between ‘Urfi and Hafiz, all but admitting that it is based upon a single verse of ‘Urfi’s:

In another letter, written to the poet Akbar Ilahabadi, Iqbal comments upon the nature of the objectionable wine of Hafiz’s poetry: “The wine intended in those verses [of Asrar-i khudi] is not what people drink in restaurants, but that state of intoxication which suffuses Hafiz’s poetry.”[11]

The “state of intoxication” that Iqbal finds so objectionable is precisely the Dionysian character of the classical ghazal, its tendency to represent eros through the dissolution of the ego rather than in its enhancement. We saw in the drinking-song verses of Hafiz and Ghalib quoted above the manner in which intoxication signifies the state of euphoria to which the lover aspires. It is immediately obvious to any reader of Hafiz, or of any post Hafiz ghazal poet, that drunkenness is the exemplary condition of the lover, whether it is produced by wine or by eros. Indeed, it is produced by both in the verses quoted, for the command “come” is addressed to the beloved-union with the beloved (wasl) and intoxication are more or less equated. Otherwise, the latter serves as the best substitute for the former, as we learn in the very first verse of Hafiz’s Divan:

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche introduces what he calls the “Dionysian” principle of art, “which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication.”[12] This principle arises from the experience of “an intoxicated reality, which ... does not heed the single unit, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of oneness.”[13] Nietzsche describes this experience as one of complete absorption in the “ground of being,” the life-force of nature underlying all that lives and dies while itself remaining constant. According to Nietzsche, this is the basis for the art of music, the most Dionysian of arts, for it is the art which imitates the primordial life-force most directly. In any case, the Dionysian impulse produces the only sort of art which can truthfully present the horror of life-suffering, destruction, and death-and at the same time redeem it with the more profound truth that “life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.”[14] Nietzsche describes the process in the following manner:

[The] rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a hypnotic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.[15]

It is this nausea, this negation of the will, which is cured by the magic of Dionysian art, which “...alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live...”[16]

In calling the ghazal Dionysian, my claim is not that it arises from the Dionysian experience of self-abnegation in the underlying unity of being that Nietzsche holds to be the basis of this sort of art, but that it depicts the Dionysian situation that Nietzsche describes. It depicts the quest to extinguish self-consciousness in eros (‘ishq), figured in union with the beloved, and laments the inability to consistently achieve this condition, which it calls “fate” (dahr, ruzgar, qaza, etc.). As we saw in the verses of Hafiz and Ghalib cited above, the feeling of intoxication is one which allows the poet to climb on top of the heavens, as it were, and alter the world to suit his own liking. For this intoxication is above and beyond the fate which makes of everyday life a cycle of suffering and death; it is of eternity and not of this world:

The word used for “time,” dawr, means literally “turn,” and intimates the fatal turn of the wheel of time. The opposite of this is the stationary azal, “eternity.” The pun on time points up the contrast between the quotidian nature of consciousness and the timeless, universal condition experienced in its extinction. What is the “wine of eternity” if not some cosmic principle underlying all that exists? This principle is eros (‘ishq), or at least that is what it is called in the ghazals.

The ghazal, however, speaks much more of sorrow (ghamm) than of euphoria. This is because the usual lot of man is not the euphoric, intoxicated state of union with the beloved but rather the misery of everyday life, the realm of fate, the wheel of heaven which grinds us all to dust:

As we saw in the quotation of the first verse of Hafiz’s Divan above, the poet calls this condition separation from the beloved. It is the state of consciousness of the self, which consists in powerful sensations of pain, weakness, and mortality. The whole world cannot redeem even an instant of this condition:

Trade for wine our cloak of abstinence, for it will fetch no better than this. (Hafiz 147)

This condition can be redeemed only by the intoxication of love, which annihilates it. Since, however, the suffering of this world is our normal fate, it is necessary to evoke the feeling of intoxication by means of the beautiful objects of this world. In other words, it is necessary to transform the world into a landscape of beautiful forms, a garden or a house of idols, by means of the impulse of eros:

This verse, though it speaks of joy, is suffused with melancholy. The word ruzgarist, which here means “an age,” evokes fate (ruzgar). The word for “infatuation” (sawda), meant originally “melancholy.” The expression translated as “preoccupation” is an idiom which rendered literally, would be “sorrow (ghamm) for something,” i.e. “care.” The upshot of this is that it is only sorrow for “idols” which can transform existential sorrow into joy through preoccupation with beauty, just as sorrow (ghamm) is linguistically turned into preoccupation by its attachment to an object. Preoccupation with beauty becomes joy because it arises from the desire for the primordial state of love-intoxication, and is indeed a version of that state.

The ghazal, which is the most exemplary preoccupation with beauty, arises from this desire as well, and for this reason, is able to “turn those nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live”― or perhaps it is better to say into symbols with which one can live. In other words, the ghazal can break the spell of time:

The verse reads literally, “make talk of the singer and wine” (hadis... gu), and this “talk” is of course ghazal poetry, which has made of these topics its vocation. The wise Oedipus did not solve the riddle of time; he merely recognised it, thus initiating his own destruction. Only the “talk of singer and wine,” the ghazal, can escape it, not through wisdom, but by evoking the state of mystical union and freedom from the self. The ghazal springs from that divine music which governs all of being, including the heavens to which we are subject:

The ghazal makes everyone dance, because through the luminous symbols of its language which transfigure the world of everyday life it evokes the primordial state of selflessness to which all aspire.

Now we may move from selflessness to selfhood and the problem of political action. We have seen that Iqbal objected to the “state of intoxication which suffuses Hafiz’s poetry.” This is precisely the Dionysian situation that this poetry depicts, the evocation of selflessness. Yet Iqbal did not propose to abandon the ghazal; he was in fact an accomplished practitioner of the genre. This is because Iqbal did not want to give up the desiring self as it expresses itself in the ghazal. In reality, the only objection that Iqbal has to the speaker of the ghazal is the manner in which this speaker expresses his desire, his propensity to find its adequation in the world of appearance:

Pleasure in presence, self-immersion in the beautiful forms of the world of appearance, is the idolatry that Iqbal would banish from the ghazal, for this is the opium that in his view leads to inaction and negation of the will. In other words, the ghazal poet’s desire to evoke the experience of unity and selflessness by means of preoccupation with beautiful forms is seen as a dangerous enterprise which has succeeding in enticing the ghazals admirers from the true, absent (gha’ib) object of desire. The warning against ephemeral beauty has its place in the ghazal tradition. Yet in the classical ghazal, the poet is able to see the divine beauty in ephemeral appearance, because he looks with the eye of selflessness; his vision issues not from the self-serving exterior eye, but from an internal eye which is one with the life-force of eros:

For Iqbal, however, this mixing of sacred and profane problematises sublimation, thereby making social action irrelevant to those who are so bewitched by the ghazal that they try to live it by making preoccupation with the beauty of the world of appearances their personal vocation. He included in this class all educated Indian Muslims. Therefore, he inserts an intermediary between the present world of appearance and the absent beloved. This intermediary is selfhood, which has two dimensions―individual, and communal. For Iqbal, the divine beloved, the goal of every mortal being, cannot be reached without traversing this intermediary.

The result is that Iqbal creates a subjective structure similar to that of the traditional qasida, in that, in order to attain a state of ultimate fulfilment, the self must pass in a dialectical movement through an intermediate stage of opposition to the external world resulting in social virtue and action. This is not, however, a progressive movement from an initial state to a final all-inclusive one but a perpetual state of self-love expressing itself in the world. The paradigm of the classical ghazal, as we have seen, does not work in this fashion at all. The ghazal deals with the existential situation of human beings in this world. There is no exit from this situation. In it the self, experiences two extremes, similar to those of the qasida; these are the sense of selfhood, which consists in sensations of pain and mortality, and the euphoric sense of self-immersion in the universal force from which all of existence arises. The self is caught in a liminal state between these two extremes, which unlike the liminality of the qasida, is not a passage from one to the other, but a simultaneous or alternating experience of each one. In the terms of the ghazal, the same beloved is responsible for both. The ghazal is liminal because the sensations of both extremes are extremely powerful. It is always on the threshold, never settled into a stable mode of being. Unlike the qasida, the ghazal can be no Bildungsroman; it is a tale that has no beginning or end, and therefore no provision for integration into a stable, social existence.

Therefore Iqbal composed his own versions of the Bildungsroman, his masnavi works, and made his ghazals the expression of the desiring self that is elaborated in them:

The principle of selfhood that is taught in these works is a principle of individuation, which is to say an Apollonian principle in opposition to the Dionysian states evoked in the classical ghazal. It is in fact from the “selflessness” (bikhudi) of the classical ghazal that Iqbal’s “selfhood” (khudi) is derived, for the term khudi in its normal sense means “selfishness” or “egotism.” Iqbal’s term, however, means the opposite of bikhudi, which is a lack of consciousness of the self, resulting in senselessness. It is precisely the mind-numbed narcotic state that Nietzsche speaks of as the effect of Dionysian experience:

The opposite of this is awareness of the self, the preservation of its proper boundaries, even in the extreme states of desire:

It is not every madman’s practice not to be beside himself in his madness. (ZA 1, 20)

The madman is the lover, whose habit is to rend his clothes in ecstasy, signifying the destruction of the boundaries of self, both social and psychological; Iqbal shows here how his own practice of love is to be different from that of his precursors. “To be beside one’s self,” i.e. to lose one’s senses, is a common expression which Iqbal has simply negated, drawing attention to the new duty of “remaining within the self.” This corresponds to his negation of the word bikhudi. The new lover shall experience the same madness, but he shall vigilantly “guard his collar,” which means that he will not allow his boundary of self to be violated.

This does not mean, however, that Iqbal will entirely renounce the language of “selflessness;” it means that this language will have to be kept in its correct perspective. The state that the ghazal poets speak of can only be an end that is constantly striven towards through the self, through individuation. The effect of this is that the polarity of the classical ghazal is changed from emphasis on the power of the beloved to an emphasis on the agency of the lover. We see this in the following two verses, the first from Hafiz and the second from Iqbal:

In both verses, the rose is the beloved and the bird the poet. In the verse of Hafiz, the emphasis is on the fact that the poet learned to speak from the beloved, that it is the overflow or grace of the beloved that fills the poet with speech. In Iqbal’s verse, the idea is that the beloved cannot speak, and it is the task of the poet to speak for him. It makes the poet’s own ability to speak a purposive vocation, the telling of secrets of the universe that the universe itself cannot tell. In other words, one can seek these secrets only in the self; attention to the external world will not yield them. In this there is simply a change in polarity, yet its result is that Iqbal introduces an essentially modern conception of the relationship between man and nature into the ghazal.[19]

The effect of this change in polarity is that the self becomes a narcissistic lover who can love the world only by transforming it into his own image. Whereas the lover of the classical ghazal immerses himself in worldly beauty by seeing the divine beauty in it, the new lover immerses the world in himself by transforming it. The principle of individuation that Iqbal introduces to mediate between the world of appearance and the divine force behind it requires that the self love only itself so profoundly that it should become itself the divine force. For the self is a model of the universe-its interior is divine force and its exterior worldly appearance. The divine force can only be reached, therefore, through the self:

The dust-pit, normally the appellation of the world, names here the body. To reach this pearl of life requires a narcissistic love of self, so that all we perceive as outside of the self becomes comprised in it. In order to see the divine in the world, we must make the world divine by remaking it according to our own divine desire:

The principle of individuation requires that we change our glance, and thereby change the world, by working through our “self.” Instead of the oscillation between states of union (wasl) and separation (firaq) of the traditional ghazal, Iqbal calls in this way for a perpetual, or well-nigh perpetual, state of separation. This separation, however, is to be a passage, a creative journey of transforming the world into a mirror of the self. The journey of separation is in fact the means by which Iqbal attempts to bring about the sublimation that is so elusive in the classical ghazal.

The sublimation of Iqbal’s ghazal may be understood as a poetic inversion of Freud’s theory of narcissism in the ego. For Freud, there is a primary narcissism, in which the ego begins desiring only itself (“an original libidinal cathexes of the ego,”[20]), and a secondary one, of which he says the following:[21]

At the very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in the process of formation, or is still feeble. The id sends part of this libido out into erotic object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force itself on the id as a love object. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects.

In other words, the ego tries to divert its desire from objects which are unattainable or forbidden back to itself as self-love. The ego accomplishes this by making itself resemble the loved object so that in attaching its desire to this resemblance it compensates for the lost object. By taking on the attributes of the desired object, the ego is able to give up that object and obtain some satisfaction from self-love:

...the ego deals with the first object-cathexes of the id (and certainly with later ones too) by taking over the libido from them into itself and binding it to the alteration of the ego produced by means of identification. This transformation [of erotic libido] into ego libido of course involves an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualisation.[22]

This “absorption” of the desired object into the ego, resulting in abandonment of the object and transference of desire to the self, is thus seen by Freud as a primary means of the sublimation of sexual energy for the sake of non-sexual ends. Furthermore, it is precisely out of this accumulation of traits from beloved objects that “personality” arises, or as Freud puts it, “...this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and ... makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘charac-ter’”.[23] In Freud’s view then, sublimation and ego building are both results of the process which he calls “secondary narcissism.”

The process of narcissism that Iqbal elaborates has these results as well, bringing them about as an inversion of Freud’s account. In both accounts, the problem is the same: how can we cope with the fact that we cannot obtain full satisfaction from the people and objects that we love in the world? For Freud, the gap between desire and reality can be bridged only by means of a self-deception which allows us to love ourselves instead of what we originally loved. For Iqbal, however, such an attachment to external objects of desire in the first place is precisely the error. By loving the forms of the world of appearance, we fall into the fatal trap of everyday time, the cycle of frustration, repression, and anguish. The escape from this trap is self-love, a love for which there is no “external” world because it transforms all into the self. Instead of altering itself so as to resemble beloved objects, the self remakes the world in its own image. In other words, self-love produces creative action upon the world. This is the basis for the sublimation of the ghazal’s language of love which shall redirect its desire to social and political activity.[24]

Therefore, Iqbal and Freud agree that the most satisfying love that the ego can enjoy is self-love, which is a mental and not a physical love. Iqbal’s conception of the relationship between man and nature, however, which is radically different from both Freud’s and the classical ghazal’s, determines the difference in the consequences of self-love. For Freud, nature is opposed to the unlimited desire of its creatures and imposes on them the fate of the “Reality Principle,” by which they repress, controvert, and deceive their desire in order to get along in this world. For Iqbal, however, man’s desire is the truth of nature:

The moth which immolates itself in the candle is usually the lover’s model, but Iqbal makes it act in this way because of the existence of man. Again, the emphasis of the classical ghazal is changed; eros is no longer simply the divine force which underlies all of nature, including man. Now man is responsible for the presence of this divine force in nature; without man, nature would be little more than dead matter. In the classical ghazal as well as in Freud, the human ego does not affect the working of the universe. For the former, the ego lends moral significance to the human condition by creating the tragic/heroic struggle of desire and consciousness, thus lifting man above other beings. In Freud’s view, the ego increases misery by creating the capacity for knowledge without providing anything more than delusory means of changing the universe to fit desire. For Iqbal, however, the universe can only be what it is, and can only become what it must become, because of the activity of the human ego:

Therefore, man comes in control of fate, not by attaining a euphoric state of selflessness but by means of the development of his self. We saw above that in the state of madness, the new lover shall yet refrain from rending his clothes. This preservation of the boundaries of the self causes the madness to be directed outwards, onto the world, creatively transforming it so that it fits into the boundaries of the self. This is a new euphoria, not of seeing divine beauty by throwing off the veil of the self, but of creating the divine in the world by means of creative action, which is the only measure of virtue:

The result is that our relation to the potential objects of desire in the world is an automatic sublimation; instead of desiring the world as it is, letting it determine us, we transform the world into our self, as the means of expression of our own narcissistic desire. Freud theorises that the organism’s aggressive impulse may be tied to its erotic impulse for the sake of enacting the latter. Here, an aggressive impulse is employed for the sake of enacting the sublimation of an erotic impulse.

Iqbal’s attitude towards nature (fitrat, tabi‘at) is an aggressive one, and this is the true consequence of the difference between his verse about the bird and the flower and the verse of Hafiz. In the verse of Hafiz, man is a part of nature, but for his ego which alienates him by making him less privy to the “rose’s overabundance” than the nightingale is. For Iqbal, man’s ego is the meaning of nature. Nature can only participate in the divine force, or more accurately, become an expression of the divine force, by being subdued by the divine agent, man. Therefore the relation between the self and the outside world is confrontational.

You perceive only the world of fragrance and colour, and you say that this is a riddle―

Just strike yourself against its strings, for you are the plectrum and this is the guitar. (ZA 2, 63)

The exploration of the rich possibilities contained in the relation between the eternal life-force of being and the ephemeral, kaleidoscopic world of appearance, which had been the “riddle” with which the ghazal had occupied itself for a few centuries, is here consigned by Iqbal to the forgotten shelves of scholasticism. Disgusted by the pale cast of thought engendered by the contemplation of this riddle, Iqbal eliminates it by separating subject from object, resulting in a demand for the “conquest of nature” (taskhir-i fitrat). The fact that this separation of the human ego from nature is destined for reconciliation does not diminish the violence of its immediate consequences:

It sharpened me and drew me upon the face of time. I am that world of imagination, which eternal nature,

Here, eternal nature is opposed to the nature that we see, which belongs to time and mutability, and to which the classical ghazal, in Iqbal’s view, too much directs its attention. “The world of nightingale and rose” is in fact the classical ghazal itself, which is the natural world that the self, in league with “eternal nature,” must shatter in order to make from the shards its own world beyond the contingencies of space and time. Narcissistic love finds in the world an obstacle to its autotelic quest. It can pursue this quest only by transforming the world into the object of its desire, namely, itself. This aggressive transformation of the world is the form that sublimation takes for the self of the new lover.

The realm of separation (firaq) from the beloved becomes therefore the true realm of human activity and freedom, instead of the realm of fate as it was in the classical ghazal. For Iqbal the beloved only comes into existence as the outcome of this activity of self-love:

Earthen man is the divine in nature. Self-love is the process of the divine working itself out of the naturalness (the “clay body”) of nature by making the whole of it divine. In other words, man is actually the divine beloved separated from itself, yearning to achieve self-realisation:

Only man can free the Divine Prisoner. God comes truly into being through man’s traversal of the gulf of separation. This is the meaning of the creative transformation of the world, and it is for this reason that by doing so the self escapes natural time, or fate, becoming the “sword that is drawn upon the face of time:”

Respiration is the clock of fate that comes with the body, but by transforming the world every moment the divine self in us takes over the work of everyday time. Everyday time alters the world every moment according to the senseless law of fate. By taking over this activity ourselves, we impose divine law on all of existence, including ourselves in so far as we are part of nature:

The word ayyam (“days”) signifies fate, the inexorable succession of one day after another, leading to death. Only by breaking its spell can we achieve true life. Not only do we escape nature in this fashion, but all of nature escapes itself. The mission of man is to free the god that is trapped in himself and in the world.

To transcend the narrow bounds of the natural world in this fashion, therefore, is the primary directive of Iqbal’s poetry of the new self.

This is the high station of man spoken of in the Qur’an, where the angels are made to bow to him. It is realised by means of the narcissistic process of sublimation that we have examined. The Dionysian intoxicated state of union celebrated in the classical ghazal short-circuits this process. It turns the self over to nature instead of making nature come into the self. It surrenders the “divine trust” (amana) that God granted only to man so as to make him His “vicegerent” (khalifa) on earth. It views the day on which this happened (ruz-i alast), the day on which God said to all the creatures, “Am I not your lord?” as a day of calamity (bala), for it was the day that sealed the fate of separation. For Iqbal, this was a blessed day, for it was the first day of the life of the universe. Therefore Iqbal lays the blame for arresting this process on the Dionysian wine of the poets and Sufis:

The man in possession of himself makes of the Milky Way (kahkashan: “straw-puller”) his straw prayer mat, for prayer is the authentic self-preserving frenzy of love in which no shirts are rent. The poet and Sufi, whom Iqbal usually equates so as to demean the former, encourage the exchange of one’s prayer mat for a flask of wine.[25] This exchange is precisely the self-surrender that Iqbal so despises. By following the advice of the poet and Sufi, we have allowed them to steal us from ourselves, thus forfeiting our divine command of the universe.

The ideal poet has quite another role in the vision of Iqbal. He is to be at the vanguard of the self-aware, revealing the secrets of selfhood to the uninitiated:

Earlier we saw that the poet is the “lamenting bird” that reveals the secret which the rose is unable to utter. In this verse, however, the sense is taken in a somewhat different direction. Iqbal is fond of the image of the “fertilising drop,” often using the phrase, “the April rain drop” (qatra-yi nisan). He is also fond of the tulip, which in his poetry usually signifies the self, as opposed to the rose which signifies the beloved of the classical ghazal and of which Iqbal is not as fond. The dew drop fertilises the tulip, enabling it to grow and “realise itself.” The poet performs this action upon his audience. His message of selfhood stirs those who listen to become self-aware and to transform the world as he does in his poetry:

Pas az man shi‘r-i man khwanand o dar Yaband o miguyand
jahani-ra digar gun kard yak mard-i khud-agahi

This fertilising action of the poet links him to prophethood. Of a piece with this is the emphasis upon the poet’s message (payam), reducing his melody to a mere expedient. In the verse of Hafiz quoted above, the poet’s music comes from the celestial music underlying existence, so that it can cause Venus to sing and the Messiah to dance. It is a Dionysian music which enables freedom from the self. Iqbal, rejecting this form of intoxication, demands of the poet that he be a Pied Piper whose music leads to the self. The danger of a poetic beauty which distracts from the self is too great to allow the poet’s music to transgress the limits imposed on it by this task:

naghma kuja o man kuja saz-i sukhan bihana-yist
su-yi qitar mikasham naqa-yi ba-zimam-ra

The capacity of camels to be led by means of a type of singing (an ancient Arab practice termed huda’), and the effect that music has on animals in general, has traditionally been understood in at least two ways. Some have attributed it to the celestial harmony underlying all of being. Others have seen it as affecting animal nature specifically, i.e. the lower soul of human beings, for which a camel serves as a good token. Iqbal gestures toward the second view in this verse in order to emphasise the secondary, lower function of artistic beauty in poetry. Once the camel is re-bridled, it is no longer necessary. For the new poet of life and selfhood, the message is to be primary.

Despite Iqbal’s sustained attack upon the classical ghazal, his own version effects an idiosyncratic redefinition of its symbols which depends on the preservation of the form. The changes in polarity and emphasis are often so subtly effected that they are easily missed or pinned down only with difficulty. It is often the case that verses of classical poetry are entirely “Iqbalian” in the sense that they seem to advocate Iqbal’s conception of selfhood. It is on this basis that Iqbal initially sought in the poet ‘Urfi a polemical antithesis of Hafiz. Yet in the poetry of Hafiz himself there are perhaps thousands of verses, including whole ghazals, to which Iqbal could have no objection. This is not because these verses actually conform to Iqbal’s representation of the self, but because his representation is an attempt to rewrite the ghazal form, retroactively imposing itself upon the entire tradition. It is clear therefore that Hafiz is merely an icon to clash with in Iqbal’s neoclassical strategy of reform. The authority of classicism is crucial to Iqbal’s project. For what he demands is a retrenchment within the self, not simply the individual self, but the communal self.

It is this authentic, communal self that keeps Iqbal’s version of narcissism from having radical, ultra-romantic implications. A world-absorbing ego that loves only itself to the point of self-deification would not assimilate well into society. Iqbal, however, does not leave it to each individual to determine or discover his true self. The paradigm of fully realised “selfhood” has found human form in the person of the Prophet of Islam, who has provided the means of replicating his achievement in the religion that he founded. The Islamic past, therefore, contains the ideal to which we all aspire, whether we know it or not, and which thereby animates our otherwise lifeless forms.

halqa gird-i man zanid ay paykaran-i ab o gil
atishi dar sina daram az niyakan-i shuma

In Freud’s theory, the pursuit of cultural ideals, be they spiritual, moral or communal, is narcississtic; the ego forms an attachment to these ideals because it has identified with them and sees in them itself. In this way narcissism functions as the primary mechanism for the sublimation of sexuality. It does not matter what the content of these ideals is so long as they have been internalised by the ego in some early stage of development. Iqbal’s ghazal, however, represents the ideal community as the truth of the self. In the verse quoted above, the “forms of water and clay” are the members of the poet’s community, and they are to form a circle around him, thus reconstituting the community, because he has inherited and preserved the fire of the illustrious forebears which originally animated the community. For Iqbal, the primary identification of the (Muslim) self, its “ego ideal,” is the Muslim community itself, embodied in the person of its prophet. This ideal is internal to the self, there from the beginning. It is to this ideal, therefore, that all of the self’s narcissistic love is directed, and in which the entirety of the self s transformation of the world finds its end.

In other words, Iqbal uses the logic of selfhood worked out in his remodelled version of the ghazal to depict Islam, its Prophet as well as its civilisation, as the historical instantiation of fully realised self-love. In this scenario, fully elaborated in Iqbal’s masnavi works, modernity is nothing more than the authentic selfhood embodied by Islam, the means for transforming the earth into heaven and humanity into divinity. The modernity of the West is a historical wrong turn, an inauthentic form of relating to the world akin to the decadence of the classical ghazal. The empiricist, calculative approach of Enlightenment rationality is an attempt to possess and accumulate the objects of the world rather than to transform them into the self. It is therefore yet another form of enslavement to the world of everyday time. It leads not to the utopian political order promised by Islam but to the exploitation and tyranny of capitalism and colonialism. Similarly, the political legacy of the classical ghazal and its absorption in the beauty of the external world is the voluntary enslavement to the false and transient pleasures of Western domination. Just as the ghazal poet gleefully succumbs to the tyranny of the beloved, so do modern Muslims happily deliver themselves to European rule. Both are embodiments of fate. On this basis Iqbal depicts the colonial situation not simply as a struggle between Islam and Western Imperialism but as a moral and historical drama of the self. The outcome must be with Islam, however, if History is to have its expected culmination in man’s ultimate control over fate.[26]

Iqbal lays the basis for all of this by rejecting the desiring self of the classical ghazal, which is trapped in an oscillation between heaven and hell, euphoria and misery, and replacing it with the narcissistic self, which occupies itself with the heavenly task of transforming hell into heaven. In the final analysis, the transformation of the world is nothing more than good old-fashioned bourgeois work. This is precisely the work that, according to the classical ghazal, we were doomed to on the fateful “Day of ‘am I not’,” the day on which man separated himself from the divinity of God. As Hafiz tells us,

maqam-i ‘aysh muyassar namishavad bi ranj
bali bi-hukm-i bala basta-and ‘ahd-i alast

The post of good living cannot be attained without hardship:
Indeed, the pact of “am I not” was sealed with misfortune. (Hafiz 20)

The pun here, a favourite one, is on the word bala which means both “yes,” the answer that only man made to God’s question, “Am I not your Lord,” and “misfortune,” which was the result of that answer. This misfortune is the bondage to the world of everyday necessity, the world in which we must suffer everyday to satisfy the needs of our bodies. Iqbal, of course, does not look at things this way, and is not tolerant of those who do:

zarbat-i ruzgar agar nala chu nay dahad tura
bada-yi man zi kaf binih chara zi mumiya talab

If the blows of daily necessity make you cry like a reed,
Put away my wine and seek aid from embalming wax. (ZA 2, 47)

Iqbal’s wine is not for drowning sorrow, but is rather for those who are impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For Iqbal, work that is directed by self-love, which is to say, undertaken for the sake of the community, is outside of fate. It is not at all the work of toil and misery that Hafiz and other pre-modern poets find to be the intolerable fact of existence. This is but the attitude of effeminacy and decadence. “Manly ambition” (himmat), the sublimated form of erotic desire, finds fulfillment in the daily labour required by the community in its quest for glory. This creative labour of self-love is the euphoria that Iqbal’s wine induces.

Does Iqbal succeed then in making the ghazal useful? At what cost does he turn it into the exemplary expression of an aestheticised work ethic, a non-alienated, utopian form of labour? In order to change the polarity of the classical desiring self, Iqbal must impose a personal conception of authenticity upon the entire ghazal tradition. By casting the true form of ‘ishq as self-love, Iqbal’s ghazal presents itself as recapturing the primordial impulse underlying the language of love of past poets. Iqbal’s ghazal projects its own narcissistic interpretation of the euphoric experience of intoxication upon the tradition, which becomes a criterion by which to validate or reject different modes of representing this experience. In fact, the Dionysian depiction of self-dissolution is indistinguishable from the narcissistic portrayal of the self absorbing the world around it. Both are characterised by sensations of control over fate. and unity with the underlying force that drives existence. The difference is that Iqbal’s ghazal confines its representations of this sought-after euphoria to images which conform to a theory of its true nature, while the traditional ghazal plays with the aesthetically productive ambiguity of outward appearances and potential inner meanings. In order to assert the opposition of the self to nature, to portray the self in search of itself, rather than anything external to it, Iqbal’s ghazal avoids the interpretive dangers of beauty and concentrates on images of power. His songs celebrate the human ego’s inexhaustible reservoir of desire, from which proceeds its capacity to control and transform its surroundings. Its sorrow and yearning arise not from a sense of weakness and confinement, but from its insatiable desire for more power. Iqbal seems to have regarded this emphasis in representation as therapeutic in an age of decadence and voluntary enslavement to the other. Despite the ever-present danger of pathological “self”-aggrandisement, Iqbal’s ghazal generates excitement and wonder in its sense of rediscovery of the self and its confrontational engagement of the ghazal tradition, not to mention its unique way of turning ghazal vocabulary into a philosophical terminology. One man, however, cannot take ultimate control over a poetic genre. Iqbal seeks to make a pre-modern form of poetry into the basis of a modern vision by confining it to a specific regime of representation. His project is constituted by a creative repression, which produces a personal poetic idiom rather than a more authentic version of the ghazal. Perhaps what he teaches us, then, has to do not so much with the true nature of the self as with the nature of modern representations of the self.

Freud, Sigmund 1914. “On Narcissism: An Introduction” in Freud 1957, vol. 14.

― 1957. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 23 vols., London.

Ghalib, Asadullah Khan 1969. Ghazaliyyat-i farsi, ed. Sayyid Wazir al-Hasan ‘Abidi, Lahore.

Hafiz, Shams al-Din Muhammad 1980. Divan-i Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz. ed. Parviz Natil Khanlari, Tehran.

Hali, Altaf Husayn 1993. Muqaddima-yi shi‘r o sha‘iri. ed. Wahid Qurayshi. Aligarh.

― 1978. The Secrets of the Self. A Philosophical Poem, tr. R.A. Nicholson, New Delhi.

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1967 [-1977]. Sṇmtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols, Berlin.

― 1968. The Birth of Tragedy in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann, New York.

Noorani, Yaseen 1997a. Visionary Politics: Self, Community and Colonialism in Arabic and Persian Neoclassical Poetry, diss.. University of Chicago.

― 1976. “A Nation Born in Mourning: The Neoclassical Funeral Elegy in Egypt,” Journal of Arabic Literature 28, pp. 38-67.

Pritchett, Frances W. 1994. Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics, Berkeley, etc.

Schimmel, Annemarie 1989- Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Lahore.

* I am grateful for valuable comments on versions of this paper to Salah Hassan, Rachana Kamtekar, Heshmat Moayyad, Michael Murrin and Jaroslav Stetkevych

^{^[1]} An inordinate amount has been written on Iqbal in Urdu and English. For a short biography as well as a general exposition of Iqbal’s thought, and an exhaustive bibliography, see Schimmel 1989. For an exposition of Iqbal’s philosophical ideas, see Dar 1944. For a sharp philosophical critique of Iqbal’s Reconstruction, see Raschid 1986.

[2] For transcribing Persian verses I have used a standard transliteration scheme which does not reflect the actual pronunciation of nineteenth-twentieth century India or fourteenth century Shiraz.

[3] For an analysis of this mechanism, see Noorani 1997 b.

[4] Hali 1993, pp. 94-105, 158-67, 178-226.

[5] For a much fuller discussion of Hali’s critical views see Pritchett 1994.

[6] For R. A. Nicholson’s translation of this work into English, see Iqbal, 1978.

[7] These lines are quoted in Khan 1976, pp. 12-13. This book, devoted to the relationship between Hafiz and Iqbal, quotes the verses from the first edition of Asrar-i khudi concerning Hafiz, which Iqbal dropped from the work for later editions due to the controversy they aroused. The book also quotes passages from letters in which Iqbal discusses these verses and attempts to justify them to his friends. The author argues that Iqbal was unable to maintain the dichotomy he set up between the beauty of poetry (exemplified by Hafiz) and its service of “life.” He attempts both to show the influence of Hafiz’s style on Iqbal and to defend Hafiz’s poetry from Iqbal’s charge that it is an opiate.

[8] Khan 1976, p. 14.

[9] The letter is to Mawlana Aslam Jirajpuri and is quoted in Khan 1976, p. 14.

[10] Iqbal had written of Hafiz in 1910, perhaps before his objections to Hafiz had reached maturity, “In words like cut jewels Hafiz put the sweet unconscious spirituality of the nightingale.” See his published journal entitled Stray Reflections (Iqbal 1961a), no. 77.

[11] Khan 1976, p. 15.

[12] Nietzsche 1968, p. 36.

[13] Ibid, p. 38.

[14] Ibid, p. 59.

[15] Ibid. pp. 59-60. I have altered the translation of the word that Nietzsche emphasises, “lethargisches,” from Kaufmann’s “lethargic” to “hypnotic.” The sense here is clearly the narcotic, oblivion-inducing effect associated with the river Lethe, as in Keats’s “Lethe wards.” See Nietzsche 1967, vol. 1. p. 5617

[16] Nietzsche 1968, p. 60.

[17] Iqbal 1985, part 1, ghazal no. 48. Henceforth cited as ZA. This work has been rendered into English verse by A. J. Arberry (Iqbal 1961b).

[18] Iqbal 1923, p. 154.

[19] In Stray Reflections we find no. 77 entitled, “The poet and the world spirit.” It reads. “The world-spirit conceals the various phases of her inner life in symbols. The universe is nothing but a great symbol. But she never takes the trouble to interpret these symbols for us. It is the duty of the poet to interpret them and to reveal their meaning to humanity. It would, therefore, appear that the poet and the world-spirit are opposed to each other, since the former reveals what the latter conceals.” (Emphasis added).

[20] Freud 1914, p. 75.

[21] Freud 1923, p. 36.

[22] Ibid pp. 35-36; my emphasis, bracketed phrase from the editor.

[23] Ibid, p. 18.

[24] Herbert Marcuse, in his analysis of Freud, takes the theory of narcissism in a utopian direction similar to Iqbal’s by venturing that “narcissism may contain the germ of a different reality principle: the libidinal cathexis of the ego (one’s own body) may become the source and reservoir for a new libidinal cathexis of the objective world-transforming this world into a new mode of being” (Marcuse 1955 pp. 153-54).

[25] For example, in his retracted verses about Hafiz in Asrar, Iqbal denigrates Hafiz by troping on verses in which Hafiz ridicules the hypocritical Sufi, thus identifying Hafiz with this character. See Khan 1976, p. 13. By exchanging the prayer mat (or mendicant’s habit) for a flask of wine, a poet like Hafiz means that mindless, hypocritical orthodoxy should be given up so that true divine love may be adopted.

[26] For a much fuller discussion of the political vision elaborated in Iqbal’s masnavi poems, see Noorani 1997a, pp. 216-48.