SATAN IN IQBAL'S PHILOSOPHICAL

E. Hardy, a Sanskritist and historian of religions, wrote in the first issue of Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft whose founder he was: "The religions of the civilized peoples are also the very frame of the science of religions."[2] More than half a century of extremely fruitful research in the field of the "Primitive" religions have of course modified the views of the scholars in religious science a good deal. Nonetheless I do not think it unfit to quote Hardy's above statement as a methodological excuse, should I say, for the present study. By examining an element of the religious thought of a modern thinker and artist of Pakistan, I indeed intend to trace those lines of his philosophical and poetical construction that lead us back into older and deeper zones. Perhaps this way offers a greater chance for security : for to proceed from what is known and liable to experimentation towards what is less known and more difficult to experiment, proves, of course, much easier than the opposite way.

The special shape which Muhammad Iqbal has given to Satan's figure, has prompted a few articles from Pakistani writers, whereas to my knowledge no European author has written anything on Iqbal's Satan. The most substantial of the articles from Pakistanis, as far as I can see, are : Abdur Rahman Tariq, "Iqbal kā tasawwur-i Iblīs", in Jahān Iqbāl, Lahore 1947, pp 399-420 (in Urdu) ; Bashīr Ahmad Dux, "The Idea of Satan in Iqbal and Milton", in Iqbal, Bazm-i Iqbāl, Lahore, Vol. I, July 1952, N. 1. pp. 83-108 (in English) ; Tāj Muhammd Khayal, "Iqbal's Conception of Satan" in Vol. II (July 1953, pp 1-17) of the same Journal (in English). Statements from the above authors will, when quoted, correspond to the following abbreviations:: Tāriq, Dār, Khayāl. Mention must also be made of A. Ahmad Surūr's study on the Iqbalian Satan, "Iqbal our Iblis", in Na'e our purāne charāgh, Delhi 1946, pp. 31-62. The same volume contains also other studies on Iqbal. Surūr's article also contains interesting remarks about other Urdu poets who wrote poetry on Satan.

In what follows I am going to present in chronological order, the full translation of those basic texts (some of them have not been translated, so far, into European languages) of Iqbal's work that are significant of his conception of Satan, excluding only: (a) the passages in English prose from the Lectures[3], which can be understood also by reader unacquainted with Oriental languages, and (b) single verses or groups of verses which do not present any consistent context. They will be quoted as foot-notes or in some other place in the course of the article.[4]

May I perchance gain bless in my defeat![24] (C) From Bāl-i Jibril (1935 in Urdu)

Satan : Ah, Gabriel! You have never guessed my mystery; alas Maddened for ever

Impossible, oh! impossible I would dwell here again; Silent, how silent all this realm — no palace, no loud lane! I whose despair is the fire by which the universe is stirred, What should I do — all hope renounce, or hope yet in God's word?[25]

Gabriel : Your mutiny has put our high estate in Heaven to shame; In the Creator's eye what credit now can angels claim?

The deeps of good and ill you only see from land's far verge: Which of us is it, you or I, that dares the tempest's scourge? Your ministers and prophets are pale shades: the storms I teem

Whose blood is it has painted Man's long history so bright? In the heart of he Almighty like a pricking thorn I lie;

God : (to His angels): See what a grovelling nature taught him thisFine theorem! His not kneeling, he pretends, Belonged to My fore-ordinance; gives his freedom Necessity's base title; wretch! his own Consuming fire he calls a wretch of smoke.[28]

To the above texts cosiderations from the Lectures (pp. 81-88) on the myth of the Fall and Sin must be added. They are of great importance for a better understanding of Iqbal's idea of Satan. He affirms that (1) unlike the Biblical story of the Fall (which is linked with pre-monotheistic conceptions[44] and is also found in Babylonia, etc.), the Qur'an makes no mention of the serpent (phallic motive) nor of the rip (also a pre-monotheistic symbol motive); (2) Adam ate from the fruit either of the tree of good and evil, or of the tree of life; (3) whereas the Old Testament curses the earth for Adam's act of disobedience, the Qur'an declares it to be the 'dwelling place' of man and a source of profit[45] to him, for the possession of which he ought to be grateful to God. Man is not "a stranger on this earth". Paradise (jannat) means a primitive state in which man "is practically unrelated to his environment and consequently does not feel the sting of human wants, the birth of which alone marks the beginning of human culture." Thus, far from being "fall" and "nostalgia for an initial paradise", Iqbal asserts clearly, "the fall does not mean any moral depravity; it is man's transition from simple consciousness to the first f!ash of self-consciousness, a kind of waking from the dream of nature with a throb of personal causality in one's own being ." Man's first act of disobedience was also his first act of free choice, and could therefore, according to the Qur'anic narration, easi!y be forgiven. In this interpretation of Iqbal, every remaining link between the legend of the Fall and pagan myths of nature — whose "deeper" meaning has been revalued by certain modern psychologists[46] --is resolutely cut off, to the advantage of an interpretation radically "futurist", anti-pagan and optimistic: no nostalgia for an "eternal return"[47] to the past, but joy in thrusting oneself forward into the creation of new realities that lies in the future and are entirely different from those of the past. "That God has taken this risk shows his immense faith in man." Satan's act (whose purpose, Iqbal says, is to arouse doubts in man's mind, and one could add, quite fruitful doubts) is therefore in a certain sense an excellent deed. Then returning to somewhat more orthodox view of things, Iqbal adds that God had forbidden Adam to taste from the fruit of the tree, which Iqbal, (quoting Madame Blavatsky), considers the symbol of occult knowledge, "because his finitude as a self, his sense-equipment, and his intellectual faculties were, on the whole, attuned to a different type of knowledge," i.e., the type gained by slowly accumulated observation. Adam yielded to Satan's whispering, not because he was elementally wicked, but because of his being "hasty" ('ājul)[48], a characteristic which the Qur'an attributes to man's nature.

The only way to avoid this intuitive occult knowledge for which he was not fitted, and by which he would have lost the balance of his faculties, was of course to place him in an environment in which he could exist only by an extremely hard method of trial and experience. Satan thus is the one who induces man to seek an unsuitable and dangerous "short cut to knowledge", depriving him of the joy of growth by experience for which alone the latter is suited. But for Iqbal who emphasizes the fact that, according to the Qur'an, Adam ate from the Tree of Life[49], Adam's temptation and alleged fall have yet another meaning: they signify the desire for eternity which man can only satisfy through the sexual act of multiplication which pre-supposes sex-differentiation. Yet the emergence and multiplication of individualities, each fixing its gaze on the revelation of its own possibilities and seeking its own dominion, inevitably brings in its wake the awful struggle of the ages. The Qur'an's "Descend ye as enemies of one another"[50], rather than to mean a proper punishment for wickedness, is actually a logical consequence of man's choice of eternal life (which for him is only possible as an eternity by multiplication), and painful struggle is the means to "harden" and purify man's self. Of all this, to say it once more, Satan is the author.

These texts are basic for any understanding of Iqbal's Satan. Before proceeding to a closer examination of this interesting figure, it will be good to give an outline of its main features.

Even a rapid reading of the above presented texts permits the following considerations:

(1) Satan appears under two (seemingly irreconcilable) aspects: on the one hand Satan is essentially man's enemy[51], the one who induces
him into sheepish attitudes, into slavery, into a rough sort of mystical gnosis (all these concepts are for Iqbal closely connected); on the other hand, he is substantially man's friend; the one who gives him taste for
action, for growth and for risk; the Satan who supports and eulogizes the idea that separation, i.e., living as a human person 'in contact with', but `detached from' the objective world and from God himself, is a superior and more beautiful way than 'union' which is undifferentiated, sterile and emasculating.

(2) Satan has above all one enemy: it is the prophetic conception of life which considers the prophet superior to the saint, law superior to theology, social institution superior to mysticism.

(3) Unlike the "European" Satan (in fact Christian, even as regards his modern, rather morbid forms), Iqbal's Satan has nothing to do with the concepts of "death", "flesh", or even, partly, of "sin" which are usually associated with him. The Iqbalian hierarchy of values (fairly different from that customary to the Western Christian) has at its top the personal creative action opening on the future, for which death, flesh and even sin can be constructive elements, and at its bottom has the servile quiet, and docile return to the Principle, to the undifferentiated, even though the one who is at work, be an ascetic and what certain people call a saint.

(4) In the old controversy between the fire and the Earth which Satan provoked himself by his refusal to bow down before Adam, Iqbal seem to hold that in the end the Earth, in order to be worshipped by the Fire, needs purification and transformation through the very Fire. There exits however dust-coloured Satans (khakī) as well. They are not worthy of a man who has been purified by the fire of a worthier and mightier Satan.

(5) Satan represents the strength of logic, of intellect, of systematic doubt as against love (`ishq). To this aspect of Satan relates also his being "the first predestinationist."

Let us now examine the above mentioned points in more detail, trying to trace the threads that link such conceptions of Iqbal with his sources in Islam and the West. Beginning with point 1): Satan's bivalent character is more or less clearly found in many religious traditions. It is well known that the Rosicrusian tradition, nowadays revived e.g. by Steiner, distinguishes two demoniac powers, Ahriman and Lucifer,
being a "materializing" power comparable, to a certain extent, with Iqbal's and the latter being a dissolving force by which any material substance is made to go up in subtle intellectualism.[52] But is there in the Islamic tradition any such bivalent notion of the Satanic? The hadith on Satan are for the most part extremely plain; one could hardly see there any possible source of Iqbal's conception. Nearly all Islamic Satans are khaki, even if in theory they are created of fire.[53]

The main sources of Iqbal's Satan, as regards his bivalent nature as well as in many other respects, are principally two: Rūmī and Milton. There exists on Milton's Satan a good many well-founded studies which Zwi Werblowski[54] has recently summarized and discussed in an interesting thesis. But I know of no specific study on the Satan of Rūmī. It will therefore be necessary to speak of him at some length by way of excursus.

Satan's sinful error takes on various aspects in Rūmī: pride, envy, dry reasoning, — the whole worsened by Satan's excuse in the very words of the Qur'an bi-mā aghwaytani ("because Thou, O Lord, Nast sent me astray") which sets about a dangerous and sinful fatalism (cf. Iqb. D.1.) in front of Adam's submissive rabbanā zalamnā[55] (I, 1488 fl.; IV, 1389 fl ; V, 3077 fl.; VI, 405). Both, Adam and Iblis, know equally well that in a certain way God is the sovereign author of every thing, but whereas Iblīs gets enraged with God and makes him responsible for his "slip", Adam, even though he is basically of the same mind as Satan, tries always to excuse his master and, as a good servant, to give the fault to himself alone.[56] Iblīs' sin is to have placed himself exclusively at God's point of view, the absolute tauḥīd, — at the side of the Fire, forgetting earthly humility, neglecting to look at things as they are from below. Thence the great importance given in Islam to the Earth (Adam), from the point of view of the Earth (See below).

Envy is another aspect of Satan's sin: his "ana khayr" ("I am better" I, 3216; I, 429) is Satan's malady. God's order is the cause of Satan's sin. Before that order he had been for 10,000 years a saint and perfectly pious angel. In the same way, the sun is the cause of the stench of dung. At night, dung does not smell (I, 3283 fl.). Satan's sin expresses itself by way of logical reasoning : he is the father of qiyās. He indeed reasons thus (1,3397-98): "Fire is, no doubt, superior to earth: now I am of fire whereas he is of filthy earth: let us therefore judge from the comparison between the secondary and the primary: he is of the darkness whereas I am of radiant light." God's answer to this argument is: "No, on the contrary, there will be no comparisons any more that count (Cor. XXIII, 10) ; devotion and piety alone will be the mihrāb directing towards pre-eminence." That means that God's plan is always un-forseeable: "The son of Abū Jahl became a true believer, the son of Noah[57] was among those who went astray" (ibid., 3402). And elswhere (II, 1620) Rūmī still says further that God in his sovereign power can lift Adam, against all law of nature, from the earth to beyond the skies, and keep down the fire of Iblīs even beneath the earth.[58] Satan, replete with logic and thus leaning towards pantheistic and anti-personalist views, is incapable of seeing beyond Adam's form (clay) which he compares with his own fire, that more real substance which is the sovereign act of God's personal will which creates and moulds every form without any necessity. With a precipitate and shallow conclusion (III, 2299 fl.; IV, 1616; IV, 1709) he stops the search. He has only one eye (IV, 1616), sees only one half of the reality, sees tin, but not din,[59] sees clay and earth, but not the act of the creative will which is beneath. Iblīs therefore means reason against love (`ishq), love being something more, something different from "sentiment", "a faculty" I should say, "with which the personal action of the ever new God, badi 'us-samāw^ati wa'l-ardi, (and therefore lovable-as a person, and adorably unforseeable — as the ever new one) is perceived beyond the rigid rationality of the laws of nature." In the Mathnawi this contrast is pointed out repeatedly (e.g., IV, 1389 fl.), and in an interesting passage (I, 3283) the emaciated face and cyanotic (kabūdī) complexion of the rational philosopher who sneers at Satan as a rude superstition, means to Rūmī the incarnation of Satan himself. Doubt and perplexity, which characterize philosophy as against faith, are inspired by Satan. But Rūmī's theism, in as far as Satan himself is concerned, does not even give him the satisfaction of radical, absolute rebellion. In an interesting passage (1, 3893 ft.) Adam mocks[60] at Satan's shameful damnation. Immediately God interprets Adam's malicious joy as a falling back into the realm of the "given", of the "natural", of the "accepted": Adam is not even for an instant allowed to accept as a natural phenomenon what in fact is a positive act of divine will. At once a Voice rises (V. 3897): "God would be able to disgrace 100 Adams and to convert 100 Satans to the purest Islam." From this point of view, although there is always scope for an exception and Satan still could become a cherubim again (IV, 3496), his being Satan does not go against God's will, but is part of his personal providence (II, 2120). "If Iblis worshipped Adam, Adam would no longer have been Adam, he would have been another." Satan, it is said ih explicit words, depends directly on one of the attributes of God's power: that of mudill (V, 953). One could go as far as to say that in this manner a Satanic element is indirectly introduced into God himself (see below). The dialectic between Satan and Adam (rather than between Satan and God, also in Islam), between Pharaoh and Moses, between Evil and Good, — the evacuation of evil taken as absolute, runs like a shining thread through the whole Mathnavi. We have given an account of this elsewhere.[61]

But in spite of Rūmī's deep sense of the dialectic between Good and Evil, God and Satan, as it vibrates through the Mathnavi, the great mystic of Balkh would alone scarcely have sufficed to inspire Iqbal's image of Satan. It is true that in some places Rūmī's Satan may appear to be a superior being, (as e.g. in the beautiful dialogue with Mu`āwīya)[62], and still more, some of Satan's earthly incarnations, as e.g. Pharaoh, may seem full of glorious power, but Iqbal's Satan would certainly be unthinkable without the undisputable influence of Milton who in his turn stood under a strong influence from pre-Christian Prometheus. The bivalent nature of the Miltonian Satan — closely resembling that of Iqbal's Iblis has very deep roots. I fully agree with Werblowski (op. cit., p. XIV) when he asserts that "while originally the Hebrew culture (and in the case of Iqbal the Islamic culture too), being based on the experience of a vocation, of an election on the part of God, could easily assert itself as willed by God, in its post-exiliar developments it underwent more and more the influence of pagan thought, i.e. Greek and Persian. This led naturally to a complete dissociation of spheres: good and evil, God and anti-God, power, i.e. activity and inactivity and suffering, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, grace and nature, Kingdom of God and of the World. As a consequence, Satan becomes the holy exponent of power in this sublunar universe after the Fall and is thus the prototype of man's cultural striving." Iqbal would have perfectly subscribed to Werblowski's statement that "the sense of trespass and sin inherent in the dynamism of human life which, to our modern consciousness, is typically Christian, is in fact essentially Greek." To this, other considerations could be added which are only partly developed by Werblowski (Milton was substantially Christian) and which offer a special interest for the understanding of the dualism of Iqbal's Satan. In a pantheistic-antipersonalist conception, the Evil par excellence is the principium individualionis i.e. the getting off from the undifferentiated unity of the happy world of the "origins".[63] On the contrary, that which for such a culture is Satanic, for the monotheistic religions which Islam represents in the most radical manner, is the most distinctive characteristic of the Divine. Here, as in Hebraic thinking, what is considered as good is precisely the future and the origins, i.e. the deepening of the conscious distinction, the emergence from the undifferentiated. God is personal and the principle of personification. He himself, through Vocation and Covenant, instigates action. Thus action is not hybris, but imitatio Dei. Satan's speech eritis sicut dii etc. is in fact divine, not satanic (besides, is it not said, in the Gospel as well as in the Old Testament: "be saints as God himself is saintly ?"[64]). The fact that in the legend of the Fall similar words are put into Satan's mouth, is the best proof that such a legend reflects strata of pre-monotheistic religiosity preserved in the traditions of the Old Testament and the Qur'an. Satan in Iqbal's poem (A, 1) is in reality God himself, God shown as the instigator of action, as the voice. In a radically theistic-personalist culture the truly evil Satan is the one who insinuates returned and undifferentiated quiet,[65] the Satan of "vile nature" of the poems D 1, 2, E 3, 1. Thus the dualism of Iqbal's Iblis (which Khayāl perceives clearly, but cannot explain historically) on the one hand through Milton, and on the other through the Islamic tradition, in particular Rūmī, traces back historically to the inextricable mixture, — also in the tradition of the great prophetic religions, — of premono theistic legends on Satan (doing works worthy of God or of a Prophet)[66] and the new divine dignity arising from the individuation (where Satan becomes for man a giver of "opium" ). Instead, an aspect truly satanic of the theistic type of Satan is his being instigator of magics (Hārūt and Mārūt, cf. the Qur'ān II, 102) understood as a pseudo-action. This action is satanic because it has its roots down in the depth of an impulse originally pre-monotheistic and not in a call from above.[67]

It is not by chance that the Qur'an and its earliest commentators lay not so much stress on Satan's pride as rather on his disobedience towards God's order. The real Satan's sin lies therefore not in the hybris of Action, but in his intent to operate apart from collaboration with God, in a sterile autonomy (magics). It counts among Iqbal's great merits that in his reconstruction of an absolute prophetical theism he has perhaps unconsciously singled out the most genuine element from among the Scripture traditions of the prophetical religions (interpreting them with not a little freedom), and that he has finally put a little bit of Satan also into God (cf. e.g. verse "I am in God's heart like a thorn" of C1) giving thus a poetical form to a theory which some modern authors have formulated in scientific prose.[68]

Sooner or later ti a wayfarer on the path of religion feels the need for a criterion of the Satanic and the Divine which at times take on shapes of an extreme resemblance.[69] In prophetical theism this criterion is the obedience to the prophet. From obedience spring those values which for such a religious Weltanschauung are supreme: the deepening of the believer's distinct consciousness as a person, and deepening of his personal integrating contact with God. Such an obedience already viewed by Rūmī (cf. my above cited articles) with an acute psychological and religious insight as the only way of salvation from the danger of satanic pride and, metaphorically speaking, from the danger of relapsing into the "mothers" (the ummahāt of Islam), i.e. the undifferentiated. The existence of a prophet bars radically the road to the undifferentiated and an undifferentiating unio mystica with God, to the unio understood as "eternal return". It is therefore the prophet, and his office as a prophet, that are Satan's worst enemy. On this point Iqbal improves the theory of who perhaps was not aware of the social and institutional value of the nubuwwa (prophethood) which he, as can be seen from various passages, seems to have brought very near, if not altogether confused, with the wilāya (sainthood). Instead, the two terms (nubuwwa and wilāya) are given by Iqbal as explicity opposed in B 1 which is a piece of great importance for his idea of Satan. There Satan (Ahriman) specifies with great care those religious concepts which Iqbal considers as poles apart from one another:

(1) The concept of covenant (mthāq) and that of union (wisāl). The former concept is a characteristic element of the prophetic religions and in a certain sense Satan replaces it by the wisāl of mysticism. The mithāq is unthinkable without having a strong sense of the person of God. The very sense of it is a barrier against any possible undifferentiated mixture of the human with the divine. These two beings that enter into "covenant" with each other, are clearly distinct and gain in a certain sense equal dignity and value;

(2) bar murād-as rāh caftan: "going" i.e. acting "according to His will". The action of the believer as a soldier in God's service, is not individualistic and magical and so is in absolute opposition to that of the "true" Satanic;

(3) sociality. Satan like eremitic monachism, meditation dissociated from social action, the getting off from the earth as the earth, so to

speak, is made to fade into the state of the philosopher's stone از نگاھے
کیمیا کن خاک را)[70]. This absence of sociality in the satanic comes out plainly in Zoroaster's protest against Ahrinian's words:

Khalvat as well as jalvat are both necessary for a complete religious life, but Khalvat e ghāz-ast ū jalvat intihā-st. "How beautiful, to walk in the caravan on the road of God, to pulsate like the soul through the veins of the world !" It is however useless to quote the innumerable passages from the theists whose involuntary religious inspiration is substantially pre-monotheistic and for whom the satanic is in the mass, in world, flesh and earth.[71]

(4) The concept that places nubuwwa higher than wilāya. The prophet is the one who, having reached heaven (Iqbal in no way denies the mystical experience of the prophet: cf. Lect., pp. 23, 125), does not disdain to descend to earth again, to take up social work, to found nations and communities, to give laws, to guide the beings — the individuals by now fully emerging from the matrice — towards a divine aim becoming steadily higher and more conscious, an aim for the future. The saint isthe one who aspires to reabsorption in God (خیز و در کاشانۂ وحدت نشین)Ahriman gives as advice to Zoroaster), who undergoes the sweet appeal of the primeval nest (an appeal which for Iqbal's radical theism is deeply satanic) rather than dedicate himself, as God's helper, to the building of quite different nests, to the conquering of quite different positions.[72] And finally, let us come to still another characteristic of Iqbal's and of the Islamic Satan: his being not correlated, or at least not essentially correlated, with concepts such as "flesh" and "death" which in Christianity[73] and in other prophetic religions[74] are almost naturally connected with Satan.

On the contrary it is precisely man's flesh that the Islamic Satan hates: according to a curious, but interesting tradition (from Talmudic sources), Iblis himself, as God's secretary and on his order (when he was still an angel) is supposed to have kneaded Adam's body. This body, it is said, remained flabby and lifeless for 40 days. Iblis then used to come prying about him, "to enter noisily through his mouth, to get out from his behind and to make fun of him in front of the Angels, saying: 'Don't be afraid of this fellow: he is hollow (aghwaf), while God is full (samad, solid, complete).[75] Death too, not only as a part of God-willed natural order, has nothing satanic about it, neither for Islam nor for Iqbal. On the contrary Iqbal, inquiring deeper into concepts which are fundamentally Islamic, makes of it a thing of supreme goodness, a source of values. The death of a martyr is divine and glorious, the death of the (spiritually) weak, abject, useless and annihilating.[76] However death has in itself nothing demonic nor is it related to any idea of sin. Death is the inevitable consecration of that Iqbalian principle in which — contrary to all types of mysticism — "liberation from finitude is not the highest state of human bliss" (Lect. p. 117). It is good to die because being fully "achieved", determined as a personal being, and thus having the power of speaking with God, is better than being infinite, i.e., deprived of individual consciousness and become de-personalized. If there is anybody, it is precisely Satan who is divine (A 1 c, B 3), he who invites to firāq which is linked with the concept of death. Continuous negation, sūkhtan-e n^ā-tamām (A 1 d) on the part of this Satan is an indispensible basic element of the Iqbalian theistic philosophy and figures clearly as good in the hierarchy of values.

In a certain sense even sin itself is not satanic. In one of his Iqbal studies, Fr. Courtois wonders how Iqbal would solve the problem of evil. His answer is that he does not solve it at all.[77] This may be said, but only if the contrast between good and evil is viewed as a contrast between heaven and earth, God and World. This however is not Iqbal's dualism, nor is it his hierarchy of values. If ever there is a contrast in Iqbal's thought, it is between Personal and Indistinct, Powerful and Weak, Heaven and Earth seen together as God's creation and Primordial Chaos, prophetically organised religious Society and individualistic anarchy and monachism. From this point of view also sin can be good, and source of good:

Besides, Satan's disregard for the flesh is narrowly linked with his unsocial character. Basically he is like the member of a great religious community, who thinks he has understood the idea of the Superior better than others and knows better what ought to be done; for in his heart he despises the companions who are less intelligent than he is (i.e., the other angels, cf. A 1 b). In turn the Superior, even though he agrees with Satan in a certain sense (as Iqbal somehow admits in E 2), is obliged by his unintelligent inferiors to follow much more terre a terre ways and methods in the providential work of his khalq and amr: this is why he creates Adam out of flabby flesh ("filthy clay"). The way a true religious being ought to follow, would have been the one actually leading to social asceticism, i.e., to the admission that historically and with regard to the actual level of reality of the First Creation, the best possible way was that shown by God, namely to become a fool with the fool, i.e., to understand the requirements of the earth and the flesh[79], to understand (see A 1) that man's way of redemption passes through the flesh (cf. especially the last verse of the above mentioned poem).

In comparison Satan is also enemy of the earth. He belongs to the "race of fire". In Islam the controversy between Earth and Fire is fairly old and offers considerable historical and religious interest. Already in the days of the zandaqa and shu`ūbiyya, some gave glory to the Fire above the Earth, supporting Iblīs in his act of negation. On the other hand it seems that the Semitic world (or rather the world of the monotheistic and prophetical religions) have given preference to the earth over the fire. Professor Mo`in, a Persian scholar of remarkable worth, thus writes on the fire in an excursus of his most valuable study on the influences of Mazdeism in Persian literature[80]: "After Islam had spread in Iran and the fire-temples were destroyed, the Fire little by little forfeited the respect and veneration it enjoyed among the Persians, although the enlightened intelligentsia of Iran and the partisans of ancient culture especially the shū'ūbiyya and the protagonists of national awakening, always strove in various ways to kindle again the flame of national sentiment and to preserve a sense of veneration for the fire. In one of his qasida Bashshar ben Burd[81] gives preference to the Fire (holy to the Persians) over the Earth (which, instead, is venerated by the Muslims as it served to build the Islamic Ka`ba. God also used it to knead Adam's body) and declared Iblis (made of Fire) higher than Adam (made of Earth):

In his Shālināma, Firdausī also calls fire which represents divine splendour, 'the qibla of the Persians', and earth and stone 'the qibla of the Arabs.'[83]

Elsewhere Firdausi considers Fire as the first element of creation, from which the earth came forth (the elements appear in this order: warm-dry-cold-humid). This attitude of Firdausī contrasts with Asadī's[84] curiously energetic plea in favour of the Earth (which implies that the controversy must have been rather lively). At the beginning of the Garshāsp-nāma (ed. Yaghma, Tehran, p. 7 fl.) Asadī displays a wealth of arguments on the relative excellence of the elements. In brief they come to this: it seems evident to the poet that as instruments and forms created by God, all four basic elements are worthy of praise, but whoever takes guidance from sound reason (khirad) must admit that the most praiseworthy is the Earth. God's grace takes its way from heaven, but the earth is the gate to which the way leads; it is in the shade of the earth upon the sun that the sky's innumerable stars are seen shining; on earth all great men and prophets have lived where they brought their Sacred Books and delivered their message; the earth is like a loving mother, its vegetation are her breasts; the earth is man's place of repose, God's house (the kā`bā) itself is made of earth. It is also the qibla of the angels since they were ordered by God to worship Adam made of earth. It is from the mines of the earth that man raises the precious stones; the earth is the animals' refuge. It harbours the living and the dead. In patience it endures every burden. It is the place which, in the act of canonical bowing, man touches with his head. The stars themselves, while turning round the earth, offer it worship; and it is the place where the other three elements are found. It is not greedy and lets nothing perish: deposit one seed only in its bosom and it will give you back a thousand; it is like a horn of plenty; it is Muhammad's qibla (the Ka`ba) from which one's gaze should never be turned. What does it matter if the sorcerer is attracted by the Fire? Iblīs was made from fire, and Adam from earth. This alone would be sufficient proof that the one is superior to the other.[85]

It is interesting to compare these arguments in favour of the earth with those given (on the basis of traditions of various ages) by the author of the curious little book (which we have already cited) Akām al-marjānn fī ahkām al-jānn (pp. 158 fl.). His claim is that Satan, however distinguished and sagacious a logician he may be held by certain people, nevertheless failed from a rational point of view, when he spoke the famous khālaqtani min nār, etc., because for 15 reasons of "sound logic" the earth is superior to the fire. The reasons are as follows: (1) unlike the earth, fire by nature dissolves and destroys all it touches; (2) the nature of fire is thinness, mobility, acuteness while the nature of earth is peace and quiet; (3) from the earth, Providence takes the food (arzāq) of animals and men, their ornaments, their tools, their houses: nothing of all this is found in the fire; (4) earth is needed for life, but not fire which can be done without; (5) any food entrusted to the earth is given back twofold and more whereas fire destroys it; (6) fire is not qā`im binafsi-hā, needs a place where it can burn, but the earth needs no support (ḥāmil); (7) the satanic flames flash up here and there just as the winds blow, while Adam's earth is solid. The wind hardly moves it from its position and then returns to the Lord who "chose it and relented towards it" (Qur. XX. 122); (8) the hawā-[86] which was blowing on the Adamic earth, was accidental and soon dropped whereas the earth was solid (razāna) from the beginning (aslī). The substance of Iblīs was the opposite: each one returned to what he was at the origin, Adam to good, Satan to evil; (9) the fire, even if it is good for something, always harbours evil whereas the earth harbours good and blessings; (10) in the sacred Scriptures (the Qur'ān) God often speaks of the earth, and invites one to meditate upon its usefulness, etc. On the contrary he mentions fire only when he wants to speak of punishment, terror and torture; (11) in the Qur'ān God explicitly gives his blessing to the earth; (12) it is on the earth that God has erected his temples (buyūt), in particular the Ka`ba. This alone would suffice to establish its superiority over the fire; (13) God has placed on the earth such a variety of products, jewels, animals, etc. as he has not placed in the fire; (14) fire behaves as the servant of all things that are on earth; (15) the Accursed One has only seen the exterior form (cf. Rūmī, op. cit.) of the clay, but not its end (nihāya). Thus even on the absurd assumption that Fire was better than Earth, it would not follow that what is created from fire is better than clay, for God can create from everything. He can create from inferior matter a better thing than that created from superior matter. What therefore is of importance, is to consider the kamāl an-nihāya, not the naqs al-mādda. But Satan's realization has not gone thus far.

Taking altogether, this last argument is the essential one. One could scarcely express more clearly, more synthetically, what makes the essential difference between the creationist mentality of Islam and that of any other pre-monotheistic religion. The true value resides not in the original matter, but in the creative intention of the personal God. The hierarchy of values is not one given by nature, but results from creation, in view of an end. In Iqbal who certainly must know this controversy between fire and earth, the fire appears as nobler than the earth almost "by nature" (A 1 e, C 2, E 1, E 2 etc.) and the superiority of the earth over it appears clearly as paradoxical A 1 e). The fire even seems to be the proper
characteristic of that Satan whom previously we have called the Divine Satan, whereas "satans of dust" is the name given to the degrading satans, the counsellors of non-resistence, the "true satans" of theism (cf. E 1). The complete man who has reached the stage of the iliā is also of "fiery extraction" (ibid.). The contradiction which develops between the images of the dual Satan, the one Active (Divine) and the other Passive (Satanic) seems to find a solution in the important final verse of Taskhir-i fitrat, inadequately interpreted by Khayal. "The flame-born Ahriman doth prostration unto dust"! It must be read in the light of Jāvednāma (B 3): "When I deny I but affirm and what I say is better than what I with‑ hold .. . O man, release me from my flame and straighten up my knot‑ted task." The fire has given to the earth a special "translucency", its external denial was needed for a "redemption of the earth."[87] We are here in a dialectic of images which perhaps cannot be understood without remembering the ancient Mazdaic tradition in which the earth itself is divided into its archangelic image (zām) and its reality as brute matter (zamīk). To put it in Mazdaic terms, Adam, as regards his outer appearance, is created from zamīk, but hidden in his zamīk there is that zām which will be his "body of resurrection" once it has become transparent and mēnōk under the action of a purifying energy which is (the) x'arena i.e., fire. Once again: Iqbal's philosophizing imagery takes us back, through very thin, but historically easily discernible threads, to that Mazdaic religiosity which has so much influenced Islam in all its forms, orthodox and heterodox.[88] For Iqbal, at any rate, any superiority proves erroneous, be it that of the earth or that of the fire. He substantially agrees with the above quoted booklet of as-Shiblī and considers the true supperiority to belong to the act of God whom fire and earth serve as his instruments. Besides Adam and Satan are dialectically brought still closer in a beautiful verse of Iqbal's Armagān (E 2):

In the same short poem Satan takes on the garment "of the one who carries man's sin" garbing himself thus as a redeemer (see note there). The final quatrain exalts that constructive civilisation based on logic and technique which Iqbal seems only to deplore when he sees the Europeans build it up.[90]

Iqbal's (passive) Satan is thus also pro-European, but only in this sense that he takes advantage of Europe in order to lull the Orient and especially Islam to sleep.

It is no wonder that Iqbal connects the Europeanizing, narcotic Satan with the intellect.[91] But this has not to be taken in the extremist Christian sense of a Chestov. To understand Iqbal's anti-intellectualism one must remember, I believe, this important statement from the Lectures (p. 58): "The result of an intellectual view of life is necessarily pantheistic"; it is therefore a Satanic result; it tends to dissolve the individualities in an abstract undifferentiated Cosmos. The divine Satan, instead, represents judā'ī, firāq (separation), he therefore is anti-pantheist par excellence, and therefore still a master in `ishq (love). (In Jāy., B 3, Hallāj calls him "more advanced than we in the art of love"). This love is unthinkable without the separation of the two lovers and their autonomous individuality. Ishq as an insight that sees — beyond the masnū — God's personal sun[92] rather than the abstract essence of things, does not lead to pantheism, but to parsonalism. The Iqbalian 'ishq is thus amor in the sense of a super-intellect, not in the sense of an infra-intellect. It is the `ishq-less, purely logical Satan who is the first advocate of predestination (D 1). Fatalism, absolute Logic and pantheism are for Iqbal to some extent equivalent.[93]

Our description of Satan's image in the poetical and philosophical work of Iqbal leads us to try also an approach to the "problem of evil" which in the Lect. (p. 76) Iqbal rightly calls the "crux of theism". I would add that it is "the crux of theism" not only in the well known meaning of (Lect. 76): "How is it then possible to reconcile the goodness and omnipotence of God with the immense volume of evil in His creation?" but also in a deeper sense which Iqbal often skims over in his work without giving a definite expression, even though he points quite clearly to the problem's solution, — the consequences of which perhaps frighten him. I mean to say that once it is granted that God is persons!, or even, as Iqbal declares explicitly, "limited" (Lect. 79/80) precisely because he is living, it is unavoidable to suppose in him an element of what we call "evil". That this is not merely the outcome of a mental exercise, the abstract logical consequence of the theistic position, but arises as a historical certitude from the very texts of the great monotheistic religions, has been set forth with brilliancy in Miss Scharf's interesting study on Die Gestalt des Satans im Alten Testament.[94] Her principal conclusion is that the genuine God of the Old Testament, with his attributes of power and bounty, undergoes a process of dissociation in the course of which he finally loses the attributes of power which, at a certain period at least, were felt as derogatory to divinity, etc. This dissociation culminates particularly in the New Testament where a part of what God was before, is detached from him, and where the Devil who in the Old Testament enjoyed a very relative autonomy and was not more than one of God's servants, become what the psychologists call an "autonomous complex" and reigns as "the Prince of this world". In the same process God becomes a loving Father to such a degree that in the average pietas of the Christian commoners his image takes on "the features of a kindly grandmother rather than those of a father."[95] Besides, already the Old Testament contains a few texts where the beginning of the split can be seen with great clarity: it suffices to compare e.g. II Sam. XXIV, 1: "Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying: Go, number Israel and Judah!" with the later account of the same event in Chron, XXI, 1: "Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to number Israel."[96]

In comparison, Islam, as is well known, has maintained a remarkable fidelity to the ancient concept of God as also 'powerful'. An interesting episode related by Browne[97] shows how in the sphere of Islam God's bivalent nature (powerful and bounteous) is also consciously felt as a more adequate notion than is the case in other religions, where, as in Christianity, stress is merely laid on God's bounty. A sharp mind (and particularly an advocate of such an absolute theism) as Iqbal's was, could of course not remain unaware of how this amounted, from a human point of view, to the negation of a good and of an evil, both abstract and absolute, and to the insertion of the thorn of evil into the very heart of the Living God. That Iqbal was conscious of all this, i.e. that a certain type of Satan represented the demonic element in God, is quite clear from this verse of his short poem Pas the bāyad kard ai aqwām-i sharq; especially if such a verse is compared with those in which Iqbal makes Satan the representative of the lā against the illā^.[98]

If Satan is the representative of the 1ā[99], he is, as a consequence, also representing the attributes of jalāl (power, force, etc.) in God, i.e. that "Dāmonische in Jahwe" which has been studied so many times in Europe.[100]

Nor could evil be more clearly attributed to God than as Iqbal does in the following verse:

But for various reasons it is Iqbal as a poet who reaches these penetrating insights which seem to be withheld from him as a thinker (e.g. Lect. p. 80: "no doubt wrong-doing is confined to man only"). Against the Manichean solution of the problem of evil through dualism, or that of Hinduism through renunciation (escaping from world-evil-māyā), or that of Christianity through moralism (originalism), Iqbal chooses a solution which he himself calls "meliorism' (Lett, p. 81) and which is based on the concept of the perfectibiliy of the universe of Dasein, of the non-finiteness of creation (cf. Qur. XXXV, 1), of the "growing universe". In one of his poems, man, in a dialogue with God, says: "Hundreds of worlds are bursting into bloom from the fields of our thought, and you have made only one world, a world stained with desire and blood! Lay now the new foundations of a more serious world, for we have grown serious now: what then is this amazing gallery of days and nights, of present, past and future"?[102] And in Bāl God accepts the criticisms of the Angels (and of Lenin ! "Oh Eternal Painter! your work is still unfinished"!) and issues orders for the completion of his first creation. In Armaghān (p. 22) man, in a beautiful dialogue[103] with God, addresses thus the Creator: "Now make this world eternal (Satanic temptation!). Don't you see how magnificently we who were born from earth, have adorned this globe of dust?" In reality, Iqbal says, there exists, already prepared in the heart of this world, another world, God's recent work (ibid., 72): "In this world there is a paradise in full bloom, and the tears we shed are like pearls of dew hanging at its branches. But still it is motionless and without life, — waiting for an Adam"!

Iqbal's most intimate thought on the problem of evil in the world could perhaps be summed up in this way : "The world as it is, certainly contains evil, plenty of it, and,to speak frankly, this is also God's fault. To deny this to him would almost give offence to His power. But he is not because of this an evil God, the wicked Demiurge of the Manicheans. Good and evil are such in relation to man: the present world is a first exercise in God's creation. As he is a living God, he has other worlds in preparation in his creative consciousness, worlds ever more beautiful and mighty, in the achievement of a plan which to us on the whole remains unknown. Thorns and roses both help to give perfection to the ever growing tree of the cosmos which divine implulse drives forward. On looking back with a longing for returns, one sees the evil as well as the good, and one blames God for it, the youthful God of the first creation. It is when looking forward that one catches a glimpse of the ever more beautiful splendours of God's evolving plan":

Summing up what precedes, it can be said that in Iqbal's Satan there is a confluence--if not in his philosophy, at least in his poetry — of the following elements:

(1) the Greek element of Prometheus",[105] of action and "technique" as "hybris", seen through the filter of Milton's work which Iqbal knew well;

(2) the ancient Hebrew and the genuine Islamic element of Satan as God's instrument and intendant, which Iqbal drew from his traditional Islamic education;

(3) the Christian and gnostic element of Satan as the positively evil power, which comes from ancient Iran. Iqbal took it from those elements that are found in Milton, and also from readings he made of New Testament and Zoroastrian tests (we already mentioned his knowledge of the Avesta and of the main tenets of Mazdaism);

(4) a personal development of Iqbal of the concept that in the Hebraic-Islamic God there is an element of what Christianity calls "satanic". This concept is also implicitly found with authors of the Islamic mystical tradition, (cf. certain passages from Ghazālī, Rūmī and others), but it could not have taken on sufficiently explicit and "modern" forms in Iqbal's consciousness without the influence of the post-Kantian idealism (especially Fichte)[106] which he had studied in Europe;

(5) a further Pragmatic-political development, typically Iqbalian, of Satan as "opium of the people"[107]^, which is logically deducible as the true opponent of the Complete God (Power+Love, Satan + God) of the Biblical and Islamic theism. This development on the one hand feeds on anti-European and anti-mystical polemical motive, and on the other springs from profound meditations on the metaphysical consequences of the Islamic God as personal. To these meditations the writings of certain irrational Protestant theologians which Iqbal had read in Europe, must also have added their contribution.[108]

To have attempted an elucidation of these elements by showing their historical connections and their fusion in the interesting metaphysical and poetical world of a modern Islamic personality belonging to two cultures, — one of the few who have studied and remarkably well penetrated European thought — seems not to be purposeless, even from a practical point of view: it indeed endeavours to serve a wider and deeper exploration of those areas between various Weltanschauungen which in our dwindling world are growing every day more varied and frequent.

[1] Dr. Alessandro Bausani, well-known scholar of Italy who has translated Javid Nama into Italian. Mr. R. A. Butler is attached to the Punjab University as teacher of Italian.

[2] E. Hardy, in Archiv fūv Religionswissenschaft, vol. I, 1898, p. 41 (cit. in Schmidt, Manuale di Storia Comparata delle Religioni, ed. ital. 1938, p. 126).

[3] I quote as Lect. in what follows, the reprint made in Pakistan of the second Oxford edition of 1934: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Istam, Lahore 1951. As is known, the first Lahore edition is of 1930. Note of the translator. The translations reproduced here are taken from V. G. Kiernan, Poems from Iqbal, London 1955 and from Shaikh Mahmud Ahmad, Pitgrimage of Eternity (Jāvid Nāma), Lahore 1961. The translation of A) (Payām-i Mashriq) and of (E 1 and E 2) (Armugān-i Ḥijāz) is due to the kindess of Mr. Mahmud Ahmad, advocate, Lahore.

[4] The titles of the works will be abridged as follows. Payām, Jav,Bāl, Darb, Armaghan. Dates between brackets refer to their first Lahore edition. They of course also contain short poems which were written a little earlier. Armaghan was published posthumously. It contains verses in both Urdu and Persian. The language of the other works will be given between brackets. The meaning of the various titles is: "The Message of the East", "The Book of Jāved" (Poema Celeste), "The Wing of Gabriel", "The Rod of Moses", "The Gift of Ḥijāz".

[5] The "Light-Beings" are the angels. On the epithet 'naive' see foot-note 39. The episode refers to well-known Quranic passages as VII, 12; XXXVIII, 76, etc.

[6] Ummahāt (Mothers). The term comes in this sense from Goethe (cf. the well known passage in Faust II, v. 6173 to 6306) whom Iqbal held in great admiration.

[7] The 'Mirror' that shows the secrets of the world is a well known "archetypal" image in various religious traditions. It is interesting to find it here connected with Satan: it symbolizes intuitive knowledge outside time. It springs from the "Graal" motive of the half-mythic Persian king Khusrau or Jamshid of whom it is said in Firdausi's Shāhnāma:. . .

thence Kai Khusrau took up the cup and gazed.

He saw the seven climes reflected there,

And every act and presage of high heaven,

Their fashion, cast, and scope, made manifest.

From Aries to Pisces he beheld

All mirrored in it — Saturn, Jupiter,

Mars, Leo, Sol and Luna, Mercury,

And Venus. In that cup the wizard-king (afsūngar)

Was wont to see futurity . . .

(ed. Beroukhim, Tehran, vol. IV, p. 1099, translated by A. G. and E. Warner, vol. HI, p. 318, London, 1908).

In the Persian lyrico-mystical tradition followed by Iqbal this type of Cup-Mirror is in its turn connected with wine. In this context the idea of the anacreontic cup in the Western mysticomagical tradition should not be forgotten. (See the interesting material collected by Jung in Psychotogy and Alchemy.) Apropos of Statan who in Iqbal's poetry offers such an esoteric cup to Adam, the connection between the chalice and the horn (of the moon) as brought out by Jung, is also of great interest, especially in consideration of the fact that certain Islamic traditions about Satan speak of "Satan's horn" which rises from the East. They also say that the sun "rises and sets between the two horns of Satan" (of. Akām al-Marjānn, pp. 187 fl. quoted in foot-note 52).

[8] This anti-pantheistic and anti-mystical idea that dialogue in separation is better than in-differentiation in union, occupies a central place in Iqbal's philosophy. In his short poem Gulshan-i rā z-i Jadid, e.g., which is an interesting and relatively little known Javāb (not translated so far into European languages) to ahabistri's Gulshan-i rāz, Iqbal makes the archangel Gabriel speak thus to God: "I renounce eternal union, now that I see the pleasure that is in complaints and sighs, allow me to share Man's proud imperfection, give me the ardour of Adam" (p. 206 of the Lahore edition, 1929).

How this idea is to be justified, will be seen more clearly in the course of the article.

[9] The zūnnār is the well known kosti, the wound ritual cincture of the Zoroastrians, which under Islamic rule became the distinctive mark of the protected non-Muslims (dimmi). In the tradition of the Persian lyrical mysticism the zūnnār symbolizes heresy, non-Islamic belief, but at the same time (it was made of the significant number of seventy two threads of white wool etc.) it alludes to more esoteric, profound meanings.

[10] Akin to this beautiful short poem are, as regards the similarity of concepts, two other poems found in Hāl: "The Angels take leave of Adam quitting Paradise" (p. 117) and "The Spirit of the Earth bids welcome to Adam" (pp. 178-179). The former re-affirms that Adam's restlessness as a consequence of his vivifying contact with Satan is good and productive ("One does not understand whether you are of earth or of mercury; it is said that you are of earth, but star, the moon-light are also part of your nature!"; in the latter poem, the Earth (The Spirit of the Earth, see also foot-note 86) foresees the supreme dignity of man grown sovereign after "the cruel torment of the days of separation" ("Yes, Fate will understand the silent winking of your eyes; from far the stars of sky will see you .. . The sparking of your sighs will rise to the Firmament!")

[11] Yad-i baydā, "the white hand", is a Qur'anic term referring to Moses' famous miracle. "And thrust thy hand within thine armpit, it will come forth white without hurt" (Qur. XX. 22). Iqbal uses the term very often as an ideogram of "prophetical power", as a symbol of nubuwwa.

[12] Refers to Noah's unsuccessful prayers for saving his impious son (not mentioned in the Bible) from destruction in the deluge (cf. Qur. XI. 36-49) Satan here refers to the presumed uselessness of prophetical humility in front of the eremitic pride of the Saint.

[13] This satanic hint at the "overcoming and nullifying of the earth" will be explained more clearly further on.

[14] This description of Zoroaster's temptation by Ahriman is, from the point of view of the concepts, the most important of four parallel images of prophecy as opposed to anti-prophecy in Jāy. The "temptation" of Ahriman trying to deter Zoroaster from his prophetical vocation is already found in the Avesta (Vendidad, XIX, 1 fi.) which Iqbal must have known through some translation, since in substance there is similarity of concept. (See F. Muller's translation, "Zarathustra's Versuchung" in WZKM, III, 1889, p. 20 fi.). The other images are those of Buddha: Gautama is confronted with the Dancer; of Christ: the evils of the European civilisation, worse than Judas' deeds themselves, are put in front of Jesus ("What I did with His humanity, says Judas, His followers have done with His divinity!"; and of Muhammad: the antiprophetic temptation is symbolized, in the pagan Abū Jahl's complaint, by the aristocratic and racialist mentality of the pre-Islamic paganism. Jāy., pp. 48-60).

[15] In this song of Baal the element that appears satanic to Iqbal lies in the return to ancestry, in the nostalgia for the eternal return, which to Iqbal's mind had been revived by the studies of European scholars on the most ancient civilisations. Concepts such as the return to the pre-monotheistic origins, the monarchy, the racialist aristocracy, the nationalisic patriotism and even the plastic idolatry of art as pure beauty, are here brought under one unique satanic denominator.

[16] i.e. Statan, when refusing to prostrate himself before Adam, appears as the absolute protagonist of tauhīd. It is not by chance that the idea is put into the mouth of Hallāj: it was wide spread among Islamic mystical circles. Cf. Massignon's and Nicholson's works quoted in foot. note 27.

[17] What Iqbal wants to say here, not without a remarkable sense of psychological and religious intuition, is that the first step on the way to Satan is the giving up of the "institutions" (sujūd is here the symbol of the canonical prayer). On the primeval ground of the tragedy between God, Adam and Satan, the prostration before Adam was tantamount to the ritual and institutional obligation, i.e. to the material (earth-Adam) side of religion, the one Satan could not understand. See passim, in the whole course of the article, and compare with the defence of the institution in the significant verses I, 2624 fl. of Rūmī's Mathnavi.

[18] See the same concept in B 1.

[19] The fact that the Ka'bā is made of earth (bricks), is precisely the main argument used by the supporters of the earth against the fire in their interesting controversy between earth and fire. This verse seems to me a confirmation of the contrast between the two.

[20] This is a paraphrase of a fairly wellknown hadith.

[21] It means that basically Satan acted out of affection for Adam. He wanted to rid him of God's constrictive jabr and make him free, i.e. the apparent hatred shown to Adam in his refusal to bow before him, was hiding affection for him. The idea of Satan as the "bearer of Adam's sins" is also found in E 2. See foot-note 32.

[22] It is the well known juridical hadith: abjadu 'l-ashyā"indī 't-talāq, here in metaphysical adaptation.

[23] The oversight occurred in my translation Poema Celeste, p. 123, should be thus corrected. Which was the scarcely specified forbidden tree of Paradise, has been much discussed between Islamic exegets : the more common opinion, which then became a leitmotiv in the Persian lyrical and mystical poetry and which is given here, is that it was a corn plant. Cf. Tabari, Tafsir al-Qur., II, 35, vol. I, p.178. He quotes also the other opinions, among the one holding to grapes, or, more rarely, to the fig-tree. The apple-tree is entirely missing. The traditions quoted by Tabari attribute the corn plant version clearly to the Hebrews (ahl at-tūrāt). In primitive cultures the end of the golden age is also connected with corn or grains (cf. Pettazzoni, Miti e Le g gende, Turin 1948, I, p. 314), and it might be that the introduction of agriculure was felt as a decadence when compared with the "uncivilized" state of beatitude enjoyed by nomads, hunters or fruit-gatherers. On the beginning of agriculture as connected with a sexual act see the material collected by M. Eliads, Traite d'histoire des religions, Paris, 1959, p. 286 fl.

[24] In the same poem, in principle the most ambitious of Iqbal, the author asks (pp. 185-186) why Satan was created, and gets from the saint Shāh-i Hamadān the altogether Fichtean answer that Satan serves as a stimulus for man's fight: from fighting evil man grows strong and hardens himself in a sane manner.

[25] Refers to Qur. XXX1X, 53: Despair not of the mercy of Allah. Satan retorts that if creative and productive action springs from anguish and despair unsatisfied with quiet ecstasy, then it would be better to say: "despair"! In this whole dialogue one cannot but recognise Iqbal's great sympathy with Satan, and the extremely positive role which he assigns to him.

[26] "He is God" a very common dhikr-sentence in use in the mystical fraternities against which Iqbal had a heart-felt antipathy, at least at this phase of his thought.

[27] This is only one of Iqbal's numerous and often unjust attacks against democracy and in general against the European civilization, understandable only in consideration of the fact that Iqbal had above all been acquainted with the "imperialistic" and colonial aspects of this civilization. For more evidence see examples in Bal, p. 222, where the freedom of thought is called a "satanic invention", and p. 210 where the cinema is deprecated not only as being "not an art, but impiety and magic" [sic!]; in Payām where he condemns the League of Nations (p. 233) and looks with distrust at the invention of the airplane (p. 162: "before worrying about the sky it would be better to settle the organisation of this earth !"); democracy is aspersed with over-simplified criticism (p. 158 : "from the sum of two hundred asses never a man will come out !"); Europe is "the centre of assassination devices" (pp. 146-147) etc. Khayal, in order to explain the contradiction between such sweeping statements and the activistic philosophy of Iqbal. maintains that they are only one-sided, and he tries to justify them in principle. To me it seems more natural to take them simply for a biased view, psychologically understandable; it leads him to condemn Europe for the same conquests which he would have hailed if they had come from the Islamic sphere. (In Lect., p. 7, he even claims them to be originally Islamic).

[28] Iqbal himself adds in a foot-note: "taken from Ibn 'Arabī". He probably refers to Fusūs al-ḥikam (ed. with comm. of `Abdur-Razzāq Kāshānī), Cairo 1321 H., p. 166. (From Ibn 'Arabi also Rūmī has probably taken similar considerations in Mathnavi, I, 1488 fl. and other passages quoted below). On the same concept see also Hallāj, Kitābu 'l-Tawāsin, ed. Massignon, Paris 1913, pp. 41 fl.., 87 fl. L. Massignon, La Passion d'al-Hallāj, Paris 1922, pp. 712, 934 fl. R. A. Nicholson, The Idea of Personality in Sufism,. Cambridge 1923, pp. 31 fl. Satan accuses God of having deceived him by using Adam as a bait and pretext also in a passage of the great mystic Sanā'i (d. 1141).

[29] It is to be noted how Iqbal in his anti-European feelings goes as far as to defend the mullāhs (for whom he had usually no soft corner, especially not for Afghan mullāhs of the day), when wrongly or rightly he saw English manoeuvres in the efforts made to "chase" them. As is known (cf. Islam and Ahmadism, Lahore 1936), Iqbal also made English underhand dealings responsible for the rise of the Ahmadīyya sect. He maintained (cf. Rumūz-i Be-khudi, Lahore 1948, 3rd ed., pp. 143 fl., translated by Arberry, London 1953, p. 40) that in periods of decadence taqlid is better than theological free-thinking.

[30] On the mythico-religious relationship between Fire and Earth see below pp. 49 fl.

[31] Taken from the shahāda: lā ilahā'illā allah. The necessary lā stage is that of negation. For Iqbal it is (cf. Khayal, p. 9) positively satanic. It has to be transcended into the UN stage, i.e., the affirmation of God, of the true God of the classical monotheism. Iqbal often uses this antithesis, e.g. when speaking of the communists (Jāy., p. 88): they have reached the /ā stage, and rightly so — , but now they have to rise to the iltā, etc.

[32] In Iqbal's thinking there often emerge immanentistic lines of thought: remains of his Hegel studies under his master, the Neo-Hegelian McTaggart. This passage is one example. It falls little in line with transcendent theism. A yet clearer example is found in the last verse of the beautiful poetry quoted in my The concept of Time in Iqbal's religious philosophy, pp. 171-172. See also foot-note 4 on p. 168 of the same.

32. [33] This idea, which is most remarkable in this context, has a very ancient origin. The bivalent character of Satan — Logos is present in the Talmud (see interesting examples in A. Frank-Duquesne, "Refiexions sur Satan en marge de la Tradition judeo-chretienne" (p. 251) in Satan, Etudes Carmelitaines, 1948. The idea that Satan is the brother of the Logos is also found in the Divinae Institutions of Lactantius (II, 9). The relevant passage has recently been made accessible to the Italian public by Papini in his recent and much discussed book Ii Diatolo, (Florence, 1953).

It is also known that certain Gnostic sects attributed to Satan a role of redeemer, precisely in the meaning that he gives man freedom and impels him to action. Here, however, the sentence seems to come out of a simpler concept: Satan, assuming the role of tempter, takes on the responsibility for man's sins (cf. Qur. XXXVIII, 83-84; VII, 16-17).

32. [34] Nard corresponds to the well known trick-track game. Iqbal suggests that Satan should run the risk of taking this world "as it is, as a juvenile creation of God" while at the same time he creates a better one, a paradise on earth. This is according to Iqbalean doctrine, exactly what God wants from man (cf. Jāv., p. 225: "whoever has no creative power, God says to the poet, is an atheist and a blasphemer Be glowing with passion, be creator, embrace, as we Ourselves do, all hori‑
zons of the Cosmos", etc. Once more, Satan, as the instigator of action, comes to be identical with the Qur'anic God. These beautiful, even though at first sight rather unassuming, verses belong to the most significant elements for an understanding of Iqbal's "satanism".

[35] The qiyām is one of the phases of the Islamic canonical prayer (salāt), exactly the statio. The order established by Satan is therefore the cowardly prostration before the tyrants. To be noted is the contrast — also verbal — between Satan who is such because he does not want to prostrate himself (the Satan whom we will call the Satan Divine) and the one who impresses on men a faint-hearted taste for prostration before the "monarchs". By the way it may be noticed that for Iqbal are imbued with monarchic spirit, in spite of contrary appearances, not only the properly speaking monarchy, but also democracy and Communist socialism. Theocracy alone is for him truly democratic (cf. Khayal, p. 12).

[36] Iqbal did not share the pacifist tendency of certain Muslim modernists as regards the holy war. He thought it to be absolutely justified in certain cases which he practically identified with the insurrection movement against authorities illegal from the religious points of view: see his interesting comment on Qur. IV, 59 in Jāv., p. 192 where the Qur'anic minkum is understood as "those of you who are in authority", therefore not the colonial rulers who are not of you.

[37] These are precisely the political friends of the "true" Satan: hereditary monarchy which means tyranny of the one by right of birth; indistinct liberal democracy which means tyranny of capitalists by right of wealth; and (more clearly specified below in i) and in other passages of Iqbal's work, cf. also Jāv., pp. 6970; communism which means the tyranny of abstract material interests. All this together is "monarchy".

[38] Refers to Marx. "No messenger of God, Yet in his claps a Book" is an

expression dating from before Iqbal and applied to certain famous Muslims, in particular to Maulānā Jalāl ud-Dīn Rūmī.

[39] Means another possible danger threatening Satan's "sheepish" order: Iqbal identifies here this danger with Fascism and Mussolini. In view of the events which occured after the last war this piece is interesting. But even fascism for which Iqbal had some sympathy, is in his view insufficient to awake the world from satanic sleep: the true danger for Satan is the prophetic and theocratic community of Islam. (See below)

[40] There exists a well kuown ḥadith quoted by Ghazāli Ihyā', IV, 322), reading thus: aktharu ahl 'l-jannati al-bulh "Most of the dwellers in paradise will be the fool", which of course means the poor in spirit, etc.

[41] "Earth's soil belongs to God" is a hadith (based on the Qur'anic passages) often quoted by Iqbal. For more commentary see Jāv., pp. 80 fl.

[42] With this criticism of speculative theology, or at least of certain loquacious features of it, Iqbal combined a remarkable respect for the shari`a, even though giving it an interpretation that had little in common with one spread by the manuals of the faqih. In addition to two of the best known problems of the Islamic speculative theology (the question of the identity of the divine attributes, sifāt, with the divine nature, (dāt, and that of created or uncreated character of the Qur'an) we find here also two problems listed which were of a special interest in the Sub-continent of Iqbal's days, taking into account the development which the Ahmadiyya movement had taken there. (Cf. Iqbal's severe criticism in the already mentioned Islam and Ahmadism.) As is known, this movement, contrary to the Islamic orthodoxy, maintains that Jesus has really died and that in the coming Mandi one ought not to see Jesus himself, but a Renovator embodying Jesus' qualities (on the teachings of the Ahmadiyya, see the summary given in Pareja-Bausani Hertling, Islamologia, Rome 1951, pp. 588-590). According to Iqbal these discussions were apt to deter the Indian Muslims from their more concrete task, namely that of fighting the oppressors and re-establishing true Islamic theocracy.

In an article which says much more and also much less than its tittle announces "The Persian Conception of Artistic Unity in Poetry," in BSOS, XIV, 2 (1952), p. 242, Wickens gives as a characteristic of Islam that it absorbs theology into law, and he maintains that this phenomenon has not yet been explained by the orientalists. Thus far I agree with him, but I am not convinced by the explanation he proposes and which is exactly contrary to what e.g. Iqbal affirms in his whole work regarding the rejuvenation of Islam: "The God we meet in Muslim Theology is central and timeless (?), not only himself unchanged (?) but changing nothing else since the beginning of Time. Such theology has thus virtually never concerned itself with the very stuff of its Christian counterpart: those vital subtle questions of Person, Nature, Hypostasis and so on . ." The Qur'an, (and not only the Qur'an as interpreted by Iqbal) seems to me fully in contradiction with these assertion of Wickens (cf. Qur., L, 15; LV, 29; XXXV, 1; XXIX, 19, etc.).

The reason for giving precedence to the shari`a over theology in Islam seems to me to lie rather in the impossibility to reason about God because of his being to an extreme degree "personal", immobile and arbitrary. It is possible to reason about an Ens, a Motor Immobilis, but not about a personal being. But since this personal being has a certain plan for mankind, since through the Prophet it gives origin to States and attaches a special importance to this earth, the only thing in which man, with regard to God, can take interest, is to keep ready to march at his orders, In general, it is the very much other-wordly oriented religions which give special importance to theological disquisitions (Christianity, Manichaenism, gnosis, etc.).

[43] Iḥtisāb-i kā' ināt i.e. being muhtasib, spiritual "police inspector" of the inner world. This relates to a tradition.

[44] Since the term "pre-monotheistic" is used several times in the course of this article, it may be useful to say more precisely that by means of this term I intend to make a clear differentiation between the monotheistic religions in the strict sense and all other types of religion. Monotheistic religions in the strict sense are fastened upon the conscious negation of the ancestral gods, which is the work of some great founder personality (the prophet). He feels himself called upon by the unique God to carry his Message, — a Phenomenon which, as Pettazzoni (Saggi di Storia delle Religioni e di Mitologia, Roma 1945, p. 7) has noted, is extremely rare, or even almost unique in the religious history of mankind, if one considers that Christianity as well as Islam are derived from Hebraic monotheism. The prefix pre of premonotheistic has a very broad value since premonotheistic religions also subsist naturally in today's world.

[45] Iqbal's deductions and distinctions between the two Qur'anic episodes of the fall (compare VII, 11-27 with XX, 115-123), however interesting they are from the point of view of his theology, do not in all respects seem acceptable from the point of view of a textual criticism of the Qur'an. Nothing indeed impels us to think that the indetermined "tree" of the first Qur'anic account is the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil as distinct from the Tree of life clearly specified in the second account. It would rather seem that in the Qur'an the two trees are fused into one, the Tree of Life which would be — contrary to the account of Genesis — the one whose fruit Adam ate.

[46] It is interesting to note how little the monotheistic Weltanschauung (Biblical and Qur'anic) appeals to the heart of modern man in comparison with the remarkable favour enjoyed by recent rejuvenation of myths and magic etc. To point out only one example we may refer to Mircea Eliade's beautiful Le Mythe de l'Eternel Retour, Paris 1949. Although on pp. 154 fl. he shows with perfect clarity that the Jewish monotheistic prophetical religiosity is the first real novelty, i.e. the destruction of the traditional cyclical mentality, and although on pp. 236-237 he recognizes that faith of the monotheistic type, "une philosophic de la libertē qui n'exclut pas Dieu", is the only system capable of overcoming "the horizon of archetypes and recurrence" fully and without danger, his whole book nontheless breathes an air of nostalgia for that world of archetypes and the lost ontological paradise and manifests a heartfelt antipathy against the history-conscious type of thinking. (See in particular pp. 218 fl.). Since it touches our concern closely, we take the freedom to rectify his interpretation of Qur. XXIX, 20 (not IV, 4 as erroneously quoted by him): "Allah est celui qui effectue la Creation, done il la repete" (?). He thus attributes a conception of the "eternal return" (cyclical) type also to the Qur'an, whereas the sentence, when translated exactly (". . . see how He originated creation, then bringeth forth the later (second) growth"), proves just the contrary, i.e. what Iqbal calls the "anti-classical" and futuristic conception of the "monotheistic" mentality.

[47] How deeply the nostalgia for the "eternal return" is rooted also in the minds of those who have been brought up on lines of a religion as strictly monotheistic as Islam, appear from the statement — unjustified in my view — of one of Iqbal's learned followers. M. D. Siddiqi. It is found in a thoughtful though lengthy article of his: "Iqbal's Concept of Evolution" (in lqbal, vol. II, 1954, P. 27): "He seems to believe that the world process is the self-realisation of an original unity broken up into its components."

[48] The term refers to Qur'an XVII, 11.

[49] See foot-note 44.

[50] Qur. VII, 24. But also Satan's traditional enmity with man assumes for Iqbal's a positive value in the Fichtean sense. In another passage he says e.g.: "To be true the enemy is also your friend, his existence gives an active brightness to your Enterprise. He who is conversant with the degrees of the self, considers it a grace of God to have a powerful enemy." And again: "Refuse living in a faded world which has a God without having a Satan".

[51] Satan is, in Islam as well as in the Jewish religion, essentially the enemy of man, of Adam, not the enemy of God. Also Rumī opposes Adam to Iblis, just as Abraham is opposed to Nimrod and Moses is opposed to Pharaoh. The New Testament with its conception of the two kingdoms, God and world, gives to Satan a far greater importance, under the manifest impact of Persian and gnostic influence. On this point see the interesting considerations of A. Frank Du Quesne, op. cit., p. 208 and 290. They seem however somehow biased by his desire to vindicate by all means absolute originality of Christianity.

[52] Besides, there is also in the iconography a great difference between certain representations showing Satan as a horrible heavy monster, and others where the fallen angel appears in a posture of a noble self-restraint (cf. E. Kirschbaum, "L, Angelo Rosso e 1, Angelo Turchino" in Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, XVII (1940), pp. 209-227.

Besides, the oldest roots of this bivalent character can be historically traced back to the so-called primitive cultures. On the one hand, there is the serpent-Dragon (symbolizing the primordial chaos, abyss) to which we briefly refer in foot-note 62, and on the other hand, the well known figure which appears — and this is particularly interesting for us here — especially in the myths about the creation, the "countercreator" like the Coyote in the myths of hunters and gatherers of California (see some passages in Pettazzoni, Mitt e Legend, vol. III, Turin 1963, pp. 89 fl. and also the brief study of D. Satolli, T. Tentori, Mitt e legende sulla creazione del primitivi nordamericani, Rome 1941, pp. 28-32.) In a cosmogonic myth of the Algonkian tribe (Lenape) it is spoken of (quoted in Schmidt, Ursprung der Gottesidee, II, pp. 417-419) either as a counter-creator who among other misfortunes brought death into the world, or as a thick snake causing a great flood. I do not think that it is possible to identify the two beings, as Henninger does ("L' adversaire du Deiu bon chez les primitifs", in Satan, Etudes Carmelit, Paris, 1948, p. Ill). On the contrary, they represent very strikingly two different aspects of the "Satanic" also as regards its evolution in history. Also in other myths (cf. that of the Maidu quoted in Satolli-Tentori^, op. cit., pp. 28-32) "Coyote" and the serpent are quite distinct from each other.

To make myself clear: it is somewhat the same as the difference between the ambivalent Germanic Loki (see F. Stanton Cawley, "The Figure of Loki in Germanic Mythyology" in Harvard Theol. Review, XXXII, 1939, pp. 309-326) and the dragon, the serpent of Midhgardhr, the former being lively and "faber", true Iqbalian iblis nāri, the latter dull and "material" like an Iblis khāki.

As regards the "counter-creator" (sometimes also assistant creator), Pettazzoni thinks him to be a creator belonging to a different mythology. He is supposed to have been supplanted amongst the vicissitudes of history and successive strata of

peoples etc. (Cf. "Mythes des origines et mythes de la creation", in Proceedings of the 7th Congress for the History of Religion 1950, Amsterdam 1951, pp. 67 fl.).

[53] The reading of the chapters related to Satan in Bukhārī's and Muslim's collections of traditions, or in other texts as Akām al-marjānn (quoted below), can at best yield some interesting starting points for historical and religious comparison with post-biblical Judaic sources, or serve as an amusing pastime because of the stories contained in such collections. In the main, Satan appears there — as also in the Hebraic texts — as God's instrument with only a very relative autonomy. How ‑ ever, for a fuller historical understanding of Iqbal's Satan one must bear in mind not only the considerations of the mystics of which we have given examples here and there, but also the interesting cbapter on "temptations" in al-Ghazālī's Ihyā' (Cairo edition of 1312 H. part III, pp. 20 fl.): It reads there e.g. (p. 21) that God, as the Qur'an says, created all things by pairs. So the devil is the angel's counter‑part. A little further he explains the well known tradition : "The heart of the believer is between the two fingers of God" affirming without hesitation that Satan is one of the two fingers. (He therefore is an aspect of God, he is musakhar to God like all other creation!) Apropos of the famous tradition: "The Prophet said: No one of you is without a Demon. They asked him: You also? Yes, I too, but God has assisted me against him. He has become Muslim and does not command but what is good", the great theologian shrewdly explains its meaning so that the passions (shahawāt) are not evil in themselves. In the case of the man of God, on the contrary, they become themselves stimuli of good. Al-Ghazāli (with whom Iqbal. felt perfectly in line, cf. foot-note 42) showed in his whole work a vivid sense of the superiority of moral action over speculative theology. Of this the following closing passage of the great Teacher of Ṭūs (op. cit. p. 23) gives a testimony: "The servant of God must always be bent on chasing (daf') the Enemy from his soul, rather than on wondering what the Enemy's origin, genealogy and dwelling-place might be. He ought above all to ask what sort of weapons the Enemy uses; so as to keep them more effectively away from his soul: they are the passions (hawā) and the lustful pleasures (shahawāt). This suffices for him who is wise."

In his most useful review Notes on lslam Fr. Courtois S. J. has started publishing instalments of a well informed and objective study on "The Islamic Conception of the Devil" (first instalment on pp. 2 to 12, vol. VII, No. 1, March 1954). But on p. 2 only a hint is given to a passage in Iqbal's Lect. and it remains entirely unnoticed that the figure of Iblis assumes a far greater importance in the author's poetical work in Urdu and Persian.

[54] Z.Werblowsky, Lucifer and Prometheus, a Study of Milton's Satan (Thesis of the Faculty of Arts, Geneva), Lodon 1952.

[55] The sentence which forms the radif of a most beautiful ghazal in Rūmi's Diwān (cf. V. von Rosenzweig, Auswahl aus den Diwanen des... Mewlānā Dschelāleddin Rūmi, Wien 1838, pp. 18-21) is a quotation from Qur. VII, 23 (rabbanā Zālamnā ānfusanā, "Our Lord! We have wronged ourselves . . .").

[56] This important concept arises still more clearly from an anecdote cited in a foot-note by Nicholson (Commentary on the First and Second Books, p. 109, v. 1493), and taken from a Commentary on the Fusūs al-Hikam of Ibn 'Arabī: "A certain mystic in conversation with God said: '0 my God, You have decreed that sin should be, You have willed it, You have created it in my soul!' Then a voice answered him: 'This is precisely what is held by those who believe in My unity (tauḥid, — here therefore Satan defends the absolute tawḥid from yet another angle), but what is it that those who profess to be my servants, should say?' The mystic answered: 'It was my fault; it is I who committed sin, who did wrong !"And I, — the Voice continued answering — I have pardoned, I have shown mercy!' ".

[57] Cf. Foot-note 11.

[58] This concept of God as transcendent and arbitrary, above nature and above its law, is often found in Rūmī's Mathnavī; in this same episode one meets with a verse which is properly speaking a declaration of explicit anti-pantheism; God says: "chār tab'ū ellat-e ūlā na-y-am, dar tasarruf dā- `imā man bāqi-y-am". On the problem of pantheism in Rūmī see Nicholson's already quoted work Idea of Personality in Sufism and also "Theism and Pantheism in Rūmi an article of mine in Pakistan Quarterly (Karachi), III, 4 (1954), pp. 36-41; 60-62.

[59] The verse reads (IV, 1617): did tin-i Adam as dinish na-did; in Jahān did ān jahān-binish na-did. Nicholson translates: "He saw the clay of Adam but did not see his obedience to God: he saw in him this world but did not see that (spirit) which beholds yonder world." If one compares this passage with those quoted a little earlier where Satan's failure is not to perceive God's active decision, — and with fragment on the controversy between earth and fire, quoted on p. 41, foot-note 15, where Satan sees only the naqsh al-mādda and not the karmāl an-nihāya — and if in addition one considers the parallelism of the second misra' of this same verse (where tin corresponds to jahān, and din to jahān-binish, the translucid perception of the material world which is proper to God and to the transcendent beings, the fravashi, to put it in terms of Mazdaism), then a — to my view — better interpetation and translation of din in the present passage comes spontaneously to one's mind. It means "the more real and profound personality of Adam", in a certain sense his fravashi personality, that of the "true" Adam, not directly dependent on the earth, but on the finality of God's creative act. Besides, Corbin (op. cit. in foot-note 70, on p. 143 and passim) has shown how the conception of the Mazdaic daēna is found present in certain Islamic circles. In the same study, the problem of daēna is also given a semantic solution which sounds a little more acceptable than the one proposed by Duchesne-Guillemin in Ormazd et Ahriman, Paris 1953, p. 67.

[60] This forms a curious contrast with Luther's injunction to laugh at Satan quia est superbus spiritus et non potest ferre contemptum sui (Werblowsky, op. cit, p. XI).

On the prohibition of laughter in certain situations reported by myths and fables see the interesting study of Propp in Uchenye Zapiski Gos. Leningradskogo Universiteta, Kl. Filolog. N., Ill, 1939. The hero, when penetrating into the throat of the dragon (Satan) which he should kill, may not laugh, otherwise he is defeated.

[61] Cf. A. Bausani, 'Aspetti del misticismo islamico' Ricerche Religiose, vol. XX, 1949, pp. 1 fl.; and of the same, "11 pensiero religioso di Maulāna Gialālad-Din Rūmi" in 0. M., XXXIII, 1953, pp. 180 fl.

[62] Summary in the above quoted article on Rumī, p. 187.

[63] Mysticism of all times is full of this motif. In the myth the serpent-dragon motif e.g. (which generally symbolizes the primordial chaos, the abyss of the waters, the undifferentiated One) has developed, as Propp has shown (Le radici storiche dei racconti di fate, Ital. edit., Turin 1949, pp. 343-446), from an initial stage of "useful serpent" whose stomach is believed to give magical abilities to the one who dwells in it, into a stage of "evil serpent" which is "the fruit of a higher civilisation". The good serpent is still very much alive in the Chinese civilisation (dragon), but remains of the good serpent motif exist even in the Bible (cf. John III, 14-15 where Jesus refers to Num. XXI, 8-9). One may also remember the famous gnostic sect of the Ophites.

[64] Cf. Lk VI, 36; Mt V, 48; Lev. XIX, 2.

[65] Also in the Christian tradition has Satan the aspect of the one who spreads "confusion" who "obnubilates". Cf. the terms employed in I Tim., III, 6; VI, 4; II Tim., III, 4; they are al derived from typhus, smoke, steam. So also the mataiotes of II Peter. II, 18; Rom. VIII, 20 (but "the work of him who so subjected it" in this passage means for many exegets God); Eph. IV, 17 seems to refer to the idle metaphysical disorder which Satan tries to create. Frank-Duquesne (op. cit. p. 238) cites also a curious passage from Jeremiah on the effect of the Fall as a return to the indetermined. In Frank-Duquesne's learned and interesting study any distinction between the two aspects of Satan is however missing. For this reason his criticism (pp. 303 fl.) of the doctrine of Satan as "aspect of God" (of the personal God) appears only partly justifiable.

This aspect of Satan as Chaos explains why in the Islamic tradition he is also connected with the water (abyss, tehom, chaotic primordial waters). There exists more than one ḥadith collected in op. cit. pp. 164 fl., 175-176) according to which "Iblīs' throne is on the sea", or Solomon, riding an `ifrit in search for iblis, finds him on bisāt on the sea. Whence it is not by chance that in the Christian apocalypse the sea will be abolished at the end of times (Apoc. XXI, 1). In Is. XXVII, 1, God will "kill the serpent which lives in the sea".

[66] See e.g. E 2) and foot-note 32. According to Saint-Victor (Les deux Masques, III, ed. 1883, p. 342) Prometheus is the permanent prophet.

Going back beyond Milton and his immediate sources, one should recall, as regards the role of Satan as initiator of "technique", the many legends of genii or devils working under-ground: cf. the dwarfs of the Northern mythology. G. Agricola, in De animantibus subterraneis; Hephaestus (a pagan god, whence a demon), identified e.g. by Vossius (De Origine et Progressu ldolatriae, 1688 cit. in Max Muller Chips from a German Workshop, IV, p. 203) with Tubalcain etc. etc.

Agricola's page on the under-ground devils is so interesting that I reproduce it from an old translation into Italian of the dialogue 11 Bermanno by M. Tramezzino (in Vinegia, MDL, fol. 430 v.; the little book contains the translation of G. Agricola's main works).

Bermanno: "Joking apart, in some mines certain kinds of Demons happen to be found: some of them do not cause any harm to the miners, but they go roaming around the wells and, without doing anything special, seem to exert themselves much in hard work, now digging the vein together with the others, now emptying the buckets from the material they have dug, now operating the lift, or teasing and vexing the workers. This happens specially in wells from which much silver is being raised, or where there is hope of finding much of it. Some others of the Demons are very tiresome and cause harm, as was the case (which is well known to many) of one who a few years ago harassed so much a mine of Anneberg called the Crown of Roses that he murderd no less than twelve miners. Whence that well had to be given up, although it contained a lot of silver.

Ancone: Psello, among the six kinds of demons he lists, mentions the one which is usually found in the mines, and he says, if I am not mistaken, this is the worst of all, being garbed in the thickest stuff that can be found. (On earth, as being heavier"stuff than fire, see below).

Bermanno: As I said, some of them are so wicked that the miners flee from them as from a deadly pestilence: some others, on the contrary, are so pleasant that the miners not only do not mind meeting them often and listening to their difficulties, but they even desire for them and take them for people bringing good luck".

[67] The magical aspect of Satan (of the "true" Satan) is parallel and connected with his traditional aspect as "liar", as creator of vampires and of confusion, as Golem and as homunculus using from below the proteiform and abstract cosmical energy which is quite different from the fiat of the divine Creator. Rumi has in his Mathnavi (III, 1191 fl.) a few master-pieces — true witnesses to his deep psychological experience — on the difference between "magic" and "creation", between Prophet and Magician, between "true" and "false miracle", a distinction over which only those do smile who are wanting in real religious experience. One may also remember his verse har ke to-rā bālā kasid,ān sadā mi-dān k'az bālā rasid. The sure proof that an inspiration comes from God and not from Satan, is that it has an elevating pratical effect; it never depresses.

[68] I refer to works as e.g. that of P. Volz, Das Damonische in Jahwe, 1924; R. Scharf, Die Gestalt des Satans im Alien Testament, in Jung, Symbolik des Geistes, 1948. Frank-Duquesne is however perfectly right in noting (op. cit. pp. 303-305) that the idea which recent writers have given a scientific formulation, is not at all new, and he quotes many interesting precedents (forgetting however the rather important Marriage of Heaven and Hell by Blake.)

[69] The question of the dangerous resemblance between Divine and Diabolic, and that of the practical means for discriminating between them has occupied all mystics and religious minds. Rūmi's solution (cf. the above quoted articles) consists in the humble veneration for the Prophet-Saint, the Visible Master who preserves man from falling back into the undifferentiated Satanic; for Ghazāli (Ihyā,III,p.24) the "doors of the devils" are numerous whereas "the door of the angels" is only one and is mostly mistaken for those of the devils. The instrument that serves as a criterion, is the Book of God (the reveald prophetical Scripture and its Laws) and the heart (qalb) enlightened by piety (taqwā).

[70] Cf. H. Corbin, Terre celeste et corps de resurrection d'apres quelques traditions iraniennes, in Eranos, XXII (1953), pp. 97-194.

[71] It may suffice to think of certain aspects of the Christian tradition more or less strongly imbibing gnosticism. It is interesting that some people, like the individualistic Kierkegaard, who are considered as forerunners of the rebirth of the orthodox biblicism, under-went deep gnostic influences, as Martin Buber has shown among other things in Dialogisches Leben, Zurich 1947. On the "Demonic" in Kierkegaard see E. Paci, "Ironia, Demoniaco ed Eros in Kierkegaard", in Archivio di Filosofia, Roma 1953 (II). To the ferocious tirades of Kierkegaard against the mass Iqbal replies with the well known ḥadith: "Satan is with him who is alone, but the hand of God is upon the Community."

[72] According to Iqbal (see one of his Urdu verses quoted in The Concept of Time, op. cit., p. 177) the classical call for "giving up the world" to the Quranic believer must mean that he ought to thrust himself forward towards new worlds and to conquer them actively. It is in this sense that he paraphrases the famous tradition that there is no monachism in Islam. Monachism in Islam means "holy war".

[73] It may suffice to quote Paul's letter to the Romans. The whole classical Christian theology with its ideological link between sin-death-flesh-redemption is unintelligible for the convinced Muslim not so much for reasons of possible inconsistencies he would be able to discover from the point of view of logic (this is only the outside of certain polemics), but because instinctively he feels it to be too anthropomorphic; too great seems to him the importance attached to the sin of a poor man. Such importance appears prejudicial to the absolute liberty of God's will which the Muslim wants to safeguard at any cost.

[74] The dragon-serpent briefly discussed in foot-note 62 is generallay connected with the realm of the dead.

Interesting in this respect is a Japanese myth (Kojiki, XXXVIII, 115) which says that in order not to die man should have married a horribly ugly woman. But he refused, and as a result men are "like flowers" and like flowers they die. Death is the wages one pays for doing or not doing something ugly (cf. "the wages of sin is death" of Paul).

One may also consult the material on the origin of Death given in the article `Fall (Ethnic)' in ERE, V, p. 706 fl.

Cf. Badr ad-Din Abū `Abdallāh Muhammad b. Abdallāh ash-Shibli (d.769 H.), Akām al-marjān fi aḥkām al-jānn, Cairo 1326 H., p. 197. On the meaning of the important term smad (Qur. CXII, 2) which here with all evidenece means "solid" "compact", see other opinions as given in Rosenthal, Some Minor Problems in the Qur'ān, New York 1953 (Reprint from the Joshua Starr Memorial Volume).[75]

[76] On the redeeming death of the Brave in Iqbal see Bausani, The Concept of Time, op. cit., pp. 173-177.

[77] Courtois, op. cit., pp. 343, 345. Any trace of a tragical "Dostojevskian" vision of evil and of the "Satanic" is indeed absent from Iqbal as well as from Islam as a whole. (I refer to visions as Stavrogin's confession in Besy and that of Hippolyt in the ldiot).

[78] "The sin of an ecstatic soul begets a younger universe". These words are laid in Jāv. into the mouth of the heretic heroine. Tāhira in the firmament of Jupiter (Jāy., p. 144).

[79] Christianity goes still further in this direction, teaching the incarnation even of God himself. This conception is repugnant to Islam because of central affirmation of God's absolute freedom of will, which in the case of incarnation would be subjected to necessity. See Muhammad Mo`in, Mazdayasnā va ta'siree ān dar adabiyat-e fārsi, Tehran, 1326 solar (1948), (pp. 36, 623, XX). In my view this is one of the best achievements of the young generation of Persian scholars. Conducted with European scientific method and richly provided with analytical indices and registers of names etc., it would be worth while a translation or a broad summary in languages that can also be read by non-Iranologists. Prof. Corbin who rightly points out its remarkable value, has given of it a summary in French by way of an introduction of about 30 pages.

[80] The passage here translated is from pp. 408 fl.

[81] The well known "free-thinker" and devoted panegyrist of caliph alMandi, executed in 783-784 A.C. on the charge of heresy.

[82] Interesting idea that the monotheistic Weltanschauung is a "novelty", something stranger and intrusive that breaks into a "tradition".

[83] Mo`in, op. cit., p. 40, where the Persian text of Firdausi is given and mention made of a similar constrast in the Shāhnāma, but now with regard to Christians.

[84] It is the youger Asadi CAR Asadī) who completed his poem GarshāspNāma in 1016 A. C. and also composed the well known dictionary Lughat i Furs. He should not be mistaken for Ab^ū Nasr Ahmad Asadi, his father and master of Firdaust. (Cf. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. II, pp. 272 fl.)

[85] Further on in this poem (pp. 134-139) Asadī puts into the mouth of a Brahmin in discussion with Garshāsp an account of the creation of the world which begins with heat and fire, and then, almost as an apology, he states another theory, that of the "Greek philosophers" which is nearer to the Islamic concept and in which at least the air is better than the fire.

[86] Cf. the demon as exusia tat aeros in the Christian gnosis. In the esoteric doctrines the air represents and symbolizes the "lower level of the mind". The double meaning of the Arabic root haw& and hawā' ("passion" and "air") suggests this assimilation.

[87] On these aspects of the "earth" see the fascinating and learned consider‑

ations that form the core of Corbin's precious article (quoted above). In one of his interesting poems, the Turkish mystical poet Yonus Emre (I want to thank my friend Prof. A. Bombaci for having brought it to my knowledge) says this on the subject of the "earth":

. . No clouds do ever darken the light of my Moon,

Never does its fulness disappear;

From the earth its light is poured on the sky.

On the earth have I discovered my Moon, why should I seek in the sky.. ?

On the earth I must prostrate my face,

From the earth is mercy showering on me!'

(Text in Yunus Emre, ed. by A. Golpinanli 2289) The supremacy of the earth takes here the meaning of the Saint, the Spiritual Guide rising from the earth and exercising his mission on the earth. (The "Moon" by Rūmi is called 'Ali.)

[88] Duchesne-Guillemin in his already cited Ormazd et Ahriman seems to

exaggerate in his attempt to minimize the importance of the Iranian influence on the Greek as well as the Hebraic, Christian and Islamic culture. Even though a proper discussion is here out of place, let us nonetheless note that apart from the Hārūt and Mārūt legend (but its identification by Dumezil with Harvatāt and Amrtāt is far from being approved unanimously by the islamicists) and the two other points of detail quoted on p. 150, the Islamic tradition and the Qur'ān itself seem to have taken something more from Mazdaism. (The very pre-historic covenant between God and future men, and the "choice" they take (see Qur. VII, 172) seem clearly to derive from the well known "choice" of the fravashi spoken of in Bundahishn, II, 10-11).

[89] See foot-note 31. On the other hand one can quote a verse of Iqbal in which man takes on a particularly striking attitude of "praiseworthy rebellion" after the manner of Iblis:

I am servant, it it true, and seek for no other pleasure (rizā) than Yours,

And I go no other Way than the one ordered by you,

But if you should enjoin this ignorant man:

`Say that an ass is a horse of purest race', I never would obey !

(Armaghan, p. 10)

[90] See foot-note 26 and 28. It should however be borne in mind that Iqbal's way of arguing in the passage where he condemns "freedom of thought" can also be of value: "not every heart," he says, "is the seat of an Angel Gabriel; not every thought is fit for hunting the Bird of Paradise." In other words, the world gets its light only from thoughts coming from God, centred in God, not from the indiscriminate confusion of selfish thoughts of this or that Once again, Iqbal stands for a theoretic- prophetic conception (not "monarchic and dictatorial") against the vague humanism of those who are separated from the Source; the motivation of his anti-liberal criticism is therefore deeply religious, not political.

[91] In a letter to Saiyidain, quoted in his lqbal's Educational Philosophy Lahore 1945 (IV ed.), p. 136, he even declares explicitly : "the intellect is satanic".

[92] Cf. Rūmī, Mathnavi, III, 1360 fl.

[93] Of Iqbal's ideas about fatalism and freedom of will, see my Concept o, Time, pp. 170-173. Besides, the Islamic tradition has it also that Satan was the first to use qiyās in the famous sentence khalaqtani min nay etc. He is therefore the first "logician". (Cf. Wensinck, Handbook, s. v. Kiyās and Shiblī, op. cit., p. 174).

[94] Op. cit. in foot-note 67.

[95] The witty point is of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the best noted Prote• stant theologians with a fairly orthodox outlook (cit. in Werblowsky, op. cit.. p. 74).

[96] One may add still this curious fact noted by Frank-Duquesne (op. cit. p. 251): sar hā- 'olām which in the Talmud (Yebhamoth 16 B) is "the Angel of Yahwe" of Ex. XXIII, 20 and which is identified by Philo with the Logos, is on the contrary Satan in the Christian tradition (cf. II Cor., IV. 4; John XII, 31), and in the reported passage of St. Paul even "the God of this world".

It is of interest that in a tradition reported by Shiblī (op. cit., p. 214) Jesus is looking at Iblis and says: "this is the arkūn of the world" etc. Perhaps the Greek term is here kept for the sake of this lesser clarity so as not to hurt the Islamic conscience by attributing such vast power to Satan.

[97] In A Year amongst the Persians, Cambridge 1927, p. 144, the discussion between Browne and some Bā bīs runs thus: 'They seemed — writes Browne — to have no conception of Absolute Good or Absolute Truth: to them Good was merely what God chose to ordain, and Truth what he chose to reveal, so that they could not understand how anyone could attempt to test the truth of a religion by an abstract ethical or moral standard. God's attributes, according to their belief, were two. fold--"Attributes of Grace" Sifāt-i Jamāl or LW), and "Attributes of Wrath" (Sifāt-i Jalāl or Qahr): both were equally divine and in some dispensations (as the Christian and Bābī) the former, in some (as the Mosaic and the Muhammedan) the latter predominated.'

[98] See foot-note 30. The short poem has a casual and political character and has not been translated into European languages.

[99] See foot-note 30.

[100] See foot-note 67.

[101] "On the Day of the last Accounts, when the book of my deeds will be opened befor me, disgrace me, God, yea, but disgrace also Thyself !"

[102] Translated in my article: "Sette poesie inedite di Muhammad Iqbāl". in ll Punto nelle Lettere e nelle Ara, Rome, II, 3, 1953, p. 18. In a brilliant essay in novel form on Noah (in Montaggio, II, 3-4, 1954) M. Brelich has poetically developed his excellent intuition of the value of what collaboration between God and man in absolute theism means. His sentence: "Noah remained dear to the Lord, because he suggested to him ideas as to how ably to modify the original plan without destroying it" (p. 63) sounds like an echo to Iqbalean passages as this: "If your heart is bleeding for a Destiny, then ask God to order for your another one" (Jāv., p. 101 of the translation) and others like this.

[103] The "dialogue" with God is not only a theoretical principle repeatedly asserted by Iqbal but is very often also used by him as a literary genre.

[104] "Thorns and roses can be seen upon the branch, but on its inside there is neither rose nor thorn !"

[105] A noteworthy recent interpretation of the Promethean myth is found in Kerenyi, Miti e Misteri (Ital. ed.), Turin 1950, pp. 179-262.

[106] In a yet unpublished doctoral thesis of the Roman Antonianum on, Iqbal's philosophy, the Pakistani Franciscan Father Augustin Fernandes has tried to point out a few immanent Fichtean aspects of Iqbal's philosophy which are usually neglected by the Muslim scholars. In order to establish the exact role of these immanent elements which are (as shown by me in Concept of Time, foot-note 4 on p. 168) in a striking contrast with Iqbal's theism — which in my view appears far more characteristic — , it would be necessary to study thoroughly the God-World relationship in his "poetical" works.

[107] It is of interest to notice that Plato, whom with some over-simplification, Iqbal makes the great master of the mystical world, in Asrār (pp. 34 fi.) is declared head and guide of the "sheep" and opium of the nations etc. He therefore is substantially "satanic". Considering that Plato has also recently been called "the philosopher of the primitive mentality" (cf.. M. Eliade, op. cit., p. 64), it is undeniable that the intuition of Iqbal, whose aversion in particular towards that type of mentality has been exposed above, is psychologically correct — leaving its historical exactitude out of consideration.

[108] Cf. Courtois, op cit., p. 347.