AMERICAN, WEST EUROPEAN

AND SOVIET ATTITUDES TO IQBAL

Riaz Hussain

Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court of the United States says: "That (Iqbal's) simple tomb is a place of pilgrimage for me. For Iqbal was a man who belonged to all races; his concepts had universal appeal. He spoke to the conscience of men of goodwill whatever their tongue, whatever their creed."[1]

Acknowledging the debt of religion that the West owes to the East, the Judge writes: "One great contribution of the East to the West is charity or love, as epitomized by Muhammad and Christ, Buddha and Confucius."[2]

The judge is at one with Iqbal in condemning the machine for its role in turning man into an automaton. Iqbal's condemnation of capitalism and communism and his plea to mankind to inculcate spiritual values and control science and covetous instincts for the Public good are echoes of the Judge's own views. He quotes the following verses of Iqbal with hearty approval:

"The object of science and art is not knowledge;

The object of the garden is not the bud and the flower.

Science is an instrument for the preservation of life."[3]

In the following stanza, Judge Douglas reads the meaning that .a new spiritual understanding between the East and the West was uppermost in the poet's mind: "In the West intellect is the source of life.

In the East, love is the basis of life.

Through love intellect grows acquainted with reality.

And intellect gives stability to the work of love.

Arise and lay the foundations of a new world by wedding intellect to love."[4]

Commenting on this theme, Justice Douglas writes:

"The great needs these days is for bridges of understanding between the East and the West. The need is for bridges of understanding at the highest intellectual levels.[5]

This is an American plan which has only recently came to some fruition. A few American universities have recently set up schools for the study of Urdu Literature and Iqbal has received a fair amount of attention from American scholars. Actually, the Americans have lagged far behind the Russians in waking up to the significance of Iqbal as a power house generating Third World Movements.

Justice Douglas' verdict on Iqbal is even-handed. Some American Academicians, however, do not agree with him. Prof. W. Cantwell Smith, for instance, is the progenitor of a myth which has over the past decade been sedulously propagated by a school of Western Writers. Prof. Smith argues that since Iqbal was anti-capitalist and capitalism fosters intellect, hence Iqbal was anti-intellect.[6]

Now no connection between capitalism and intellect as Iqbal conceived it may be established. To prove that Iqbal was anti-intellect because he was anti-capitalist is to misread Iqbal. Whether Prof. Smith's canard against Iqbal is willful or due to incomprehension is hard to tell. The delight that an average American takes in defending capitalism and democracy is both genuine and unbounded. Freeland Abbot, Professor of History, Tuft's University asserts:

"Iqbal's view of the West was imperfect. He had not lived in the West long enough really to understand it. He was unable to picture the West apart from imperialism, and he apparently accepted the old Shibboleth that the West primarily fosters materialistic qualities, whereas the East primarily fosters spiritualistic qualities… an idea based on the belief that technology supplants religion."[7]

Prof. Abbot rebuts Iqbal's thesis on the West on the following grounds:

I. Iqbal's physical stay in the West was too brief for him to acquire perfect understanding of the West.

2. Iqbal's view of the West was coloured by the West's imperialistic role in the world. Impliedly, Iqbal did not see the science, economy, technology, democracy and .philosophy of the West in right perspective because of his prejudice against Imperialism.

3. Iqbal was anti-scientist, in other words, anti-intellect.

(An echo of Smith here!)

These are serious charges, but Prof. Abbot does not attempt to substantiate them.

Whether Prof. Abbot's arguments are imperfectly considered is better known to him. Changing tone, Prof. Abbot proceeds to establish another pet thesis i.e., Iqbal's ignorance of a half of the intellectual life of the West. By "half of the intellectual life of the West," Prof. Abbot means the works of Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, New England intellectuals whose work and fame have hardly survived their own age.

Prof. Abbot maintains that all that Iqbal could say in condemnation of Western Civilization had, all been said many times before by such American poets as Sidney Lanier and Walt Whitman. Not only that, but all the theories of Iqbal about the relationship of God and man were a mere repetition of the ideas of Emerson and Walt Whitman.

Delivering his final Judgment, Prof. Abbot observes:

"His (Iqbal's) vision of the West was naturally enough affected by his position, that of a proud Muslim remembering a proud past, and by his times, those of domination by Western Powers."[8]

Prof. Abbot's charges an Judgments offer but a poor defense against Iqbal's indict­ment of the West. The main burden of Prof. Abbot's thesis is that Iqbal did not understand the West since his stay in the West was too short. I wonder if this is meant as a serious argument.

Was Iqbal a journalist or a travelogue writer of the modern American type who, after a short stay in a country'', begins to pontificate on all aspects of its life? Of course, Iqbal was none of these. His intellectual and physical contact with the West had begun long before he went to Europe in 1905.

The educational milieu in which Iqbal spent his teens was thoroughly Western. He attended Colleges of the Western type, had European teachers and studied Western Philosophy and Literature. He lived and moved in an India wherein Politics, Law, Education, Manners, Dress, etc., had become Western.

Hence the impressions which Iqbal formed during his stay in Europe (1905—1908) were really an extension of the impressions which he had already formed by his contact with Western Civilization in India. Prof. Abbot's contention that Iqbal's knowledge of the West was imperfect because his stay in the West was zoo short is, therefore, untenable.

Mr. Abbot's second allegation that Iqbal's view of the West was coloured by his prejudice against imperialism is equally hollow. Prof. Abbot has quoted chapter and verse to prove that thoreau, Melville and Emerson found the same faults in Western Civilization as Iqbal did. Was their vision jaundiced also?

Is Justice William O. Douglas, as quoted above, anti-science, anti-intellect, anti-capitalism? Or are all these men of thought merely calling a spade a spade? The question does not seem to have occurred to Prof. Abbot. N. P. Anikoy, the Soviet biographer of Iqbal, states:

"(Iqbal is) great for his passionate condemnation of weak will and passiveness, his angry protest against inequality, discrimination and oppression in all forms i.e., economic, social, political, national, racial, religious, etc., his preaching of optimism, an active attitude towards life and man's high purpose in the world, in a word, he is great for his assertion of the noble ideals and principles of humanism, democracy, peace and friendship among peoples."[9]

Such a balanced and accurate assessment of Iqbal was not always a Soviet norm.

It may come as a surprise to many that long before West Europe or America took any serious notice of Iqbal, the Soviet scholars were earnestly keeping track of Iqbal's thought. The history of Iqbal studies in Russia goes back to the pre-1917. Bolshevik Revolution period Prof. A. E. Krimiski of the University of Moscow made use of Iqbal's dissertation on "The Development of Metaphysics in Persia" in his work "Persia, its History and Literature" (Moscow, 1912). Prof. Krimiski was deeply impressed by the sympathy and keenness of Iqbal's views on Persian Sufism and calls Iqbal "a European Educated Muslim who has treated the subject of Sufism with great sympathy."

An eclipse came over Iqbal studies in the Soviet Union during and immediately after the 1917 Revolution. Then, after a long gap, doctrinal reviews of Iqbal's thought and action began to appear in Soviet writings during the Sixties. The impetus to Iqbal studies in Russia was provided by the Pakistan Philosophical Congress held in Peshawar in April, 1956. The Russian delegates to the Congress assessed the deep influence that Iqbal's thought exercised on the minds of the Muslims in this region and elsewhere. They realized the uppermost folly of ignoring the works of one of the champions of freedom and a leading Muslim thinker of South East Asia. Accordingly, the three delegates carried to their country the complete works of Iqbal in order that a scholarly assessment be made of him. Then appeared a long line of works replete with several misconceptions. Gordon-Polonskeya in their book "The History of Pakistan" (Moscow, 1961) took the line that the demand for Pakistan was especially created by the British on the principle of "Divide and rule." On this arbitrary assumption, the joint authors conclude that the "Muslim demand for self-determination bifurcated the all-India National Movement.''[10]

The Soviet Encyclopedia 'published 1972 praises Iqbal for his anti-capitalism, humanism and dynamic outlook on life, but charges him with being in-consistent and unsystematic. "In his poetry," says the Encyclopedia, "Iqbal sang the creative activity of man and called him to a restructuring of human existence, his work inspired by humanism and patriotism. Notwithstanding this inspiration, the philosophical and political views of Iqbal were not free of contradiction. He was critical of capitalism, but defended property and individualism." What appears a "contradiction" to the Soviet Academician is no contradiction in Islam. A measure of the Soviet author's inherent inability to comprehend Islam may be taken from his naive statement that "Iqbal welcomed the 'October Revolution' and showed sympathy for socialism, writing the poem 'Lenin', but at the same time he expressed himself against communist atheism."

Actually, Iqbal was magnanimous enough to give praise where it was due and there is no denying the fact that he applauded humanistic goals of the October Revolution. It is, on the other hand, equally incontrovertible that because of communist disbelief in God, Iqbal did not see the salvation of mankind through communism. Hence there is no inconsistency in Iqbal's praise and condemnation of the October Revolution.[11]

Capitalist and communist intellectuals may not have anything in common, but their imperviousness to Islamic ideals is the common denominator. Hence their confused and arbitrary reactions to Iqbal. The earliest West European reaction to Iqbal came from Dickinson who, in his review of Asrar-e-Khudi, remarked:

"While Mr. Iqbal's philosophy is universal, his application of it is particular and exclusive. Only Muslims are worthy of the kingdom. The rest of the world is either to be absorbed or excluded."[12]

Whether Dickinson's ignorance of the purpose and ideal of Islam is feigned or real, it is hard to tell.

Iqbal thought that it was real and patiently explained to Dickinson: "The humanitarian ideal is always universal in poetry and philosophy, but if you make it an effective idea and work it out in actual life, you must start, not with poets and philosophers, but with a society exclusive in the sense of having a creed and well-defined outline, but ever enlarging its limits by example and persuasion. Such society, according to my belief, is Islam."

Iqbal pointed out to Dickinson that bigotry and prejudice were the hallmarks of the Western Society and not of Islam. All men, and not just Muslims, were worthy of the Kingdom of Allah.

"This (Islamic) Society has so far proved itself a more successful opponent of the race idea, which is probably the hardest barrier in the way of the humanitarian ideal… All men and not Muslims alone are meant for the Kingdom of God on Earth, provided they say goodbye to their idols of race and nationality and treat one another as personalities."[13]

In England, E. M. Forster, the novelist, was perhaps the first reviewer and critic of Iqbal's work outside Academic circles. Commenting on Iqbal's poem "The Temple of Love", Forster wrote,

"The glory of the courtyard from Meccas shall inhabit that temple, the images on its shrine shall be gold, inscribed Hindustan, and it shall wear both the Brahman thread and the Muslim rosary, and the Muezzin shall call worshippers to prayer upon a horn."[14]

E. M. Forster makes out as if Iqbal was propounding another Din-e-Elahi, containing elements of Hinduism and Islam. Such a faith might well have destroyed the distinct identity of either faith, which would have been tolerated neither by Hindus nor Muslims, as Akbar's experiment showed. Iqbal's temple is in India, but it is not of India. The temple is raised to love, which transcends the image in which it is expressed. It symbolizes the universal love which is the central purpose of Islam.

Despite Forster's readiness to misinterpret Iqbal on many points, he enjoys one major distinction of all the contemporary Indian or European critics of Iqbal in the early 1920s. Forster alone recognized that "poets in India cannot be parted from politics. Would that they could! But there is no hope in the present circumstances. One could as easily part Dante from Florence."[15]

To have recognized the political core of Iqbal's work as early as 1920, speaks volumes for Forster's perception of the dynamics of Indian life and letters.

NOTES AND REFERENCES