I was reminded by a fellow enthusiast that it being the 21st of April, it is Allama sahib’s death anniversary today. At the moment I’m not in a position to offer anything original but I thought I should do something to mark the day. So here is Ustad Nusrat singing his famous poem “khudi ka sirr e nehan, La ilah Ilallahu” (the hidden secret of the self is: no god but God). This sums up his message in more ways than one.
Part 1
Part 2
Nahin Maqam Ki Khugar tabeeyat e azaad
Hawa e seyr mashal e naseem peyda kar
Hazaar chashma terey sang e rah sey phootey
Khudi mein doob kar Zarb e Kaleem peyda kar!
Asalam-u-aleikum,
Iqbal wrote to the well known Nadwi scholar:
“Even the very concept of tasawwuf is an alien plant on the soil of Islam, one which has been brought up in the intellectual climate. of Ajamis (non-Arabs, specially Persians.”
My question to you, did he mean classical, mainstream tasawwuf all together, or only certian aspects of it?
Did he change his views later? What (or who) caused him to change his views? I’m guessing his ‘mureed-e-Hindi’ phase came later?
Did he ever go away from his un-orthodox views he wrote about in ‘Reconstruction’, like his evolutionbased thinking?
Dhu’l Nun,
Your question is interesting and is the subject of a full blown essay. However the short answer, in my view, is that Allama sahib’s views did undergo a development over time mainly due to personal experience. However to the end he remained a critic of what he called Ajami tasawwuf. He used this term to mean the tendency to withdraw from the demands of practical life, immersion in metaphysical speculation and a preoccupation with the occult sciences. This was one aspect of his stance. Another aspect was the result of his deep understanding of the abusive and exploitative potential of many institutional forms of tasawwuf especially in these latter ages. His scathing comments on this aspect are well known.
Thanks for you reply. If you know of any such full blown essays, from a traditional Sunni perspective, please let me know.
I have to admit, many of the modernist movements in Pak. today, their orgin is, in one way or the other, from Iqbal and Jinnah. Parwez, Ghamdi are two such examples.
I am at times, deeply inspired by Iqbal, but his views seem contradictory and they’ve confused generations after him.
I still don’t understand his praise of the wahabis, and his references to Maulana Rumi (ra). Wahabism is death to our culture, our heritage, and limits our intellectual and spiritual foundations. Didn’t he know they revolted against the Ottomans several times? They betrayed the Ummah and the Turks, yet he only praises Abdul Wahab.
It’s like he is part Salafi, part Sufi, part modernist and good at influencing all these groups through this poetry. Hence the messy Pakistan.
I have very similar views with respect to Iqbal and Dhu’l Nun. I enjoy his Sufi inspired urdu and farsi poems which I think are some of the best in the genre but I really don’t know what to make of his modernism. It seems that Iqbal was in some sense an embodiment of the tensions of his time.
Prof. SH Nasr once remarked that despite Iqbal’s intellectual abilities, he took the West too seriously. I think he had at times an occidental view of things re: disdain for so-called “ajami romanticism” and praise for socio-political reform.
In many ways most people are a product of their times and so was Iqbal. His views on many subjects were evolving e.g contrast his view of the works of Shaykh al Akbar in his early letters to those in his letter to Hz Mehr Ali Shah (ra). It is not the Iqbal of the Reconstruction that is remembered by posterity but the Iqbal of Baal e Jibreel and Armaghan e Hijaz.
I think the problem is that we are given to hero worship. Either our man is perfect and must be correct on every conceiveable matter or he’s not worth the bother. We need to accept people as they are, recognise their merits and not be duped into blindly accepting their errors.
As for Iqbal he never claimed to be an authority on Islam nor did he have any intention of founding some new school. The fault is ours if we choose to make him that mujaddid of the age.
I think by claiming to offer a “reconstruction” Iqbal himself was identifying himself as an authority/reformer. The hero worship, despite being a problem of his posterity that continues to this day, was in some sense given reason to flourish in his own lifetime because he placed himself into those shoes.
I am interested in reading more about the evolution of his views on Ibn Arabi. Could you suggest any books?