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Nandita Chaturvedi  Painting by KCS Paniker Paul Robeson had stated questions young Blacks might ask looking at an Africa ravaged by colonialism and poverty, “What of value has Africa to offer that the Western world cannot give me? (...) Where they exist, he is looking at the broken remnants of what was in its day a mighty thing; something perhaps that has not been destroyed, but driven underground, leaving ugly scars upon the earth’s surface to mark the place of its ultimate reappearance.”
Many young Indians today ask the same questions when they look at what is seen as Indian tradition. They see the prejudice, empty ritualism and superstitions of a clan structure warped by colonialism, and ask what has this to give us for the future? What is there for us in idols and temples that can answer the questions that confront us today? They see the poverty of the Indian people, the garbage that chokes all Indian cities, and ask, is our culture and value system to blame? There are others that seek to defend the tradition as our inheritance, yet see it as a static monolith which we must return to in order to defend ourselves against the cultural attacks of the West. Yet, ironically, they often believe versions of their tradition that were put forward by the West to keep India in subjugation. What was believed and upheld in the freedom movement of our nation is missed today: that Indian tradition, and indeed, religion is a means to further the project of human liberation. As such, it must also be a domain for ideological struggle for the people. It cannot be static or unchanging, stuck in a past that no longer exists, but must rise to the challenge of confronting the modern world. The history of Indian philosophy is in many ways the same as the history of religion in India. To be organic to this history means to recognise that debate has defined this tradition; that at every stage of our history, there are philosophical positions that emerge which seek to further human freedom, and those that seek to preserve the status quo. Religion is not separate from ideology and politics. It is the task of every young person seeking their place to know what has come before and strive for a new synthesis of their tradition that can show the way forward. This was the ethos of the non-violent struggle led by Gandhi that faced and changed the conditions caused by colonialism. Gandhi based himself in the Geeta and fashioned Hindu thought and philosophy into a weapon of mass struggle. It is the purpose of this essay to look at two figures that worked on the ideas that Gandhi put into practice: Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Muhammad Iqbal. Both figures are rejected by much of the left today as conservatives and nationalists, yet both worked out a profound revolutionary thought drawing from the traditions of Hindu and Muslim philosophy which then became part of the Indian freedom movement. They sought ideas organic to the Indian people that could strengthen them in the struggle for self determination. They squarely confronted the West and its claims of scientific superiority through ideas. This essay will argue that they indeed belong together and must be studied as revolutionary figures by the Indian youth as it makes its future. Geeta Rahasya and Asrar E Khudi Geeta Rahasya, Tilak’s commentary on the Geeta was published in 1915. Iqbal’s epic poem, Asrar-E-Khudi was published in the same year in Persian. 1915 was also the year that Gandhi returned to India after his time in South Africa. Both Tilak and Iqbal were witness to the degradation of the Indian people under colonialism. They saw their people crippled with hunger, poverty and illiteracy, unable till then to pose a sustained challenge to colonialism. They saw the elite classes of India aping the whites, aspiring to the British lifestyle and turning their backs on the Indian masses. They saw the elite behave in pathetic and spineless ways, justifying the ideas that perpetuated colonial rule in India. Iqbal had returned from getting his PhD in philosophy in Germany in 1908. He then set up a law practice in Lahore but focussed on writing poetry and philosophy. Iqbal saw how aspects of religion broadly, and Indian Islam in particular, had been contorted to suit colonial rule. He saw the preachers of Islam promise their followers dreams of a heaven beyond, and only an escape from the brutalities of their lives. He saw his people justify inaction with claims of an acceptance of God’s will. In words they talked of giving up their lives to God, but in effect gave up their agency to the British. Iqbal saw the need for a spiritual awakening of his people, a strengthening of their selves so that they could engage in struggle. He saw the need for a new synthesis of ideas that would allow Islam once again to be used as a weapon against injustice. This is what took him to writing Asrar-E-Khudi in which he sets out the basis for a new philosophy, rooted in the old, but striving for the future: “I have no need of the ear of To-day, I am the voice of the poet of To-morrow.” Tilak began his study of the Gita to understand the relationship between the religion he was born into and the world he saw around him. His elders had told him from a young age that attempting to achieve liberation meant renouncing the world. The corruption and codification of Hinduism in that time meant that the religion had become a means for retreat and escape from the horrors of colonialism, instead of a means to engage with and change the world. In the face of this Tilak asked, “Does my religion want me to give up this world and renounce before I attempt to, or in order to be able to, attain the perfection of manhood?” He saw all around him examples of the Indian elite who proclaimed piousness and the rules of right conduct according to religion, but could not face the White man ruling them and their people. When faced with the choice between comfortable living in an unjust system, and sacrifice, they chose the former. In some ways aspects of what Tilak was addressing continue on in Indian society to this day. The opulence of Indian temples and the rigidness of rules, unwilling to give way to the new, drive away young people who wish to engage with the world. As Tilak had asked, any young person born into a Hindu family may ask today: does my faith have nothing to do with the world we see around us? Are we to go to work in Western companies, emulate the American lifestyle, while practicing an empty ritualism on the side? Indeed, is a striving for a more just world at odds with my religion? And so Tilak began a study of the Gita and found in it the answer he had been searching for: “The conclusion I have come to is that the Gita advocates the performance of action in this world even after the actor has achieved the highest union with the Supreme Deity by Gnana (knowledge) or Bhakti (Devotion). This action must be done to keep the world going on the right path of evolution which the creator has destined the world to follow.” Life is an Endeavor for Freedom: Action, Vice-Regency Tilak wrote Gita Rahasya then to clarify that if the book is approached with an open mind, without the influences of western thought, the Gita asks us to engage in just action. We may today look back at Gandhi’s movement which drew on this thought and call it revolutionary action. Inherent in Tilak’s work and interpretation of the Gita was a criticism of the Indian elite and middle classes who had accepted British rule and saw their ‘duty’ within the exploitative system of colonialism to achieve good standing with a higher God. He says, “If man seeks unity with the Deity, he must necessarily seek unity with the interests of the world also, and work for it. If he does not, then the unity is not perfect, because there is union between two elements out of the 3 (man and Deity, and the third (the world) is left out.” Tilak clarifies in his work that other interpreters of the Gita call for a path to liberation through knowledge (Gyan yoga) or devotion (Bhakti). Yet, he sees the main thrust of its message as action guided by knowledge and enriched by devotion. Thus, within his commentary was an appeal to the poor, that liberation was accessible to all, irrespective of wealth or social standing. One must know in order to act, and knowledge amassed without purpose was useless and decadent. Thus, the striving for freedom within religion, and indeed, in the world was not the domain or property of intellectuals. Similarly, Iqbal explored in Asrar-E-Khudi the concept of Vice Regency. “We are gradually traveling from chaos to cosmos and are helpers in this achievement. Nor are the members of the association fixed; new members are ever coming to birth to co-operate in the great task. Thus the universe is not a completed act: it is still in the course of formation. … The process of creation is still going on and man too takes his share in it, in as much as he helps to bring order into at least a portion of the chaos. The Quran indicates the possibility of other creators than God.” For Iqbal, in order to become co-creators of the world, the people of India had to strengthen their individual selves. “In one word -- life is an endeavor for freedom,” he said. Iqbal also believed that knowledge was not the end, but must serve a higher purpose, which was life itself. “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, Science is a means of invigorating the self.” In order to develop the self, one had to keep one's personality in tension, to confront contradictions within oneself and in the world. The self was fortified by love, and weakened by asking. And how could one overcome contradictions and tension to evolve closer to God? The answer lay in taking revolutionary action. “Subject, object, means and causes -- all these are forms it (Life) assumes for the purpose of action.” Iqbal even denied love as assimilative action: “Thus, in order to fortify the ego, we should cultivate love, i.e. the power of assimilative action, and avoid all forms of asking, i.e. inaction.” Thus we see these two intellectual giants follow different paths -- yet arrive at the same conclusions that draw from Hindu, Islamic, Sufi and Western philosophy. In the first preface to Asrar-E-Khudi, Iqbal says, “In the intellectual history of humanity, the name of Shri Krishna will always be taken with courtesy and respect — that this great man, in an extremely captivating way, criticized his land and people's philosophical traditions, and made the truth apparent that the renunciation of action is not the renunciation of everything. Because action is a requirement of nature, and through it arises life’s stability. Rather, by renunciation of action is meant that there should be absolutely no attachment of the heart to action and its results.” The Individual Self in Modern India The racist narrative about Asia and Africa paints the people of these continents as a sea of nameless faces. In the eyes of the white world, and indeed for their collaborators within India, the Indian poor are vaguely ‘collective’ and do not have individual personalities. This is a convenient philosophy when world order is built to extract surplus value from their labor, and to treat them as sub-human. It is only the western man who is allowed to be an individual with aspirations, desires and existential concerns. Yet, the anticolonial struggle in India saw the people of India wake up to their individual potentials. The India of today is the result of this anticolonial project that has allowed a large section of dark humanity to rise from poverty and engage in the project of human science, art and philosophy. It is Iqbal’s conception of the individual that must guide the consciousness of this humanity going forward. As other articles in this issue will illustrate, the individual for Iqbal was a fundamental category of understanding the world, yet different from existentialism or liberal thought. His ideas were modern ideas. He says, “What then is life? It is individual: its highest form, so far, is the ego (khudi) in which the individual becomes a self‐contained exclusive centre. Physically as well as spiritually man is a self‐contained centre, but he is not yet a complete individual. The greater his distance from God, the less his individuality. He who comes nearest to God is the completest person. Not that he is finally absorbed in God. On the contrary, he absorbs God into himself.” In reading Iqbal’s Asrar-E-Khudi, one cannot but think of the freedom fighters that made up Gandhi’s movement, and Gandhi himself. They tell the story of a principled individual strengthened to the point where the world has to change to fit them. One also thinks of the figures that came out of the Civil Rights movement in America, and for me, these are the men and women I have studied most deeply and come into contact with who illustrate what Iqbal is describing. One thinks of Martin Luther King Jr, James Lawson and Diane Nash, whose moral authority and just action changed the American nation forever. These remarkable people did not lead their lives on terms dictated by society, yet determined the terms on which society must re-make itself. They used only their Selves to take on the responsibility of an entire nation. They set an example which, in turn, changed the nation itself. Although theories of class struggle and revolution based themselves on the best of European thinking: Hegel and Marx, it is from India that the theory of non-violence arose. While being a theory of social change and revolution, it is essentially individual: it relies on each student of non-violence realizing and striving for principles that can guide human society. Yet the beauty of the philosophy lies in its universal nature; anyone, indeed the poorest and the weakest can adopt the struggle for strengthening of the self. In fact, in reading Iqbal, one is struck by how naturally his ideas address poor and working people. “Albeit thou art poor and wretched And overwhelmed by affliction, Seek not thy daily bread from the bounty of another, Seek not water from the fountain of the sun, Lest thou be put to shame before the Prophet On the Day when every soul shall be stricken with fear. The moon gets sustenance from the table of the sun And bears the brand of his bounty on her heart. Pray God for courage! Wrestle with Fortune! Do not sully the honour of the pure religion!” Unlike the present liberal discourse which paints the poor as victims to be pitied or criminals to be wary of, Iqbal’s writing is a call and a challenge to the poor. In this regard, both Tilak and Iqbal remind one of Gandhi, who gave the call for the poor to make themselves worthy of Swaraj and self rule. The poor have immense moral and intellectual capabilities, and these revolutionaries saw that the future depended on their capability to develop these. They addressed directly and put into action a program to increase the capacity of the Indian people for struggle. Love and Non-Violence Thus, both Tilak and Iqbal’s ideas and work seem to form the philosophical basis of what became the Indian freedom struggle. Central to Gandhi and Iqbal’s philosophical foundation is love, which seems so starkly missing from European philosophy. Perhaps the closest parallel one can draw is the thought of Martin Luther King Jr. In his words, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” In Asrar-E-Khudi, Iqbal writes, Be a lover constant in devotion to thy beloved, That thou mayst cast thy nose and capture God. Sojourn for a while on the Hira of the heart. Abandon self and flee to God. Strengthened by God, return to thy self And break the heads of the Lat and Uzza of sensuality. By the might of Love evoke an army Reveal thyself on the Faran of Love, That the Lord of the Ka‘ba may show thee favour And make thee the object of the text, “Lo, I will appoint a vicegerent on the earth.” Central to Iqbal’s thought is the idea that through love and a strengthening of the self man can become a vice regent to god on earth. He can become a maker of the world, and by the might of love evoke an army. Gandhi and King worked on similar lines, King called love ‘the sword that heals’. Although Tilak did not explicitly speak about love, we can today see Gandhi’s ideas as a development on what he had built. Tilak’s practice was guided by a deep love for the people, and he was one of the first leaders to carry out ideological struggle among the people through his organization of large scale festivals in an anticolonial spirit. Gandhi often referred to love as a guiding and organizing force in the world, “The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force…. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force.” Gandhi’s ideas on nonviolence direct action rested upon his conception of truth, soul force and love. This world view is not at odds with the ideas of Iqbal, rather it flows naturally from his poetry. There is an effort today to paint the men and women who were part of our freedom movement as intellectuals, artists, organizers and politicians in extreme colors. The intelligentsia of today would have you believe that the freedom movement’s greatest names were narrow nationalists who defended social oppression. The truth cannot be farther from this, and we must call this ideology what it is: an effort to keep the next generation of Indians away from their revolutionary legacy. A people who do not know their history are lost, and easily manipulated. Much rests on the people of India in this time when the world is transitioning to a new stage. It is imperative that we rediscover our revolutionary thought, and Iqbal and Tilak represent two of its most profound proponents. The young people of India need the ideas of love, revolutionary action and khudi to build a new future.
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Jahan Choudhry  Painting by Rabindranath Tagore We live in the aftermath of perhaps the most consequential movement in modern history, the world anti-colonial movement. This movement succeeded in securing political freedom for most of humanity. It has made unprecedented progress in the educational and economic upliftment of the masses through increasing literacy, housing, standard of living, and life expectancy. On the ideological plane it destroyed the notion that the alleged civilizational superiority of the West gave it the right to politically enslave the rest of the world. It smashed the scientific belief in white supremacy and the color-line. It has given billions of people a say in the way their societies and, indeed, world affairs are run for the first time in human history. Quite apart from Western bourgeois notions of liberal democracy, these were massive gains in achieving what W.E.B. Du Bois called “world democracy”. The leading lights of the world anti-colonial movement developed a new set of ideas to serve darker humanity, synthesizing the progressive elements of the European Enlightenment with the best of the civilizations of Asia and Africa. Allama Muhammad Iqbal was one of the pioneers of anti-colonial thought in Asia, synthesizing the radical element of the Enlightenment with Islamic and Indian philosophy and developing a literature to awaken the masses of the East to claim their rightful place in history.
The advent of the unipolar world, globalization, and the rampage of Western imperialism since 1991 have weakened these gains. Western intellectuals and Eastern purveyors of neocolonialism have made racist arguments about corruption, primordial ethnic conflict and the inefficiency of socialism in the Third World. Much intellectual work has been done to erase the memory of anti-colonial victories in the youth so that they do not have a base with which to envision a better and more democratic future. History, philosophy, sociology, and political economy have all become victims of this assault. We are in an era in which much economic and technological progress has been made by the formerly colonized nations, especially in Asia. However, the threat of neocolonialism remains and retains a strong hold over the minds of the people of the East. Religious fundamentalism, cultural nationalism, and other ideologies of obscurantism offer little resistance to the West when they refuse to engage with Western philosophy nor do they make any attempt to bring Eastern philosophy into relevance for the modern world. In this exciting but perilous era, the philosophy of Allama Dr. Muhammad Iqbal provides an example for a way of thinking that can contribute to the rise of the darker nations and the freeing of humanity. The Oppressed Engage the Enlightenment Every corner of the world we live in has been touched by Western thought, technology, politics, and culture. The darker peoples of the world have only recently emerged from the political subjugation and civilizational stagnation engendered by Western colonialism. The challenge since the dawn of the anti-colonial struggle has been to reject the innate superiority of the West over all of humanity. A serious rejection of the superiority of Western civilization entails a mastery of its highs and a knowledge of its lows, giving darker humanity a full understanding of how the present world came to be and the possibility to choose a different path than the one dictated by the Western elites. If science is the key to the modern era, and Western science claims supremacy, then it must be philosophy, what Hegel called the Science of Sciences, that is the fundamental battleground for the future of human thought. Allama Iqbal was a pioneer model of the Eastern philosopher engaging with the heights of Western philosophy but rejecting its inherent supremacy, and retaining the right to work out his own synthesis to serve the majority of humanity outside of the fold of Western civilization. The European Enlightenment, fuelled by the knowledge of Africa and Asia, laid the groundwork for political revolutions that brought the masses of the West into the struggle for politics, art, and culture for the first time. However, for Asia and Africa, this was the period of the advent of colonial rule, degradation and the advent of the color-line. Humanity soared to new heights and fell to new lows. Colonial rule trapped the peoples of the East in the ugliness of political slavery and the social backwardness of feudalism. For instance, 1857 marked the full tragic colonial conquest of India by British power. History shows us the heroism of the fighters against British encroachment uniting in the name of Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. Yet the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, through ornate metaphors, protests the decay of the Mughal system and the failure of the Mughal intellegentsia to break from its old ways of thinking to meet the new modern power of the British. The barbarism of British conquest and rule was justified through the concept of the color-line and the civilizing mission. After the foreign military conquest, some among the colonized sought a simplistic return to the pre-colonial order and refused to engage the new ideas animating the world. Another group of “reformers” accepted the “civilizing mission” of the colonizers and sought to uncritically remold colonized society in the image of liberal Europe. There was a need for a new set of thinkers who would be able to engage the ideas of modern Europe, the ideas animating the dominant civilization of the West, in a bid to assert the humanity and dignity of the colonized people. A new struggle emerged not just to turn back history to the pre-colonial era but to understand the new world and the possibilities it held for the colonized. New philosophical concepts such as the interconnectedness of all human beings, new notions of democracy and socialism, the need for reconstruction of religion, and a revolutionary notion of love were developed as common philosophical assumptions for a new world vision. Out of this thinking came the emergence of the Bandung Spirit and the struggle for world democracy. Though this project has weakened since the end of the Cold War, our time is one to return to this ideological and political project. Our task is to accept the challenge of standing on the shoulder of these giants to claim humanity’s revolutionary future. Iqbal emerged as a model of this type of intellectual. Iqbal: The Poet of Self-Respect and Awakening As Ali Sardar Jafri described him, Allama Iqbal is a poet of the awakening of Muslims, of Indians, and of Asia. Crediting the East with developing a philosophy of the self with action as its basis, Iqbal recognized the ways that Eastern traditions such as Hinduism and Islam had lost their original message of action in a retreat towards refuge in pantheism. He credited the European Enlightenment for rediscovering this philosophy of action in taking it forward in the development of modern science and rationality, but developed a critique of the severe limitations of modern European thought that had minimized the role of ethics and morality. Iqbal was born in 1877 as English education was beginning to take hold of the Indian Muslim intelligentsia with the founding of the Anglo Mohammedan College in Aligarh, later known as Aligarh Muslim University. Besides the small minority which Macaulay hoped to convert to Englishmen, the colonial government had little interest in educating the Indian populace. Though young Iqbal’s primary education was in the madrassa system, providing him a command over Arabic, Persian and Urdu, a forward thinking maulvi recommended he attend an English mission high school. His hard work and good fortune led him not only to the elite Government College in Lahore but also led his British teachers to recommend him for higher studies at Cambridge University. At a time when it was more usual to study law, Iqbal took the rare step of pursuing an MA and then a PhD in philosophy. Though the MA was in Cambridge, the PhD was in Germany, where he was not hindered by the conservatism of English empiricism or analytic philosophy but was freed by the relative openness to the East and radicalism of German thought. From his dissertation one sees a comparative analysis of the development of Persian Sufi Metaphysics with the thought of European philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, along with numerous references to Greek and Hindu philosophy. Iqbal was the rare colonial subject privileged to study European philosophy during the high point of empire. His education in Europe and his living there during its zenith as the “center of the world” did not produce in him an uncritical submission but rather triggered a great awakening. Indeed, Ali Sardar Jafri would describe Allama Iqbal as a poet of awakening, of Muslims, of Indians, and of Asia as a whole. It was in Lahore in 1904 that Iqbal penned “Sare Jahan Se Acha Hindustan Hamara” (Better than the whole world, our India). The poem not only praised the beauty of India and all of its people, but its lesser known lines contrast the continuity and dynamism of Indian civilization with Rome, Egypt, and Greece, “though the passing of time for centuries has always been our enemy”. The poet ends with “Iqbal! No‐one in this world has ever known your secret / Does anyone know the pain I feel inside me?” indicating an awareness of where he stood in terms of the social consciousness of the society. In a poem entitled March 1908, while studying in Europe, Iqbal penned verses that would be a theme of his work: Diyar-e-Maghrib Ke Rehne Walo ! Khuda Ki Basti Dukan Nahin Hai Khara Jise Tum Samajh Rahe Ho, Woh Ab Zr-e-Kam Ayaar Ho Ga O inhabitants of the Western world, God’s world is not a market! What you are considering genuine, will be regarded counterfeit. Tumhari Tehzeeb Apne Khanjar Se Ap Hi Khudkushi Kare Gi Jo Shakh-e-Nazuk Pe Ashiyana Bane Ga, Na Paidar Ho Ga Your civilization will commit suicide with its own dagger The nest built on the weak branch will not be permanent, stable Iqbal realized at a young age that Western civilization’s values were tied up with capitalism. Iqbal’s first employment after his MA in Lahore was a lecturer in economics, and his first publication was a translation of Western economic thought into an Urdu textbook. Nevertheless, his analysis of European civilization at its height did not lead him to analyze it merely through economics. Though his subsequent poetry would demonstrate admiration for the works of Marx and Lenin, he did not proceed through Marxist categories. Though basing himself on Islamic and especially Sufi philosophy, his critique of the West was not a superficial rejection but determined by a deep study of the heights of Western philosophy. Khudi: The development of the individual to awaken humanity The modernization process of colonized societies was blocked by colonialism. The anti-colonial movement placed darker humanity in the process of what Marx termed the ‘absolute movement of becoming’, the transition from one stage of society to another. One central question that arose in colonial and feudal conditions was the question of the individual’s relationship to society. A philosophy had to be put forward to address this question. Darker humanity had to struggle for freedom from colonial domination alongside waging a struggle for a new type of free individual. In engaging with the question of the individual, Iqbal developed the concept of Khudi in order to show how darker humanity might move all of humanity forward through self-respect and self-actualization. Unlike the rebellion of thinkers like Nietzchse and later, the movement of existentialism, Iqbal's search for the self went from his own religion and culture to a universal human vision for the future. He made a major contribution in recovering Eastern philosophy with his dissertation “the History of Metaphysics in Persia '' utilizing German philosophy to analyze the oeuvre of metaphysical thought in Persia from Zoroaster to the Bahai’i movement. Persia was a place where Greek, Egyptian, Indian, and Islamic philosophy met. Iqbal used Insights from this philosophical study for Asrar-e-Khudi which laid out his understanding of Khudi, or the self. He engaged and challenged Sufi pantheism, which held the submergence of the individual into the divine as the goal of spirituality. Drawing from Maulana Rumi, among others, he called for the individual to take on the attributes of God and return to a life of action in the world. Where Khudi was invoked as a negative thing, to be dissolved into God, Iqbal held Khudi and its development as central to existence. Where Sufi philosophy was divided between the basis of all as God versus God and his creation being separate, Iqbal argued that Khudi is the eternal form of all things. Even being reunited with God they individual Khudi’s would not dissipate. It was not agony to be separated from the divine in this life but a joy of constant striving. For example, he inverted the traditional Sufi metaphor of music as an expression of the instrument’s longing for the seed bed from which it is made. The metaphor alludes to music as longing for a return to the divine. In Iqbal’s retelling, the instrument coming out of the seed bed is an expression of the instrument’s desire to become itself, and musical notes similarly long to be released from the instrument. The striving of each being to achieve its potential and purpose is the reason for its existence. Being and becoming is an active process that is the fundamental nature of existence and ultimately the way to God. Each individual must strive not to surrender, but to become. Iqbal called on each person to raise their Khudi to its highest level. HIs call was for “a Kingdom of God on Earth” as “democracy of more or less unique individuals, presided over by the most unique individual on Earth”. This is a call for a world where every human being can have full development and in which no one would be reduced to begging another, but rather have the power to transmute handfuls of dust into gold. In a world order dominated by greed and the diminishing of man, he challenged those who would put down the dignity of man. He also challenged the colonial middle class that sought nothing but offices and financial gain: Ae Tair-e-Lahooti! Uss Rizq Se Mout Achi Jis Rizq Se Ati Ho Parwaz Mein Kotahi O Bird, who flies to the Throne of God, You must keep this truth in sight, To suffer death is nobler far Than bread that clogs your upward flight. As part of this process of becoming, there was the need to reimagine religious philosophy in a more democratic way. By keeping his philosophy centred on the individual’s development, Iqbal inverted the meaning of religion from acceptance of the world as God’s will to the raising of the colonized individual to shape destiny. Khudi Ko Kar Buland Itna Ke Har Taqdeer Se Pehle Khuda Bande Se Khud Puche, Bata Teri Raza Kya Hai Develop the self so that before every decree God will ascertain from you: “What is your wish?” In Shikwa and Jawab-e-Shikwa, Iqbal challenged the religious authorities' resignation about colonialism in India and the broader Muslim world. His poetry challenged fatalism about taqdeer, divinely ordained destiny, when he not only wrote a critique of God’s disloyalty to the faithful Muslims but also wrote a reply castigating the Muslim intelligentsia in the voice of God. Not one to shy away from world events, Iqbal’s religious imaginary allowed for none other than V.I. Lenin to serve as a foremost example of raising one’s self to God, as in the poem Lenin Before God, the revolutionary castigates almighty Allah for failing the workers of the world. Lenin’s challenge leads Allah to call on his angels to deliver the message of the revolt of the poor against all forms of oppressive authority. Additionally, Iqbal’s Khudi sought to constantly renew life through various understandings of love emerging from Sufi thought. God is not separate from man nor is he a refuge from the world of action, but God’s attributes represent an infinite goal for the growth of man. Iqbal saw through the ugliness of a colonized world to the possibility of man rising to new heights, of dedicating himself solely to love and morality. Arzu, the desire for the impossible, and justuju, the quest to achieve purpose, could awaken man’s innate personality into transformative striving. Iqbal’s love whether prem, mohabbat, ishq, are powerful forces guiding the self into higher and higher forms. He identifies a new patriotic feeling among India’s communities with a “Naya Shivala”, or new Temple, whose foundation will be preet, love. He identifies the masjid of Cordoba, the highpoint of Muslim civilization in Europe, with Ishq, the only force humans will leave behind in this world. He sees the history of human achievement and civilization as having love as its foundation. Iqbal’s emphasis on khudi, the self, and love as central to his vision for the future parallels anti-colonial thinkers such as Du Bois and Gandhi in seeing democracy as based on the ability of all individuals to develop themselves to their full potential with the goal of fulfilling the potential of all. Need for Inter-civilizational Unity Iqbal’s message is not comfortable for a colonized mindset that only seeks worldly gain and conformity. That either bows down to the West or seeks spiritual refuge from the struggles of this world. Cold reason will not allow us to see a new world nor will it give the youth the courage to sacrifice for it. A multipolar world, or world democracy as Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois termed it, requires the philosophy of Rumi to be as appreciated as Shakespeare, and Iqbal to be as relevant as Goethe. Iqbal’s body of work seeks to present the individuals throughout Indian, Islamic and world history including Ram, Nanak, Karl Marx, Einstein, Shakespeare, Ghalib. It covers the highs and lows of history in Muslim, Asian and Western civilizations. Iqbal is a force for a new human culture whose literature rejects the domination of one civilization over others, and sees the common moral and spiritual heritage of humanity as its basis. Iqbal’s vision shows us that Islam, and the other religions of the East, will not go through a reformation making them comfortable for Western liberalism, now in the process of devouring its own values, but will go through a democratic reconstruction with the masses as the agents. This will be a transition to a new world, whose final point we cannot see yet but whose need is urgent. In this process, South Asia moves forward with a strong policy of sovereignty by India and Bangladesh, as well as a growing consciousness of the need for independence against neocolonialism in Pakistan. There is talk of civilization but confusion on how the essence of the region and its people will rejuvenate its civilization and take a new democratic form. It must be the people of the subcontinent who return to him. Imran Khan, who fights for haqeeqi azadi, or real freedom, is an ardent admirer of Iqbal who accuses the Pakistani elites of cowardice as against Iqbal’s empathy for the struggle of the masses. The poet whose work spanned Delhi, Lucknow, Allahabad, Hyderabad and Madras belongs as much to the Republic of India too. A real unity among the people of South Asia will be constructed upon going back to the heritage of the struggle against colonialism. Iran is perhaps the country that has appreciated the revolutionary message of the great Indo-Persian poet the most. A natural basis exists for the unity of these countries on their shared anti-colonial heritage. The anti-colonial movement has greater potential than the European Enlightenment. It has already given more people lives of dignity and for the first time in history given them a voice in the running of world affairs. Iqbal wrote his works on the concept of the self as a PhD holder at a time when very few of his fellow Indians or other Asians could even hope to graduate high school. Now there are a billion plus people in place with an understanding to grapple with the questions of the self and the future of the human personality. Democracy requires that this new wave of humanity must have an opportunity to grapple with the ideas of thinkers like Iqbal who present an alternative to the Western paradigm. Billions of new human personalities must have the right to develop their “khudi”, to develop their own strivings for the ultimate purpose of life. Western imperialism seeks to block this with new ideologies grounded in the end of humanity through artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and other anti-human worldviews. Though the Western elites say humanity’s role in the world is ending, the anti-colonial revolution shows us that it is only beginning with the world’s non-western majority claiming their rightful place in world history. Though much work is left to be done to fully empower the masses, we are at the threshold of a new stage of history. The rise of major economies of the Third World into organizations such as BRICS+ are a very significant development. However, the real revolution will not be the emergence only of economic or political systems to rival the West but the emergence of new systems of values. At the foundation of this will be a new culture based on a new philosophy. BRICS+ must be built on the heritage of Bandung and the sacrifice of masses of anti-colonial fighters of all stripes. Iqbal was a pioneer of this project which must come to fruition in our time. |
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