The enigma of Muhammad Iqbal
Title: Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician
Writer: Zafar Anjum
Publisher: Random House India, 2014
Extent: 195 pp.
In Pakistan, much of the national energies are spent to eulogize the great poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who is credited with being not only the poet of the East, but also the thinker who imagined, perhaps insufficiently, the birth of a new Muslim country from within undivided India.
Meanwhile in India, where Iqbal was born, lived and died while it was still a British colony without witnessing for himself the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the poet is now little-known save for one of the nationalistic poems he bequeathed to his love for Mother India, in his ‘nationalist’ phase, Saare Jahan say Achcha Hindustan Hamara.
Summing up the two ‘tragedies’ which have befallen Iqbal, the writer Zafar Anjum remarks in his Introduction to the book Iqbal, “Iqbal’s first tragedy was that after his death, he was claimed as the national poet of Pakistan and was largely ignored in India. His second tragedy is that Pakistan, a country that was founded on the basis of religion…practically forgot its own national poet. Similarly, in India, Iqbal remains a pariah and the majority of people know little about his life or his work.”
So why is yet another book on Pakistan’s national poet needed in the 21st century? Especially when so many of the Indian subcontinent’s best-known intellectual and literary figures continue to be pilloried at the altars of Indian and Pakistani nationalism? One has seen similar treatment being meted out to Saadat Hasan Manto, Miraji and Noon Meem Rashid.
I suspect Anjum has directed the book at an Indian rather than a Pakistani audience, which has by now been nourished on a rather indigestible diet of Iqbal’s motivational, often male-chauvinistic poetry ad nauseam in the national media, following a neat mummification by the country’s insecure postcolonial elite. His aims in writing the book are admittedly modest: “I don’t claim it to be a comprehensive account, for to write such a book would require a lot of time and research, and in the time that I was given, I have tried my best.”
In fact, my initial elation at perusing yet another book on Iqbal published from India was soon dissipated since there is little in this short book which is new or original about its protagonist. No doubt, in the hands of a devotee like Anjum, the well-worn details of Iqbal’s personal and public life are brought to life in an engaging narrative style for a newer and younger audience, which may only have been introduced to the poet through a narrow chauvinistic lens.
The book then is written in a flowing, literary style; however one is at a loss to understand why the writer has not referenced the earlier biographical work on Iqbal by Iqbal Singh and Mustansir Mir, or the nuanced work on Iqbal’s connections to postcolonialism by Javed Majeed. Also it is disappointing to note that Anjum has not gone through the labours of primary or archival research, or even attempting to translate some of the verses from Iqbal he chooses in the book himself, merely rather lazily relying on existing online resources for the same, despite the fact that Iqbal has been blessed with good translators like Victor Kiernan, Annemarie Schimmel and Khushwant Singh in the past. In addition, Anjum’s newer, younger readership would have benefitted immensely had he chosen to illustrate Iqbal’s varied literary prowess by adding a few of the latter’s famous poems like Naya Shivala, Khizar-e-Rah, Masjid-e-Qurtuba, Farman-e-Khuda, Saqi Nama, Shikwa, Jawab-e-Shikwa etc. in the Appendices; as well as some more meticulous editing: ubiquitous spelling mistakes and repeated references to the same details and facts abound in the main text, as well as the notes.
So how does one explain the enigma of Iqbal, the nationalist poet whose shifting political and ideological loyalties throughout his life defy categorization, yet he is regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation, and possibly the last great Muslim thinker? From singing paeans to the syncretism of Indian civilization, to an anti-imperialist and later pan-Islamist poet-philosopher, before ending up as the dreamer of a separate Muslim homeland he was never to see in his own lifetime. Iqbal is not alone in embodying such contradictions. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats too made a torturous journey from an ardent nationalist espousing armed struggle to one renouncing it; Iqbal’s great contemporary and literary rival – some say Iqbal vainly tried to emerge out of his shadow regarding himself as the greater poet of the two – the Bengali bard Rabindranath Tagore, the bête noire of nationalism, ended up giving three of his poems as the national anthems of three post-colonial states: India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Despite these contradictions, Iqbal has something to offer everybody, regardless of the school of thought. One wishes Anjum had spent more time on the poet’s ‘anti-imperialist’ phase when he wrote poems like Lenin Khuda kay Huzoor Main, Naya Shivala, Khizar-e-Rah, Farman-e-Khuda, outlining his emancipatory vision not only for India but also the Muslim world. This emancipatory vision also led to his famous series of lectures collected together as Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam and in a letter he wrote to Jinnah in May 1937, outlining a blueprint for a social democratic Pakistan.
How would Iqbal have felt and fared had he survived to witness the country he envisioned in 1947? Anjum doesn’t spend much time in answering this question but one has enough evidence now to conclude that both he and his vision would have been swept aside by the nexus of clerics and the civil-military bureaucracy which have brought much ruin to Pakistan, including the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. In this context, Iqbal is little more than a failed poet.
What the book successfully does is to bring out the mass of contradictions Iqbal was in his personal life, something which is often ignored or understated in the halo of hagiography surrounding Iqbal in Pakistan. His love affairs with Atiya Faizi and his German tutor Emma Wegenast were unrequited, while his three marriages survived long enough to yield the promise of a fulfilling family life.
In the light of Pakistan’s subsequent evolution since Iqbal’s death, one is inclined to question the Pakistani state’s enthroning of Muhammad Iqbal as our national poet. After all, Iqbal wrote most of his poetry in Persian, the official Indian language before 1857 and not Urdu, one of the pillars of the new state born from the ashes of the old in 1947. Moreover, Iqbal never lived in the independent Muslim state he dreamed of. And as Saadat Hasan Manto presciently noted in his presidential remarks on Iqbal Day, sometime in the early 1950s, “there are two grievances which I must express. The first grievance occurred when a self-respecting poet like Iqbal had to write odes to fictional kings. Another is cropping up now when I see the poet who declared, in Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, the heavens, earth, air, rivers, mountains and valleys, the sun, moon and stars, fruits and flowers in fact the whole universe to be Man’s inheritance, his ascetic poetry being controlled by a few self-serving custodians.
Iqbal had prayed to God, “Spread the light of my vision everywhere.” This prayer which issued from a humane heart will indeed be granted but upon seeing the name of this great poet affiliated with soaps, oils, hotels and laundries, sometimes I feel that the light of his vision will keep wandering for a long time in the narrow and dark lanes of ignorance.
A diamond’s heart maybe cut by a flower petal
But a naïve man will be unmoved by verses soft and delicate.”
It is perhaps time to admit to ourselves the failure of both the pock-marked vision as well as the Kashmiri seer to which this vision is infallibly attributed.
(Raza Naeem is an academic, translator and book critic based in Lahore. He is working on a translation of SaadatHasanManto’s nonfiction and was awarded the 2013-2014 Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship for his translation and interpretive work on Manto. He maybe reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Writer: Zafar Anjum
Publisher: Random House India, 2014
Extent: 195 pp.
In Pakistan, much of the national energies are spent to eulogize the great poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who is credited with being not only the poet of the East, but also the thinker who imagined, perhaps insufficiently, the birth of a new Muslim country from within undivided India.
Meanwhile in India, where Iqbal was born, lived and died while it was still a British colony without witnessing for himself the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the poet is now little-known save for one of the nationalistic poems he bequeathed to his love for Mother India, in his ‘nationalist’ phase, Saare Jahan say Achcha Hindustan Hamara.
Summing up the two ‘tragedies’ which have befallen Iqbal, the writer Zafar Anjum remarks in his Introduction to the book Iqbal, “Iqbal’s first tragedy was that after his death, he was claimed as the national poet of Pakistan and was largely ignored in India. His second tragedy is that Pakistan, a country that was founded on the basis of religion…practically forgot its own national poet. Similarly, in India, Iqbal remains a pariah and the majority of people know little about his life or his work.”
So why is yet another book on Pakistan’s national poet needed in the 21st century? Especially when so many of the Indian subcontinent’s best-known intellectual and literary figures continue to be pilloried at the altars of Indian and Pakistani nationalism? One has seen similar treatment being meted out to Saadat Hasan Manto, Miraji and Noon Meem Rashid.
I suspect Anjum has directed the book at an Indian rather than a Pakistani audience, which has by now been nourished on a rather indigestible diet of Iqbal’s motivational, often male-chauvinistic poetry ad nauseam in the national media, following a neat mummification by the country’s insecure postcolonial elite. His aims in writing the book are admittedly modest: “I don’t claim it to be a comprehensive account, for to write such a book would require a lot of time and research, and in the time that I was given, I have tried my best.”
In fact, my initial elation at perusing yet another book on Iqbal published from India was soon dissipated since there is little in this short book which is new or original about its protagonist. No doubt, in the hands of a devotee like Anjum, the well-worn details of Iqbal’s personal and public life are brought to life in an engaging narrative style for a newer and younger audience, which may only have been introduced to the poet through a narrow chauvinistic lens.
The book then is written in a flowing, literary style; however one is at a loss to understand why the writer has not referenced the earlier biographical work on Iqbal by Iqbal Singh and Mustansir Mir, or the nuanced work on Iqbal’s connections to postcolonialism by Javed Majeed. Also it is disappointing to note that Anjum has not gone through the labours of primary or archival research, or even attempting to translate some of the verses from Iqbal he chooses in the book himself, merely rather lazily relying on existing online resources for the same, despite the fact that Iqbal has been blessed with good translators like Victor Kiernan, Annemarie Schimmel and Khushwant Singh in the past. In addition, Anjum’s newer, younger readership would have benefitted immensely had he chosen to illustrate Iqbal’s varied literary prowess by adding a few of the latter’s famous poems like Naya Shivala, Khizar-e-Rah, Masjid-e-Qurtuba, Farman-e-Khuda, Saqi Nama, Shikwa, Jawab-e-Shikwa etc. in the Appendices; as well as some more meticulous editing: ubiquitous spelling mistakes and repeated references to the same details and facts abound in the main text, as well as the notes.
So how does one explain the enigma of Iqbal, the nationalist poet whose shifting political and ideological loyalties throughout his life defy categorization, yet he is regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation, and possibly the last great Muslim thinker? From singing paeans to the syncretism of Indian civilization, to an anti-imperialist and later pan-Islamist poet-philosopher, before ending up as the dreamer of a separate Muslim homeland he was never to see in his own lifetime. Iqbal is not alone in embodying such contradictions. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats too made a torturous journey from an ardent nationalist espousing armed struggle to one renouncing it; Iqbal’s great contemporary and literary rival – some say Iqbal vainly tried to emerge out of his shadow regarding himself as the greater poet of the two – the Bengali bard Rabindranath Tagore, the bête noire of nationalism, ended up giving three of his poems as the national anthems of three post-colonial states: India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Despite these contradictions, Iqbal has something to offer everybody, regardless of the school of thought. One wishes Anjum had spent more time on the poet’s ‘anti-imperialist’ phase when he wrote poems like Lenin Khuda kay Huzoor Main, Naya Shivala, Khizar-e-Rah, Farman-e-Khuda, outlining his emancipatory vision not only for India but also the Muslim world. This emancipatory vision also led to his famous series of lectures collected together as Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam and in a letter he wrote to Jinnah in May 1937, outlining a blueprint for a social democratic Pakistan.
How would Iqbal have felt and fared had he survived to witness the country he envisioned in 1947? Anjum doesn’t spend much time in answering this question but one has enough evidence now to conclude that both he and his vision would have been swept aside by the nexus of clerics and the civil-military bureaucracy which have brought much ruin to Pakistan, including the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. In this context, Iqbal is little more than a failed poet.
What the book successfully does is to bring out the mass of contradictions Iqbal was in his personal life, something which is often ignored or understated in the halo of hagiography surrounding Iqbal in Pakistan. His love affairs with Atiya Faizi and his German tutor Emma Wegenast were unrequited, while his three marriages survived long enough to yield the promise of a fulfilling family life.
In the light of Pakistan’s subsequent evolution since Iqbal’s death, one is inclined to question the Pakistani state’s enthroning of Muhammad Iqbal as our national poet. After all, Iqbal wrote most of his poetry in Persian, the official Indian language before 1857 and not Urdu, one of the pillars of the new state born from the ashes of the old in 1947. Moreover, Iqbal never lived in the independent Muslim state he dreamed of. And as Saadat Hasan Manto presciently noted in his presidential remarks on Iqbal Day, sometime in the early 1950s, “there are two grievances which I must express. The first grievance occurred when a self-respecting poet like Iqbal had to write odes to fictional kings. Another is cropping up now when I see the poet who declared, in Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, the heavens, earth, air, rivers, mountains and valleys, the sun, moon and stars, fruits and flowers in fact the whole universe to be Man’s inheritance, his ascetic poetry being controlled by a few self-serving custodians.
Iqbal had prayed to God, “Spread the light of my vision everywhere.” This prayer which issued from a humane heart will indeed be granted but upon seeing the name of this great poet affiliated with soaps, oils, hotels and laundries, sometimes I feel that the light of his vision will keep wandering for a long time in the narrow and dark lanes of ignorance.
A diamond’s heart maybe cut by a flower petal
But a naïve man will be unmoved by verses soft and delicate.”
It is perhaps time to admit to ourselves the failure of both the pock-marked vision as well as the Kashmiri seer to which this vision is infallibly attributed.
(Raza Naeem is an academic, translator and book critic based in Lahore. He is working on a translation of SaadatHasanManto’s nonfiction and was awarded the 2013-2014 Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship for his translation and interpretive work on Manto. He maybe reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )