Allama Muhammad Iqbal and Translation Politics

By Qazi

Sir Muhammad Iqbal was a prominent literary and political figure in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Though he died before the creation of Pakistan, he is considered to be among the first few people to talk about an independent Muslim state in the North-West India. In this respect he is venerated by Pakistanis as a freedom-fighter who used his pen to stimulate his dormant nation.

However, it is a pity to note that there is scarce research about Iqbal’s ideas and philosophy in the West. He was educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge and at Munich University, Germany, but the West often ignores him as a scholar. The most prominent western writings on him include an analysis of his writings and political life in Hamilton A. R. Gibb’s Modern Trends in Islam (1947); Iqbal’s contribution to modern Islam in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s Modern Islam in India (date); Iqbal’s fundamental principles and his assimilation of Western ideas in Annemarie Schimmel’s Gabriel’s Wing (1963); and a detailed discussion of different aspects of Iqbal’s philosophy in Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan, edited by Hafeez Malik (1971).  There are a few scholarly articles by Western writers which mostly appeared in Pakistani newspapers and journals. Despite the fact that Iqbal immediately captured the attention of famous Orientalists of his time, such as Professor Thomas Arnold and Professor Reynold A. Nicholson, he could not get as much attention as was due to him. One such proof is the date of publication of the said sources– there is a difference of approximately a decade between each of them.

One reason for this oblivion is the scarcity of good translations of Iqbal’s work. In order to appeal to a wider Muslim audience he chose to write in Persian; and for the masses of India, in Urdu. Both languages suited best his poetic endeavours. But when it came to addressing the whole world, he chose English, which was a natural choice for him for two reasons: first, he was educated at English-language institutions; second, he was living in a British colony. But ironically, his most representative works were not in English. Hence the West did not read him. His Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam could not win Western favour because its antecedents were not familiar to Western scholars, except for a few Orientalists of his time.

As a result, not only the Western failure to appreciate Iqbal’s talent but also its indifference to acknowledge the traces of Western ideas in his work demands a revival of interest in Iqbal’s works and his system of thought. I intend to draw the attention of scholarly circles, both in the East and the West, towards Iqbal and the quality of his work. A study of Iqbal is very germane to the present socio-political situations. The deplorable human condition and the impassable difference between the East and the West urge researchers to delve deep into those sources which can cement relationships between the continents and heal our wounds. One such source, no doubt, can be the work of a writer like Iqbal who stands at the meeting point between the two cultures.

 I have divided my paper into two parts: part one deals with the implications of British imperialism for the languages of the subjugated Indians with a specific emphasis on Urdu; and part two dwells on the subject of translation of Iqbal’s two major works, Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self ) and Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. This is germane to our present discussion as the translation issue in Iqbal’s case presents a new paradigm for translatio imperii studies, because he had to face resistance from both the imperialists and his own countrymen, the Indians of the sub-continent.

D. J. Matthews et al mention in their book Urdu Literature that as the national language of Pakistan and as one of the official languages of India, Urdu ranks as one of the most important languages of the subcontinent of South Asia. It is one of the most widely spoken languages of the subcontinent, and has been further carried by emigration to many other parts of the world, and yet the mainstream of its literary development extends back only some two and a half centuries, and the term ‘Urdu’ itself came to be applied to the language still more recently.

Urdu developed as a result of the expansion of the Muslim empire. It has always been directly linked to the Muslims of the subcontinent, though its origin can be dated only to a period many centuries later than the foundation of Islam itself. It is certain that an expedition in AD 711 led by Muhammad bin Qasim succeeded in subjugating Sind and the lower Punjab, but this remained only a peripheral outpost of the Islamic world (Matthews et al).

Only some three centuries later the invasions of Sultan Mahmūd of Ghazni (998-1030), who followed the historic route from Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass, established a somewhat stable Muslim presence in India. Under Mahmūd’s successors the Punjab and the adjacent north-western areas were brought under the permanent authority of a Muslim kingdom, with its capital eventually established in Lahore. After a period of consolidation, further conquests of the neighboring Hindu kingdoms were undertaken by the Muslims, whose political dominance of northern India was effectively inaugurated by the conquest of Delhi in 1192 by Qūtb ud Dīn Aibak. So began the period of the Delhi Sultanate, which was to dominate for the next three centuries until the coming of the Mughals (2).

The origins of Urdu lie in this early period of Muslim rule in the subcontinent. V. P. Liperovsky mentions in The Encyclopedia of Pakistan that Urdu dates back to Khari Boli or “stable speech” which developed from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries in the Delhi, Meerut and Agra region which originally included Lahore. According to him, these regions formed “a zone of intense contact between Muslim newcomers speaking Turkic and Iranian languages and the local population” (286). Thus Urdu resembles English in being a language of very mixed origins.

 The story of how these languages eventually came together in Northern India is all the more interesting for its complexity and its association with Muslim imperialism. Linguistically the most remote of all is Arabic, a member of the Semitic language family, which also includes Hebrew. Yet, in religious terms, Arabic has always been of central importance to Muslims as the language of the Quran and Muslim theology. The first expansion of Islam was accompanied by a rapid expansion of Arabic beyond its original homeland in the Arabian Peninsula. Not only was it the language of the new religion, but it also served as the official language of the Caliphate, cultivated both for administrative and for literary purposes. It also quickly came to be adopted as a spoken language over much of the original Islamic empire, but Arabic was to prove less successful in the eastern realms of the Caliphate where Persian began to be cultivated in preference to Arabic (Matthews et al 3).

The Ghaznavid kingdom of Sultan Mahmud was one of these eastern successor states of the Caliphate where Persian was cultivated. Irrespective, therefore, of the actual racial origins of the Muslim invaders of the subcontinent, who included besides Persians many Turks as well as Pashto-speaking Pathans, it was Persian which was the chief language brought by the conquests to north-western India (Matthews et al 4). With the establishment of Muslim rule in Delhi, it was the old Hindi of this area which came to form the major partner with Persian. This variety of Hindi is called Khari Boli.  Thanks to the association of Khari Boli with the central area of imperial capital, it proved the ideal basis for a widespread lingua franca, which would be spread in time over a large part of the subcontinent (6).

Although Persian continued to be universally used as the language of administration and literature in the Delhi Sultanate, its Muslim population no longer consisted of a majority of foreign, Persian-speaking immigrants, for they were soon outnumbered by a native Indian Muslim community as a result of the process of intermarriage and widespread conversion. In the conversion to Islam of a large proportion of the Hindu population of north-western India, the principal role was played not by the maulvis and qazis who upheld the religion in its strictest orthodox form, but by representatives of the mystical Sufi orders (Matthews et al 7). It is in the Persian account of the lives of these saints that the first garbled fragments of Urdu are recorded, in descriptions of their conversations with their disciples. Since none of this literature was recorded until later centuries, its original form can only be dimly glimpsed. But it seems that Amir Khusrau (d. 1325), the greatest Persian poet of the Delhi Sultanate and a disciple of a famous Sufi, Khwaja Nizam ud Din, also composed some poetry in Khari Boli (8).

During the middle and later years of the eighteenth century, Urdu finally supplanted Persian as the main medium of poetry in circles associated with the Muslim courts. This was the age of the great masters Sauda (d. 1781) and Mir (d. 1810), who both grew up in Delhi, but--like so many of their talented contemporaries--were forced to move in search of patronage to the wealthy court of Lucknow, already protected against political upheaval by having been reduced to the effective status of a vassal of the expanding British power. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the British had brought the feeble remnant of the Mughal empire in Delhi under their control.

Cocooned within the web of British paramountcy, the royalty and nobility of Lucknow were able to extend lavish patronage to Urdu poetry. The first half of the nineteenth century, therefore, saw a spectacular development of Urdu in Lucknow. An ornate and Persianized Urdu was also cultivated in the circle of writers grouped around the last Mughal ‘emperor’ of Delhi, of whom the greatest was Ghalib (d. 1869), one of the finest of all Urdu poets, and ‑ thanks to the vividness of his letters ‑ one of the outstanding pioneers of prose-writing in the language.

It is also from this period that the name ‘Urdu’ came to be applied to the language. Throughout the period of their rule in the subcontinent Muslim writers had been casual in their references to the spoken local languages, usually describing them indifferently by such labels as ‘Hindi’, ‘Hindui’,  and ‘Indian’. For a while in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries other names became current, notably Rekhta,  the ‘mixed language’. Finally, however, the term ‘Urdu’ came to be preferred. This is derived from the Turkish word ordu--which is also the origin of English word ‘horde’. The headquarters of the imperial army in Delhi were known as the Urdu-e-Mualla, or ‘exalted camp,’ and Urdu owes its present name to being the language of this camp, and--by extension--of the imperial capital (Matthews et al 10-12).

The British rulers supported Urdu as a lingua franca, though they called it ‘Hindustani’. Christian missionaries used it as a vehicle to spread the Gospel as widely as possible. But the Hindu majority of India increasingly alienated itself from Hinustani/Urdu as the Muslims more vigorously clung to the language for their separate identity, especially after the mutiny of 1857. Hence two separate languages of the Indians emerged: Hindi for the Hindus and Urdu for the Muslims. This language divide helped accelerate the British imperial plan of ‘divide and rule’.

Iqbal was born to a Punjabi-speaking Muslim family that converted from Brahman Hinduism to Islam just a few centuries before his birth. The family, though not highly educated, paid special attention to nurturing of their promising son, Iqbal, who was trained in Persian, Arabic, Urdu and English languages by his early tutors. Yet German was another language which he learned as a part of his PhD programme in Germany. This equipped him with the ability to communicate with felicity in languages of both Muslim and British imperialism: the use of Persian could be nostalgic; the use of Urdu was due to a separate Muslim identity; and the use of English was to show his competence in advanced knowledge and learning.

However, his mastery of these languages gets him into trouble if we analyze the reception of his two major works: Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self ) and Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. I consider both works as specimens of resistance literature: resisting both the domestic orthodoxy and the British hegemony. Stephen Slemon in his article “Unsettling the Empire” explains literary resistance as embedded in a text which resists a “definable set of power relations” (104). He further explains, “all literary writing which emerges from these cultural locations will be understood as carrying a radical and contestatory content– and this gives away the rather important point that subjected peoples are sometimes capable of producing reactionary literary documents” (106). Iqbal’s Secrets of the Self and Reconstruction follow this paradigm with a twist, that is to say, Iqbal had to resist not only British imperialists but also indigenous factions who opposed his work tooth and nail.

The history of the reception of Secrets of the Self is very interesting as it involves the issue of translation and misinterpretation. Originally written in Persian, it was published in 1915 and provoked an uproar in the orthodox and so-called educated Muslim sections of India. Iqbal, who never hesitated from acknowledging the dynamic nature of Western Europe, proposed a change in the mystic trends then so popular in India. His introductory remarks about a famous Persian mystic poet, Hafiz Shirazi, were received with great resentment. Iqbal infused his message with new ideas of a constant struggle stemming from internal tensions and conflicts of the human being as an ego. His ideas of ego, self-determination and self-realization were interpreted as sacrilegious attempts on the part of a Westernized mind in the garb of a liberal Muslim. In a letter to R. A. Nicholson, Iqbal enunciated his philosophy of khudi or ego as follows:

What then is life? It is individual: its highest form, so far is the Ego in which the individual becomes a self-contained exclusive centre….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. (Discourses of Iqbal 195)

The way Iqbal interpreted ego was a clear departure from the conventional interpretation of the term in Muslim mysticism. Iqbal believed that the current sufistic practices in Islam had nothing to do with the plain teaching of Islam and its Arabic essence. Though only the ego could take an individual to the heights of human perfection, the current sufistic trends could lull it into a deep slumber and make it inactive, hence paving way for subjugation of the nation. Further he draws attention towards the difference between the conventional and original meaning of the word Ego (khudi). In a note dictated to Nazir Niazi he explains:

The word ‘Khudi’ was chosen with great difficulty and most reluctantly. From a literary point of view it has many shortcomings and ethically it is generally used in a bad sense, both in Urdu and Persian….Thus metaphysically the word ‘Khudi’ is used in the sense of that indescribable feeling of ‘I’ which forms the basis of the uniqueness of each individual. Metaphysically it does not convey an ethical significance for those who cannot get rid of its ethical significance. I have already said in the Zubur-i-Ajam, ‘The wine of egohood is no doubt bitter, but do look to thy disease and take my poison for the sake of thy health.’ When I condemn self-negation I do not mean self-denial in the moral sense; for self-denial in the moral sense is a source of strength to the ego. In condemning self-negation I am condemning those forms of conduct which lead to the extinction of ‘I’ as a metaphysical force, for its extinction would mean its dissolution, its incapacity for personal immortality. (Discourses of Iqbal  211-12) 

But this ideology was far-fetched for the orthodox Muslim sections in India whose chief representatives unleashed a torrent of abuse against him and severely criticized him in newspaper essays and articles from 1915 to 1918. The most painful aspect of the dispute was that those who did not read the poem also participated in this war against Iqbal and dubbed him as infidel, enemy of Sufism and religion, advocate of the devil, and traitor. This war-mongering faction added many objectionable ideas to the original passage while translating it into Urdu.

But that was only one part of the controversy. The second part commenced with the English translation of the poem in 1920. This time the criticism came from the forces associated with the imperialists, the British. In a letter to the poem’s English translator, Dr. Nicholson, Iqbal referred to the misinterpretation of his idea of Perfect Man and Ego. He objected to the view of a critic published in Athenaeum (London) in which the critic attempted to draw close similarities between Iqbal’s Perfect Man and Nietzsche’s Superman. Iqbal’s reply was that he had developed his idea at least twenty years before reading Nietzsche. He further commented on the criticism of Dickinson that he did not believe in brute force, but rather in the power of the spirit:

I am afraid the old European idea of a blood-thirsty Islam is still lingering in the mind of Mr. Dickinson. All men and not Muslims alone are meant for the Kingdom of God on earth, provided they say good-bye to their idols of race and nationality, and treat one another as personalities. Leagues. Mandates, treaties…and Imperialism, however, draped in democracy, can never bring salvation to mankind….That  Muslims have fought and conquered like other peoples, and that some of their leaders screened their personal ambitions behind the veil of religion, I do not deny, but I am absolutely sure that territorial conquest was no part of the original programme of Islam. As a matter of fact, I consider it a great loss that the progress of Islam as a conquering faith stultified the growth of those germs of an economic and democratic organization of society which I find scattered up and down the pages of the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet….The object of my Persian poem is not to make a case for Islam; my aim is simply to discover a universal social reconstruction… (Discourses of Iqbal 204-05)

Was it a translation or transfusion? I leave it to the discerning eye and now turn to his Reconstruction which was originally written in English--the colonizer’s language. Though Urdu/Hindustani won the favour of the British officials for administrative needs, it did not and could not enjoy equal status with English. History proves that Urdu was taught to British bureaucrats, but the irony is that those textbooks were published in London. English had first ousted Persian as an official language and was later considered far better for the expression of ideas than the language(s) of the colonized.

Iqbal’s decision to write his major philosophical work, Reconstruction, in English could not extricate itself from the power struggle fought on the terrain of language. This is, to some extent, what Chinua Achebe talks about in his article “Colonial Criticism”. Under imperial rule “a new situation was slowly developing as a handful of natives began to acquire European education and then to challenge Europe’s presence and position in their native land with the intellectual weapons of Europe itself” (58). Iqbal uses such intellectual weapons very successfully.

Reconstruction is a philosophical treatise based upon Iqbal’s wish to inculcate the spirit of inquiry among Muslim youth. It consists of seven lectures which were first delivered during 1929 and 1930 to the gatherings of learned and highly-educated Indians, and that is why the medium used was English. Translation works on various levels in the composition of this book which was finally published in 1930.

First of all, Iqbal translated/interpreted around one hundred and fifty Eastern and Western scholars, which in itself is amazing. He assumed that his audience was well familiar with all those sources and anticipated no difficulty to use the sources to establish his view of the dynamic nature of the universe. By this implication he meant the dynamic spirit of Islam which had been stifled by hegemonic struggle. The proposal that he had for this revival of interest was to do a synthetic study of Islamic theology and European progress in science and technology. In a letter to a famous Muslim scholar, Syed Suleman Nadvi, he commented on his intention:

My intention is that the Muslims should do the study of Islamic theology  in the light of modern jurisprudence, but this should be a critical study rather than slavish imitation. The Muslims of the early ages did the same ‑ Greek philosophy was once considered the acme of human intellect but when Muslims were well-equipped with critical insight, they fought against the philosophy by using Greek syllogism. I believe that we need the same drive today. (qtd. in Zindah Rud 413 my translation)

But this was not an easy task. First, Iqbal had to wrest his meaning from European philosophical works with great difficulty. This enterprise was dangerous in the sense that on the one hand, he acknowledged his indebtedness to Western sources, and on the other, he tried to synthesize them with the basic teachings of Islam. Here is the danger: the subjugated Muslims in the entire Muslim world had strong resentment for their colonizers. They were not mentally prepared for such a daring work which shows glimpses of the approval of the West. The ideas and above all the language in which the ideas were clothed, were of the imperialists ‑ the suppressors’. Those who took this book seriously were few in number and those who opposed the work joined the camp of orthodox maulvis who had already issued a fatwa against Iqbal in 1924. Iqbal had already been warned by his well-wishers against an Urdu translation of the book. It was first translated into Urdu in 1958, twenty years after the death of Iqbal.

The story of the composition and translation of Reconstruction illuminates our discussion of translation theories and imperialism. Its author had to face resistance first from the English language itself when he declared that some ideas which are the product of modern philosophical debates are difficult to represent: “I cannot, at times, find most appropriate expressions for such thoughts (Zinda Rūd 419, my translation).” In my view, this points to the process of decolonization via the medium of language— the English language, which was the language of the imperial power, could be used as an intellectual weapon at a very high price. In Iqbal’s case, this led to the confusion and complexity of his views in the book as marked by his son, Javid Iqbal, in his biography, Zinda Rūd.

On the other hand, translation of the book in the language of the subjugated, Urdu, was also problematic. The terrain of this language was not then fertile enough to absorb the hail of the imperialists’ ideas, no matter how much effort was put to synthesize them with Islamic sources. The irony is that the book could not win many readers in either language. Perhaps, it is waiting for yet another translation ‑ a translation in a globalized era.

The Spirit of Muslim Culture

‘Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven and returned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned.’¹ These are the words of a great Muslim saint, ‘AbdulQuddës of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of ‘unitary experience’; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large. The prophet’s return is creative. He returns to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby to create a fresh world of ideals. For the mystic the repose of ‘unitary experience’ is something final; for the prophet it is the awakening, within him, of world-shaking psychological forces, calculated to completely transform the human world. The desire to see his religious experience transformed into a living world-force is supreme in the prophet. Thus his return amounts to a kind of pragmatic test of the value of his religious experience. In its creative act the prophet’s will judges both itself and the world of concrete fact in which it endeavours to objectify itself. In penetrating the impervious material before him the prophet discovers himself for himself, and unveils himself to the eye of history. Another way of judging the value of a prophet’s religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message. In this lecture I want to confine myself to the latter alone. The idea is not to give you a description of the achievements of Islam in the domain of knowledge. I want rather to fix your gaze on some of the ruling concepts of the culture of Islam in order to gain an insight into the process of ideation that underlies them, and thus to catch a glimpse of the soul that found expression through them. Before, however, I proceed to do so it is necessary to understand the cultural value of a great idea in Islam - I mean the finality of the institution of prophethood.²

A prophet may be defined as a type of mystic consciousness in which ‘unitary experience’ tends to overflow its boundaries, and seeks opportunities of redirecting or refashioning the forces of collective life. In his personality the finite centre of life sinks into his own infinite depths only to spring up again, with fresh vigour, to destroy the old, and to disclose the new directions of life. This contact with the root of his own being is by no means peculiar to man. Indeed the way in which the word WaÁâ (inspiration) is used in the Qur’«n shows that the Qur’«n regards it as a universal property of life;³ though its nature and character are different at different stages of the evolution of life. The plant growing freely in space, the animal developing a new organ to suit a new environment, and a human being receiving light from the inner depths of life, are all cases of inspiration varying in character according to the needs of the recipient, or the needs of the species to which the recipient belongs. Now during the minority of mankind psychic energy develops what I call prophetic consciousness - a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing ready-made judgements, choices, and ways of action. With the birth of reason and critical faculty, however, life, in its own interest, inhibits the formation and growth of non-rational modes of consciousness through which psychic energy flowed at an earlier stage of human evolution. Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct. Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement; and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge. There is no doubt that the ancient world produced some great systems of philosophy at a time when man was comparatively primitive and governed more or less by suggestion. But we must not forget that this system-building in the ancient world was the work of abstract thought which cannot go beyond the systematization of vague religious beliefs and traditions, and gives us no hold on the concrete situations of life.

Looking at the matter from this point of view, then, the Prophet of Islam seems to stand between the ancient and the modern world. In so far as the source of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the ancient world; in so far as the spirit of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the modern world. In him life discovers other sources of knowledge suitable to its new direction. The birth of Islam, as I hope to be able presently to prove to your satisfaction, is the birth of inductive intellect. In Islam prophecy reaches its perfection in discovering the need of its own abolition.⁴ This involves the keen perception that life cannot for ever be kept in leading strings; that, in order to achieve full self-consciousness, man must finally be thrown back on his own resources. The abolition of priesthood and hereditary kingship in Islam, the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Qur’«n, and the emphasis that it lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge, are all different aspects of the same idea of finality. The idea, however, does not mean that mystic experience, which qualitatively does not differ from the experience of the prophet, has now ceased to exist as a vital fact. Indeed the Qur’«n regards both Anfus (self) and ÿf«q (world) as sources of knowledge.⁵ God reveals His signs in inner as well as outer experience, and it is the duty of man to judge the knowledge-yielding capacity of all aspects of experience. The idea of finality, therefore, should not be taken to suggest that the ultimate fate of life is complete displacement of emotion by reason. Such a thing is neither possible nor desirable. The intellectual value of the idea is that it tends to create an independent critical attitude towards mystic experience by generating the belief that all personal authority, claiming a supernatural origin, has come to an end in the history of man. This kind of belief is a psychological force which inhibits the growth of such authority. The function of the idea is to open up fresh vistas of knowledge in the domain of man’s inner experience. Just as the first half of the formula of Islam⁶ has created and fostered the spirit of a critical observation of man’s outer experience by divesting the forces of nature of that Divine character with which earlier cultures had clothed them. Mystic experience, then, however unusual and abnormal, must now be regarded by a Muslim as a perfectly natural experience, open to critical scrutiny like other aspects of human experience. This is clear from the Prophet’s own attitude towards Ibn Âayy«d’s psychic experiences.⁷ The function of Sufism in Islam has been to systematize mystic experience; though it must be admitted that Ibn Khaldën was the only Muslim who approached it in a thoroughly scientific spirit.⁸

But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge. According to the Qur’«n, there are two other sources of knowledge - Nature and History; and it is in tapping these sources of knowledge that the spirit of Islam is seen at its best. The Qur’«n sees signs of the Ultimate Reality in the ‘sun’, the ‘moon’, ‘the lengthening out of shadows’, ‘the alternation of day and night’, ‘the variety of human colours and tongues’,10 ‘the alternation of the days of success and reverse among peoples’ - in fact in the whole of Nature as revealed to the sense-perception of man. And the Muslim’s duty is to reflect on these signs and not to pass by them ‘as if he is dead and blind’, for he ‘who does not see these signs in this life will remain blind to the realities of the life to come’.⁹ This appeal to the concrete combined with the slow realization that, according to the teachings of the Qur’«n, the universe is dynamic in its origin, finite and capable of increase, eventually brought Muslim thinkers into conflict with Greek thought which, in the beginning of their intellectual career, they had studied with so much enthusiasm. Not realizing that the spirit of the Qur’«n was essentially anti-classical, and putting full confidence in Greek thinkers, their first impulse was to understand the Qur’«n in the light of Greek philosophy. In view of the concrete spirit of the Qur’«n, and the speculative nature of Greek philosophy which enjoyed theory and was neglectful of fact, this attempt was foredoomed to failure. And it is what follows their failure that brings out the real spirit of the culture of Islam, and lays the foundation of modern culture in some of its most important aspects.

This intellectual revolt against Greek philosophy manifests itself in all departments of thought. I am afraid I am not competent enough to deal with it as it discloses itself in Mathematics, Astronomy, and Medicine. It is clearly visible in the metaphysical thought of the Ash‘arite, but appears as a most well-defined phenomenon in the Muslim criticism of Greek Logic. This was only natural; for dissatisfaction with purely speculative philosophy means the search for a surer method of knowledge. It was, I think, Naïï«m who first formulated the principle of ‘doubt’ as the beginning of all knowledge. Ghazz«lâ further amplified it in his ‘Revivification of the Sciences of Religion’,¹⁰ and prepared the way for ‘Descartes’ Method’. But Ghazz«lâ remained on the whole a follower of Aristotle in Logic. In his Qist«s he puts some of the Quranic arguments in the form of Aristotelian figures,¹¹ but forgets the Quranic Sërah known as Shu’ar«’ where the proposition that retribution follows the gainsaying of prophets is established by the method of simple enumeration of historical instances. It was Ishr«qâand Ibn Taimâyyah who undertook a systematic refutation of Greek Logic.¹² Abë Bakr R«zâ was perhaps the first to criticize Aristotle’s first figure,¹³ and in our own times his objection, conceived in a thoroughly inductive spirit, has been reformulated by John Stuart Mill. Ibn Àazm, in his ‘Scope of Logic’,¹⁴ emphasizes sense-perception as a source of knowledge; and Ibn Taimâyyah in his ‘Refutation of Logic’, shows that induction is the only form of reliable argument. Thus arose the method of observation and experiment. It was not a merely theoretical affair. Al-Bârënâ’s discovery of what we call reaction-time and al-Kindâ’s discovery that sensation is proportionate to the stimulus, are instances of its application in psychology.¹⁵ It is a mistake to suppose that the experimental method is a European discovery. Dü hring tells us that Roger Bacon’s conceptions of science are more just and clear than those of his celebrated namesake. And where did Roger Bacon receive his scientific training? - In the Muslim universities of Spain. Indeed Part V of his Opus Majus which is devoted to ‘Perspective’ is practically a copy of Ibn Haitham’s Optics.¹⁶ Nor is the book, as a whole, lacking in evidences of Ibn Hazm’s influence on its author.¹⁷ Europe has been rather slow to recognize the Islamic origin of her scientific method. But full recognition of the fact has at last come. Let me quote one or two passages from Briffault’s Making of Humanity,

‘. . . it was under their successors at that Oxford school that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic science. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that a knowledge of Arabic and Arabian science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge. Discussions as to who was the originator of the experimental method . . . are part of the colossal misrepresentation of the origins of European civilization. The experimental method of the Arabs was by Bacon’s time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout Europe’ (pp. 200-01). . . .

‘Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab civilization to the modern world, but its fruits were slow in ripening. Not until long after Moorish culture had sunk back into darkness did the giant to which it had given birth rise in his might. It was not science which brought Europe back to life. Other and manifold influences from the civilization of Islam communicated its first glow to European life’ (p. 202).

‘For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory - natural science and the scientific spirit’ (p. 190).

‘The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The ancient world was, as we saw, pre-scientific. The astronomy and mathematics of the Greek were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture. The Greeks systematized, generalized, and theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science, detailed and prolonged observation, experimental inquiry, were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any approach to scientific work conducted in the ancient classical world. What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry, of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs’ (p. 191).

The first important point to note about the spirit of Muslim culture then is that, for purposes of knowledge, it fixes its gaze on the concrete, the finite. It is further clear that the birth of the method of observation and experiment in Islam was due not to a compromise with Greek thought but to a prolonged intellectual warfare with it. In fact, the influence of the Greeks who, as Briffault says, were interested chiefly in theory, not in fact, tended rather to obscure the Muslims’ vision of the Qur’«n, and for at least two centuries kept the practical Arab temperament from asserting itself and coming to its own. I want, therefore, definitely to eradicate the misunderstanding that Greek thought, in any way, determined the character of Muslim culture. Part of my argument you have seen; part you will see presently.

Knowledge must begin with the concrete. It is the intellectual capture of and power over the concrete that makes it possible for the intellect of man to pass beyond the concrete. As the Qur’«n says:

‘O company of djinn and men, if you can overpass the bounds of the heaven and the earth, then overpass them. But by power alone shall ye overpass them’ (55:33).

But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing. Such a vision of the universe leads the reflecting mind nowhere. The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind. The finite, as such, is an idol obstructing the movement of the mind; or, in order to overpass its bounds, the mind must overcome serial time and the pure vacuity of perceptual space. ‘And verily towards thy God is the limit’, says the Qur’«n.¹⁸ This verse embodies one of the deepest thoughts in the Qur’«n; for it definitely suggests that the ultimate limit is to be sought not in the direction of stars, but in an infinite cosmic life and spirituality. Now the intellectual journey towards this ultimate limit is long and arduous; and in this effort, too, the thought of Islam appears to have moved in a direction entirely different to the Greeks. The ideal of the Greeks, as Spengler tells us, was proportion, not infinity. The physical presentness of the finite with its well-defined limits alone absorbed the mind of the Greeks. In the history of Muslim culture, on the other hand, we find that both in the realms of pure intellect and religious psychology, by which term I mean higher Sufism, the ideal revealed is the possession and enjoyment of the Infinite. In a culture, with such an attitude, the problem of space and time becomes a question of life and death. In one of these lectures I have already given you some idea of the way in which the problem of time and space presented itself to Muslim thinkers, especially the Ash‘arite. One reason why the atomism of Democritus never became popular in the world of Islam is that it involves the assumption of an absolute space. The Ash‘arite were, therefore, driven to develop a different kind of atomism, and tried to overcome the difficulties of perceptual space in a manner similar to modern atomism. On the side of Mathematics it must be remembered that since the days of Ptolemy (A.D. 87-165) till the time of NaÄâr ñësâ (A.D. 120-74)nobody gave serious thought to the difficulties of demonstrating the certitude of Euclid’s parallel postulate on the basis of perceptual space.¹⁹ It was ñësâ who first disturbed the calm which had prevailed in the world of Mathematics for a thousand years; and in his effort to improve the postulate realized the necessity of abandoning perceptual space. He thus furnished a basis, however slight, for the hyperspace movement of our time.²⁰ It was, however, al-Bârënâ who, in his approach to the modern mathematical idea of function saw, from a purely scientific point of view, the insufficiency of a static view of the universe. This again is a clear departure from the Greek view. The function-idea introduces the element of time in our world-picture. It turns the fixed into the variable, and sees the universe not as being but as becoming. Spengler thinks that the mathematical idea of function is the symbol of the West of which ‘no other culture gives even a hint’.²¹ In view of al-Bârënâ, generalizing Newton’s formula of interpolation from trignometrical function to any function whatever.²² Spengler’s claim has no foundation in fact. The transformation of the Greek concept of number from pure magnitude to pure relation really began with Khw«rizmâs movement from Arithmetic to Algebra.²³ al-Bârënâ took a definite step forward towards what Spengler describes as chronological number which signifies the mind’s passage from being to becoming. Indeed, more recent developments in European mathematics tend rather to deprive time of its living historical character, and to reduce it to a mere representation of space. That is why Whitehead’s view of Relativity is likely to appeal to Muslim students more than that of Einstein in whose theory time loses its character of passage and mysteriously translates itself into utter space.^24a

Side by side with the progress of mathematical thought in Islam we find the idea of evolution gradually shaping itself. It was Ja`hiz who was the first to note the changes in bird-life caused by migrations. Later Ibn Maskawaih who was a contemporary of al-Bârënâ gave it the shape of a more definite theory, and adopted it in his theological work - al-Fauz al-Asghar. I reproduce here the substance of his evolutionary hypothesis, not because of its scientific value, but because of the light which it throws on the direction in which Muslim thought was moving.

According to Ibn Maskawaih plant-life at the lowest stage of evolution does not need any seed for its birth and growth. Nor does it perpetuate its species by means of the seed. This kind of plant-life differs from minerals only in some little power of movement which grows in higher forms, and reveals itself further in that the plant spreads out its branches, and perpetuates its species by means of the seed. The power of movement gradually grows farther until we reach trees which possess a trunk, leaves, and fruit. At a higher stage of evolution stand forms of plant-life which need better soil and climate for their growth. The last stage of development is reached in vine and date-palm which stand, as it were, on the threshold of animal life. In the date-palm a clear sex-distinction appears. Besides roots and fibres it develops something which functions like the animal brain, on the integrity of which depends the life of the date-palm. This is the highest stage in the development of plant-life, and a prelude to animal life. The first forward step towards animal life is freedom from earth-rootedness which is the germ of conscious movement. This is the initial state of animality in which the sense of touch is the first, and the sense of sight is the last to appear. With the development of the senses of animal acquires freedom of movement, as in the case of worms, reptiles, ants, and bees. Animality reaches its perfection in the horse among quadrupeds and the falcon among birds, and finally arrives at the frontier of humanity in the ape which is just a degree below man in the scale of evolution. Further evolution brings physiological changes with a growing power of discrimination and spirituality until humanity passes from barbarism to civilization.^24b

But it is really religious psychology, as in ‘Ir«qâand Khw«jah Muhammad P«rs«,²⁵ which brings us much nearer to our modern ways of looking at the problem of space and time. ‘Ir«qâ’s view of time-stratifications I have given you before.²⁶ I will now give you the substance of his view of space.

According to ‘Ir«qâ the existence of some kind of space in relation to God is clear from the following verses of the Qur’«n:

‘Dost thou not see that God knoweth all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth? Three persons speak not privately together, but He is their fourth; nor five, but He is their sixth; nor fewer nor more, but wherever they be He is with them’ (58:7).

‘Ye shall not be employed in affairs, nor shall ye read a text out of the Qur’«n, nor shall ye do any work, but We will be witness over you when you are engaged therein; and the weight of an atom on earth or in heaven escapeth not thy Lord; nor is there aught²⁷ that is less than this or greater, but it is in the Perspicuous Book’ (10:61).

‘We created man, and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are closer to him than his neck-vein’ (50:16).

But we must not forget that the words proximity, contact, and mutual separation which apply to material bodies do not apply to God. Divine life is in touch with the whole universe on the analogy of the soul’s contact with the body.²⁸ The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it. Yet its contact with every atom of the body is real, and it is impossible to conceive this contact except by positing some kind of space which befits the subtleness of the soul. The existence of space in relation to the life of God, therefore, cannot be denied;²⁹ only we should carefully define the kind of space which may be predicated of the Absoluteness of God. Now, there are three kinds of space - the space of material bodies, the space of immaterial beings, and the space of God.³⁰ The space of material bodies is further divided into three kinds. First, the space of gross bodies of which we predicate roominess. In this space movement takes time, bodies occupy their respective places and resist displacement. Secondly, the space of subtle bodies, e.g. air and sound. In this space too bodies resist each other, and their movement is measurable in terms of time which, however, appears to be different to the time of gross bodies. The air in a tube must be displaced before other air can enter into it; and the time of sound-waves is practically nothing compared to the time of gross bodies. Thirdly, we have the space of light. The light of the sun instantly reaches the remotest limits of the earth. Thus in the velocity of light and sound time is reduced almost to zero. It is, therefore, clear that the space of light is different to the space of air and sound. There is, however, a more effective argument than this. The light of a candle spreads in all directions in a room without displacing the air in the room; and this shows that the space of light is more subtle than the space of air which has no entry into the space of light.³¹ In view of the close proximity of these spaces, however, it is not possible to distinguish the one from the other except by purely intellectual analysis and spiritual experience. Again, in the hot water the two opposites - fire and water - which appear to interpenetrate each other cannot, in view of their respective natures, exist in the same space.³² The fact cannot be explained except on the supposition that the spaces of the two substances, though closely proximate to each other, are nevertheless distinct. But while the element of distance is not entirely absent, there is no possibility of mutual resistance in the space of light. The light of a candle reaches up to a certain point only, and the lights of a hundred candles intermingle in the same room without displacing one another.

Having thus described the spaces of physical bodies possessing various degrees of subtleness ‘Ir«qâ proceeds briefly to describe the main varieties of space operated upon by the various classes of immaterial beings, e.g. angels. The element of distance is not entirely absent from these spaces; for immaterial beings, while they can easily pass through stone walls, cannot altogether dispense with motion which, according to ‘Ir«qâ, is evidence of imperfection in spirituality.³³ The highest point in the scale of spatial freedom is reached by the human soul which, in its unique essence, is neither at rest nor in motion.³⁴ Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities.³⁵

From this summary of ‘Ir«qâ’s view you will see how a cultured Muslim Sufi`intellectually interpreted his spiritual experience of time and space in an age which had no idea of the theories and concepts of modern Mathematics and Physics. ‘Ir«qâ is really trying to reach the concept of space as a dynamic appearance. His mind seems to be vaguely struggling with the concept of space as an infinite continuum; yet he was unable to see the full implications of his thought partly because he was not a mathematician and partly because of his natural prejudice in favour of the traditional Aristotelian idea of a fixed universe. Again, the interpenetration of the super-spatial ‘here’ and super-eternal ‘now’ in the Ultimate Reality suggests the modern notion of space-time which Professor Alexander, in his lectures on ‘Space, Time, and Deity’, regards as the matrix of all things.³⁶ A keener insight into the nature of time would have led ‘Ir«qâ to see that time is more fundamental of the two; and that it is not a mere metaphor to say, as Professor Alexander does say, that time is the mind of space.³⁷ ‘Ir«qâ conceives God’s relation to the universe on the analogy of the relation of the human soul to the body;³⁸ but, instead of philosophically reaching this position through a criticism of the spatial and temporal aspects of experience, he simply postulates it on the basis of his spiritual experience. It is not sufficient merely to reduce space and time to a vanishing point-instant. The philosophical path that leads to God as the omnipsyche of the universe lies through the discovery of living thought as the ultimate principle of space-time. ‘Ir«qâ’s mind, no doubt, moved in the right direction, but his Aristotelian prejudices, coupled with a lack of psychological analysis, blocked his progress. With his view that Divine Time is utterly devoid of change³⁹ - a view obviously based on an inadequate analysis of conscious experience - it was not possible for him to discover the relation between Divine Time and serial time, and to reach, through this discovery, the essentially Islamic idea of continuous creation which means a growing universe.

Thus all lines of Muslim thought converge on a dynamic conception of the universe. This view is further reinforced by Ibn Maskawaih’s theory of life as an evolutionary movement, and Ibn Khaldën’s view of history. History or, in the language of the Qur’«n, ‘the days of God’, is the third source of human knowledge according to the Qur’«n. It is one of the most essential teachings of the Qur’«n that nations are collectively judged, and suffer for their misdeeds here and now.⁴⁰ In order to establish this proposition, the Qur’«n constantly cites historical instances, and urges upon the reader to reflect on the past and present experience of mankind.

"Of old did We send Moses with Our signs, and said to him: ‘Bring forth thy people from the darkness into the light, and remind them of the days of God." Verily, in this are signs for every patient, grateful person’ (14:5).

‘And among those whom We had created are a people who guide others with truth, and in accordance therewith act justly. But as for those who treat Our signs as lies, We gradually ring them down by means of which they know not; and though I lengthen their days, verily, My stratagem is effectual’ (7:181-83).

‘Already, before your time, have precedents been made. Traverse the Earth then, and see what hath been the end of those who falsify the signs of God!’ (3:137).

‘If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like it hath already befallen others; We alternate the days of successes and reverses among peoples’ (3:140).

‘Every nation hath its fixed period’ (7:34).⁴¹

The last verse is rather an instance of a more specific historical generalization which, in its epigrammatic formulation, suggests the possibility of a scientific treatment of the life of human societies regarded as organisms. It is, therefore, a gross error to think that the Qur’«n has no germs of a historical doctrine. The truth is that the whole spirit of the ‘Prolegomena’ of Ibn Khaldën appears to have been mainly due to the inspiration which the author must have received from the Qur’«n. Even in his judgements of character he is, in no small degree, indebted to the Qur’«n. An instance in point is his long paragraph devoted to an estimate of the character of the Arabs as a people. The whole paragraph is a mere amplification of the following verses of the Qur’«n:

‘The Arabs of the desert are most stout in unbelief and dissimulation; and likelier it is that they should be unaware of the laws which God hath sent down to His Apostle; and God is Knowing, Wise.

‘Of the Arabs of the desert there are some who reckon what they expend in the cause of God as tribute, and wait for some change of fortune to befall you: a change for evil shall befall them! God is the Hearer, the Knower’ (9:97-98).

However, the interest of the Qur’«n in history, regarded as a source of human knowledge, extends farther than mere indications of historical generalizations. It has given us one of the most fundamental principles of historical criticism: Since accuracy in recording facts which constitute the material of history is an indispensable condition of history as a science, and an accurate knowledge of facts ultimately depends on those who report them, the very first principle of historical criticism is that the reporter’s personal character is an important factor in judging his testimony. The Qur’«n says:

‘O believers! if any bad man comes to you with a report, clear it up at once’ (49:6).

It is the application of the principle embodied in this verse to the reporters of the Prophet’s traditions out of which were gradually evolved the canons of historical criticism. The growth of historical sense in Islam is a fascinating subject.⁴² The Quranic appeal to experience, the necessity to ascertain the exact sayings of the Prophet, and the desire to furnish permanent sources of inspiration to posterity - all these forces contributed to produce such men as Ibn Ish«q,⁴³ ñabarâ,⁴⁴ and Mas‘ëdâ.⁴⁵ But history, as an art of firing the reader’s imagination, is only a stage in the development of history as a genuine science. The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time. These ideas are in the main two; and both form the foundation of the Quranic teaching.

1. The Unity of Human Origin. ‘And We have created you all from one breath of life’, says the Qur’«n.⁴⁶ But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people’s entry into the main current of world-events. This opportunity was brought to Islam by the rapid development of a vast empire. No doubt, Christianity, long before Islam, brought the message of equality to mankind; but Christian Rome did not rise to the full apprehension of the idea of humanity as a single organism. As Flint rightly says, ‘No Christian writer and still less, of course, any other in the Roman Empire, can be credited with having had more than a general and abstract conception of human unity.’ And since the days of Rome the idea does not seem to have gained much in depth and rootage in Europe. On the other hand, the growth of territorial nationalism, with its emphasis on what is called national characteristics, has tended rather to kill the broad human element in the art and literature of Europe. It was quite otherwise with Islam. Here the idea was neither a concept of philosophy nor a dream of poetry. As a social movement the aim of Islam was to make the idea a living factor in the Muslim’s daily life, and thus silently and imperceptibly to carry it towards fuller fruition.

2. A Keen Sense of the Reality of Time, and the Concept of Life as a Continuous Movement in Time. It is this conception of life and time which is the main point of interest in Ibn Khaldën’s view of history, and which justifies Flint’s eulogy that ‘Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him’.⁴⁷ From the remarks that I have made above I do not mean to throw doubt on the originality of Ibn Khaldën. All that I mean to say is that, considering the direction in which the culture of Islam had unfolded itself, only a Muslim could have viewed history as a continuous, collective movement, a real inevitable development in time. The point of interest in this view of history is the way in which Ibn Khaldën conceives the process of change. His conception is of infinite importance because of the implication that history, as a continuous movement in time, is a genuinely creative movement and not a movement whose path is already determined. Ibn Khaldën was not a metaphysician. Indeed he was hostile to Metaphysics.⁴⁸ But in view of the nature of his conception of time he may fairly be regarded as a forerunner of Bergson. I have already discussed the intellectual antecedents of this conception in the cultural history of Islam. The Quranic view of the ‘alternation of day and night’⁴⁹ as a symbol of the Ultimate Reality which ‘appears in a fresh glory every moment’,⁵⁰ the tendency in Muslim Metaphysics to regard time as objective, Ibn Maskawaih’s view of life as an evolutionary movement,⁵¹ and lastly al-Bârënâ’s definite approach to the conception of Nature as a process of becoming⁵² - all this constituted the intellectual inheritance of Ibn Khaldën. His chief merit lies in his acute perception of, and systematic expression to, the spirit of the cultural movement of which he was a most brilliant product. In the work of this genius the anti-classical spirit of the Qur’«n scores its final victory over Greek thought; for with the Greeks time was either unreal, as in Plato and Zeno, or moved in a circle, as in Heraclitus and the Stoics.⁵³ Whatever may be the criterion by which to judge the forward steps of a creative movement, the movement itself, if conceived as cyclic, ceases to be creative. Eternal recurrence is not eternal creation; it is eternal repetition.

We are now in a position to see the true significance of the intellectual revolt of Islam against Greek philosophy. The fact that this revolt originated in a purely theological interest shows that the anti-classical spirit of the Qur’«n asserted itself in spite of those who began with a desire to interpret Islam in the light of Greek thought.

It now remains to eradicate a grave misunderstanding created by Spengler’s widely read book, The Decline of the West. His two chapters devoted to the problem of Arabian culture⁵⁴ constitute a most important contribution to the cultural history of Asia. They are, however, based on a complete misconception of the nature of Islam as a religious movement, and of the cultural activity which it initiated. Spengler’s main thesis is that each culture is a specific organism, having no point of contact with cultures that historically precede or follow it. Indeed, according to him, each culture has its own peculiar way of looking at things which is entirely inaccessible to men belonging to a different culture. In his anxiety to prove this thesis he marshals an overwhelming array of facts and interpretations to show that the spirit of European culture is through and through anti-classical. And this anti-classical spirit of European culture is entirely due to the specific genius of Europe, and not to any inspiration she may have received from the culture of Islam which, according to Spengler, is thoroughly ‘Magian’ in spirit and character. Spengler’s view of the spirit of modern culture is, in my opinion, perfectly correct. I have, however, tried to show in these lectures that the anti-classical spirit of the modern world has really arisen out of the revolt of Islam against Greek thought.⁵⁵ It is obvious that such a view cannot be acceptable to Spengler; for, if it is possible to show that the anti-classical spirit of modern culture is due to the inspiration which it received from the culture immediately preceding it, the whole argument of Spengler regarding the complete mutual independence of cultural growths would collapse. I am afraid Spengler’s anxiety to establish this thesis has completely perverted his vision of Islam as a cultural movement.

By the expression ‘Magian culture’ Spengler means the common culture associated with what he calls ‘Magian group of religions’,⁵⁶ i.e. Judaism, ancient Chaldean religion, early Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Islam. That a Magian crust has grown over Islam, I do not deny. Indeed my main purpose in these lectures has been to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from its Magian overlayings which, in my opinion, have misled Spengler. His ignorance of Muslim thought on the problem of time, as well as of the way in which the ‘I’, as a free centre of experience, has found expression in the religious experience of Islam, is simply appalling.⁵⁷ Instead of seeking light from the history of Muslim thought and experience, he prefers to base his judgement on vulgar beliefs as to the beginning and end of time. Just imagine a man of overwhelming learning finding support for the supposed fatalism of Islam in such Eastern expressions and proverbs as the ‘vault of time’,⁵⁸ and ‘everything has a time!’⁵⁹ However, on the origin and growth of the concept of time in Islam, and on the human ego as a free power, I have said enough in these lectures. It is obvious that a full examination of Spengler’s view of Islam, and of the culture that grew out of it, will require a whole volume. In addition to what I have said before, I shall offer here one more observation of a general nature.

‘The kernel of the prophetic teaching,’ says Spengler, ‘is already Magian. There is one God - be He called Yahweh,⁶⁰ Ahuramazda, or Marduk-Baal - who is the principle of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception of the world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgement.’60 If this view of the prophetic teaching is meant to apply to Islam it is obviously a misrepresentation. The point to note is that the Magian admitted the existence of false gods; only they did not turn to worship them. Islam denies the very existence of false gods. In this connexion Spengler fails to appreciate the cultural value of the idea of the finality of prophethood in Islam. No doubt, one important feature of Magian culture is a perpetual attitude of expectation, a constant looking forward to the coming of Zoroaster’s unborn sons, the Messiah, or the Paraclete of the fourth gospel. I have already indicated the direction in which the student of Islam should seek the cultural meaning of the doctrine of finality in Islam. It may further be regarded as a psychological cure for the Magian attitude of constant expectation which tends to give a false view of history. Ibn Khaldën, seeing the spirit of his own view of history, has fully criticized and, I believe, finally demolished the alleged revelational basis in Islam of an idea similar, at least in its psychological effects, to the original Magian idea which had reappeared in Islam under the pressure of Magian thought.⁶¹

Human Dignity (Part 1) - انسان کی عظمت

Reh Navird-e-Shauq Muhammad Iqbal: Hayat aur Karnamay Iqbal Singh

Description The Ardent Pilgrim by Iqbal Singh is regarded as the most authentic and original work concerning the life and literary works of Allama Iqbal. Iqbal Singh has made a personal study of Iqbal’s life and work while drawing upon his own deep insight into the contemporary intellectual and philosophic milieu of the time. The result is an in-depth account of Iqbal’s remarkable journey through life and the impact of his thought on his contemporaries and the generations to come.

Iqbal aur Insaan Dosti Talib Hussain Sial

Description This is a unique study of the element of humanism in the philosophical thought and creative work of Pakistan’s national poet, Mohammad Iqbal. The author has meticulously researched into the Western and Eastern sources which contributed to the making of Iqbal’s own mystical thought and literary ideas. Dr Sial has also deftly summarised the essence of Islam and other religions which were at the base of Iqbal’s thought and creative genius.

Poems from Iqbal Renderings in English Verse with Comparative Urdu Text Translated by V. G. Kiernan

Description Allama Muhammad Iqbal was acknowledged during his lifetime as the most important poet of Muslim India in the twentieth century, both for the quality of his verse and for the influence exercised by his ideas. This volume contains a rendering in English of over a hundred poems chosen from the four collections of Iqbal’s poetry written in Urdu, which include religious, lyrical, satirical and other themes. The English versions are accompanied by the original text.

Iqbal’s Concept of God By M.S.Raschid

Description The book is an examination of Iqbal’s concept of God: it is a finite one—based on his reading of Western thought. Iqbal relates his philosophical conclusions to the Quran and Muslim thought. Iqbal’s finite deity is very close to the Sufi concept of God; both doctrines cannot be reconciled with the Quranic teaching. The underlying conceptual issues lead to a discussion of mysticism.The concluding chapter goes beyond Iqbal in expounding the philosophical logic of ‘the problem of God’.

Intikhab-e-Kalam: Allama Iqbal Compiled by Muhammad Reza Kazimi

Description This book contains a selection from the poems of Allama Iqbal,the first Urdu poet credited with a systematic philosophy, i.e. Khudi which means self-awareness or loftiness of character. His poetry inspired many generations, both before and after Independence, since infinite struggle was his ideal. Iqbal struck a responsive chord in his readers, more than any lyrical poet has been able to strike. His style is better described as scriptural rather than as the grand style usually employed in religious themes.

1/4 Iqbal (PTV Documentary) - اقبال ڈاکومینٹری حصہ اول

Iqbal Academy Show Episode 2 Part 4 of 4.flv

Iqbal Academy Show Episode 2 Part 3 of 4.flv

Iqbal Academy Show Episode 2 Part 2 of 4.flv

Iqbal Academy Show Episode 2 Part 1 of 4.flv

Is Religion Possible? By Allama Muhammad Iqbal

Broadly speaking religious life may be divided into three periods. These may be described as the periods of ‘Faith’, ‘Thought’, and ‘Discovery.’ In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command. This attitude may be of great consequence in the social and political history of a people, but is not of much consequence in so far as the individual’s inner growth and expansion are concerned. Perfect submission to discipline is followed by a rational understanding of the discipline and the ultimate source of its authority. In this period religious life seeks its foundation in a kind of metaphysics - a logically consistent view of the world with God as a part of that view. In the third period metaphysics is displaced by psychology, and religious life develops the ambition to come into direct contact with the Ultimate Reality. It is here that religion becomes a matter of personal assimilation of life and power; and the individual achieves a free personality, not by releasing himself from the fetters of the law, but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness. As in the words of a Muslim Sufi - ‘no understanding of the Holy Book is possible until it is actually revealed to the believer just as it was revealed to the Prophet.’1 It is, then, in the sense of this last phase in the development of religious life that I use the word religion in the question that I now propose to raise. Religion in this sense is known by the unfortunate name of Mysticism, which is supposed to be a life-denying, fact-avoiding attitude of mind directly opposed to the radically empirical outlook of our times. Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so. It is a genuine effort to clarify human consciousness, and is, as such, as critical of its level of experience as Naturalism is of its own level.

As we all know, it was Kant who first raised the question: ‘Is metaphysics possible?’2 He answered this question in the negative; and his argument applies with equal force to the realities in which religion is especially interested. The manifold of sense, according to him, must fulfil certain formal conditions in order to constitute knowledge. The thing-in-itself is only a limiting idea. Its function is merely regulative. If there is some actuality corresponding to the idea, it falls outside the boundaries of experience, and consequently its existence cannot be rationally demonstrated. This verdict of Kant cannot be easily accepted. It may fairly be argued that in view of the more recent developments of science, such as the nature of matter as ‘bottled-up light waves’, the idea of the universe as an act of thought, finiteness of space and time and Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy3 in Nature, the case for a system of rational theology is not so bad as Kant was led to think. But for our present purposes it is unnecessary to consider this point in detail. As to the thing-in-itself, which is inaccessible to pure reason because of its falling beyond the boundaries of experience, Kant’s verdict can be accepted only if we start with the assumption that all experience other than the normal level of experience is impossible. The only question, therefore, is whether the normal level is the only level of knowledge-yielding experience. Kant’s view of the thing-in-itself and the thing as it appears to us very much determined the character of his question regarding the possibility of metaphysics. But what if the position, as understood by him, is reversed? The great Muslim Sufi philosopher, Muhyaddin Ibn al-‘Arabâ of Spain, has made the acute observation that God is a percept; the world is a concept.4 Another Muslim Sufi thinker and poet, ‘Ir«qâ, insists on the plurality of space-orders and time-orders and speaks of a Divine Time and a Divine Space.5 It may be that what we call the external world is only an intellectual construction, and that there are other levels of human experience capable of being systematized by other orders of space and time - levels in which concept and analysis do not play the same role as they do in the case of our normal experience. It may, however, be said that the level of experience to which concepts are inapplicable cannot yield any knowledge of a universal character, for concepts alone are capable of being socialized. The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable. This objection has some force if it is meant to insinuate that the mystic is wholly ruled by his traditional ways, attitudes, and expectations. Conservatism is as bad in religion as in any other department of human activity. It destroys the ego’s creative freedom and closes up the paths of fresh spiritual enterprise. This is the main reason why our medieval mystic techniques can no longer produce original discoveries of ancient Truth. The fact, however, that religious experience is incommunicable does not mean that the religious man’s pursuit is futile. Indeed, the incommunicability of religious experience gives us a clue to the ultimate nature of the ego. In our daily social intercourse we live and move in seclusion, as it were. We do not care to reach the inmost individuality of men. We treat them as mere functions, and approach them from those aspects of their identity which are capable of conceptual treatment. The climax of religious life, however, is the discovery of the ego as an individual deeper than his conceptually describable habitual selfhood. It is in contact with the Most Real that the ego discovers its uniqueness, its metaphysical status, and the possibility of improvement in that status. Strictly speaking, the experience which leads to this discovery is not a conceptually manageable intellectual fact; it is a vital fact, an attitude consequent on an inner biological transformation which cannot be captured in the net of logical categories. It can embody itself only in a world-making or world-shaking act; and in this form alone the content of this timeless experience can diffuse itself in the time-movement, and make itself effectively visible to the eye of history. It seems that the method of dealing with Reality by means of concepts is not at all a serious way of dealing with it. Science does not care whether its electron is a real entity or not. It may be a mere symbol, a mere convention. Religion, which is essentially a mode of actual living, is the only serious way of handing Reality. As a form of higher experience it is corrective of our concepts of philosophical theology or at least makes us suspicious of the purely rational process which forms these concepts. Science can afford to ignore metaphysics altogether, and may even believe it to be ‘a justified form of poetry’6, as Lange defined it, or ‘a legitimate play of grown-ups’, as Nietzsche described it. But the religious expert who seeks to discover his personal status in the constitution of things cannot, in view of the final aim of his struggle, be satisfied with what science may regard as a vital lie, a mere ‘as-if’7 to regulate thought and conduct. In so far as the ultimate nature of Reality is concerned, nothing is at stake in the venture of science; in the religious venture the whole career of the ego as an assimilative personal centre of life and experience is at stake. Conduct, which involves a decision of the ultimate fate of the agent cannot be based on illusions. A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego. The mere concept affects life only partially; the deed is dynamically related to Reality and issues from a generally constant attitude of the whole man towards reality. No doubt the deed, i.e. the control of psychological and physiological processes with a view to tune up the ego for an immediate contact with the Ultimate Reality is, and cannot but be, individual in form and content; yet the deed, too, is liable to be socialized when others begin to live though it with a view to discover for themselves its effectiveness as a method of approaching the Real. The evidence of religious experts in all ages and countries is that there are potential types of consciousness lying close to our normal consciousness. If these types of consciousness open up possibilities of life-giving and knowledge-yielding experience, the question of the possibility of religion as a form of higher experience is a perfectly legitimate one and demands our serious attention.

But, apart from the legitimacy of the question, there are important reasons why it should be raised at the present moment of the history of modern culture. In the first place, the scientific interest of the question. It seems that every culture has a form of Naturalism peculiar to its own world-feeling; and it further appears that every form of Naturalism ends in some sort of Atomism. We have Indian Atomism, Greek Atomism, Muslim Atomism, and Modern Atomism.8 Modern Atomism is, however, unique. Its amazing mathematics which sees the universe as an elaborate differential equation; and its physics which, following its own methods, has been led to smash some of the old gods of its own temple, have already brought us to the point of asking the question whether the casualty-bound aspect of Nature is the whole truth about it? Is not the Ultimate Reality invading our consciousness from some other direction as well? Is the purely intellectual method of overcoming Nature the only method? ‘We have acknowledged’, says Professor Eddington,

‘that the entities of physics can from their very nature form only a partial aspect of the reality. How are we to deal with the other part? It cannot be said that other part concerns us less than the physical entities. Feelings, purpose, values, made up our consciousness as much as sense-impressions. We follow up the sense-impressions and find that they lead into an external world discussed by science; we follow up the other elements of our being and find that they lead - not into a world of space and time, but surely somewhere.’9

In the second place we have to look to the great practical importance of the question. The modern man with his philosophies of criticism and scientific specialism finds himself in a strange predicament. His Naturalism has given him an unprecedented control over the forces of Nature, but has robbed him of faith in his own future. It is strange how the same idea affects different cultures differently. The formulation of the theory of evolution in the world of Islam brought into being Rëmâ’s tremendous enthusiasm for the biological future of man. No cultured Muslim can read such passages as the following without a thrill of joy:

Low in the earth
I lived in realms of ore and stone;
And then I smiled in many-tinted flowers;
Then roving with the wild and wandering hours,
O’er earth and air and ocean’s zone,
In a new birth,
I dived and flew,
And crept and ran,
And all the secret of my essence drew
Within a form that brought them all to view -
And lo, a Man!
And then my goal,
Beyond the clouds, beyond the sky,
In realms where none may change or die -
In angel form; and then away
Beyond the bounds of night and day,
And Life and Death, unseen or seen,
Where all that is hath ever been,
As One and Whole.

(Rëmâ: Thadani’s Translation)10

On the other hand, the formulation of the same view of evolution with far greater precision in Europe has led to the belief that ‘there now appears to be no scientific basis for the idea that the present rich complexity of human endowment will ever be materially exceeded.’ That is how the modern man’s secret despair hides itself behind the screen of scientific terminology. Nietzsche, although he thought that the idea of evolution did not justify the belief that man was unsurpassable, cannot be regarded as an exception in this respect. His enthusiasm for the future of man ended in the doctrine of eternal recurrence - perhaps the most hopeless idea of immortality ever formed by man. This eternal repetition is not eternal ‘becoming’; it is the same old idea of ‘being’ masquerading as ‘becoming.’

Thus, wholly overshadowed by the results of his intellectual activity, the modern man has ceased to live soulfully, i.e. from within. In the domain of thought he is living in open conflict with himself; and in the domain of economic and political life he is living in open conflict with others. He finds himself unable to control his ruthless egoism and his infinite gold-hunger which is gradually killing all higher striving in him and bringing him nothing but life-weariness. Absorbed in the ‘fact’, that is to say, the optically present source of sensation, he is entirely cut off from the unplumbed depths of his own being. In the wake of his systematic materialism has at last come that paralysis of energy which Huxley apprehended and deplored. The condition of things in the East is no better. The technique of medieval mysticism by which religious life, in its higher manifestations, developed itself both in the East and in the West has now practically failed. And in the Muslim East it has, perhaps, done far greater havoc than anywhere else. Far from reintegrating the forces of the average man’s inner life, and thus preparing him for participation in the march of history, it has taught him a false renunciation and made him perfectly contented with his ignorance and spiritual thraldom. No wonder then that the modern Muslim in Turkey, Egypt, and Persia is led to seek fresh sources of energy in the creation of new loyalties, such as patriotism and nationalism which Nietzsche described as ‘sickness and unreason’, and ‘the strongest force against culture11’. Disappointed of a purely religious method of spiritual renewal which alone brings us into touch with the everlasting fountain of life and power by expanding our thought and emotion, the modern Muslim fondly hopes to unlock fresh sources of energy by narrowing down his thought and emotion. Modern atheistic socialism, which possesses all the fervour of a new religion, has a broader outlook; but having received its philosophical basis from the Hegelians of the left wing, it rises in revolt against the very source which could have given it strength and purpose. Both nationalism and atheistic socialism, at least in the present state of human adjustments, must draw upon the psychological forces of hate, suspicion, and resentment which tend to impoverish the soul of man and close up his hidden sources of spiritual energy. Neither the technique of medieval mysticism, nor nationalism, nor atheistic socialism can cure the ills of a despairing humanity. Surely the present moment is one of great crisis in the history of modern culture. The modern world stands in need of biological renewal. And religion, which in its higher manifestations is neither dogma, nor priesthood, nor ritual, can alone ethically prepare the modern man for the burden of the great responsibility which the advancement of modern science necessarily involves, and restore to him that attitude of faith which makes him capable of winning a personality here and retaining it in hereafter. It is only by rising to a fresh vision of his origin and future, his whence and whither, that man will eventually triumph over a society motivated by an inhuman competition, and a civilization which has lost its spiritual unity by its inner conflict of religious and political values.

As I have indicated before,12 religion as a deliberate enterprise to seize the ultimate principle of value and thereby to reintegrate the forces of one’s own personality, is a fact which cannot be denied. The whole religious literature of the world, including the records of specialists’ personal experiences, though perhaps expressed in the thought-forms of an out-of-date psychology, is a standing testimony to it. These experiences are perfectly natural, like our normal experiences. The evidence is that they possess a cognitive value for the recipient, and, what is much more important, a capacity to centralize the forces of the ego and thereby to endow him with a new personality. The view that such experiences are neurotic or mystical will not finally settle the question of their meaning or value. If an outlook beyond physics is possible, we must courageously face the possibility, even though it may disturb or tend to modify our normal ways of life and thought. The interests of truth require that we must abandon our present attitude. It does not matter in the least if the religious attitude is originally determined by some kind of physiological disorder. George Fox may be a neurotic; but who can deny his purifying power in England’s religious life of his day? Muhammad, we are told, was a psychopath13. Well, if a psychopath has the power to give a fresh direction to the course of human history, it is a point of the highest psychological interest to search his original experience which has turned slaves into leaders of men, and has inspired the conduct and shaped the career of whole races of mankind. Judging from the various types of activity that emanated from the movement initiated by the Prophet of Islam, his spiritual tension and the kind of behaviour which issued from it, cannot be regarded as a response to a mere fantasy inside his brain. It is impossible to understand it except as a response to an objective situation generative of new enthusiasms, new organizations, new starting-points. If we look at the matter from the standpoint of anthropology it appears that a psychopath is an important factor in the economy of humanity’s social organization. His way is not to classify facts and discover causes: he thinks in terms of life and movement with a view to create new patterns of behaviour for mankind. No doubt he has his pitfalls and illusions just as the scientist who relies on sense-experience has his pitfalls and illusions. A careful study of his method, however, shows that he is not less alert than the scientist in the matter of eliminating the alloy of illusion from his experience.

The question for us outsiders is to find out an effective method of inquiry into the nature and significance of this extraordinary experience. The Arab historian Ibn Khaldën, who laid the foundations of modern scientific history, was the first to seriously approach this side of human psychology and reached what we now call the idea of the subliminal self. Later, Sir William Hamilton in England and Leibniz in Germany interested themselves in some of the more unknown phenomena of the mind. Jung, however, is probably right in thinking that the essential nature of religion is beyond the province of analytic psychology. In his discussion of the relation of analytic psychology to poetic art, he tells us that the process of artistic form alone can be the object of psychology. The essential nature of art, according to him, cannot be the object of a psychological method of approach. ‘A distinction’, says Jung,

‘must also be made in the realm of religion; there also a psychological consideration is permissible only in respect of the emotional and symbolical phenomena of a religion, where the essential nature of religion is in no way involved, as indeed it cannot be. For were this possible, not religion alone, but art also could be treated as a mere sub-division of psychology.’14

Yet Jung has violated his own principle more than once in his writings. The result of this procedure is that, instead of giving us a real insight into the essential nature of religion and its meaning for human personality, our modern psychology has given us quite a plethora of new theories which proceed on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of religion as revealed in its higher manifestations, and carry us in an entirely hopeless direction. The implication of these theories, on the whole, is that religion does not relate the human ego to any objective reality beyond himself; it is merely a kind of well-meaning biological device calculated to build barriers of an ethical nature round human society in order to protect the social fabric against the otherwise unrestrainable instincts of the ego. That is why, according to this newer psychology, Christianity has already fulfilled its biological mission, and it is impossible for the modern man to understand its original significance. Jung concludes:

‘Most certainly we should still understand it, had our customs even a breath of ancient brutality, for we can hardly realize in this day the whirlwinds of the unchained libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Caesars. The civilized man of the present day seems very far removed from that. He has become merely neurotic. So for us the necessities which brought forth Christianity have actually been lost, since we no longer understand their meaning. We do not know against what it had to protect us. For enlightened people, the so-called religiousness has already approached very close to a neurosis. In the past two thousand years Christianity has done its work and has erected barriers of repression, which protect us from the sight of our own sinfulness.’15

This is missing the whole point of higher religious life. Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego’s evolution. The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment. The basic perception from which religious life moves forward is the present slender unity of the ego, his liability to dissolution, his amenability to reformation and the capacity for an ampler freedom to create new situations in known and unknown environments. In view of this fundamental perception higher religious life fixes its gaze on experiences symbolic of those subtle movements of Reality which seriously affect the destiny of the ego as a possibly permanent element in the constitution of Reality. If we look at the matter from this point of view modern psychology has not yet touched even the outer fringe of religious life, and is still far from the richness and variety of what is called religious experience. In order to give you an idea of its richness and variety I quote here the substance of a passage from a great religious genius of the seventeenth century - Shaikh AÁmad of Sirhind - whose fearless analytical criticism of contemporary Sufism resulted in the development of a new technique. All the various system of Sufi technique in India came from Central Asia and Arabia; his is the only technique which crossed the Indian border and is still a living force in the Punjab, Afghanistan, and Asiatic Russia. I am afraid it is not possible for me to expound the real meaning of this passage in the language of modern psychology; for such language does not yet exist. Since, however, my object is simply to give you an idea of the infinite wealth of experience which the ego in his Divine quest has to sift and pass through, I do hope you will excuse me for the apparently outlandish terminology which possesses a real substance of meaning, but which was formed under the inspiration of a religious psychology developed in the atmosphere of a different culture. Coming now to the passage. The experience of one ‘Abd al-Mumin was described to the Shaikh as follows:

‘Heavens and Earth and God’s Throne and Hell and Paradise have all ceased to exist for me. When I look round I find them nowhere. When I stand in the presence of somebody I see nobody before me: nay even my own being is lost to me. God is infinite. Nobody can encompass Him; and this is the extreme limit of spiritual experience. No saint has been able to go beyond this’.

On this the Shaikh replied:

‘The experience which is described has its origin in the ever varying life of the Qalb; and it appears to me that the recipient of its has not yet passed even one-fourth of the innumerable ‘Stations’ of the Qalb. The remaining three-fourths must be passed through in order to finish the experiences of this first ‘Station’ of spiritual life. Beyond this ‘Station’ there are other ‘Stations’ know as RëÁ, Sirr-i-Khafâ, and Sirr-i-Akhf«, each of these ‘Stations’ which together constitute what is technically called ‘ÿlam-i Amr has its own characteristic states and experiences. After having passed through these ‘Stations’ the seeker of truth gradually receives the illuminations of ‘Divine Names’ and ‘Divine Attributes’ and finally the illuminations of the ‘Divine Essence’.’16

Whatever may be the psychological ground of the distinctions made in this passage it gives us at least some idea of a whole universe of inner experience as seen by a great reformer of Islamic Sufâsm. According to him this ‘ÿlam-i Amr, i.e. ‘the world of directive energy’, must be passed through before one reaches that unique experience which symbolizes the purely objective. This is the reason why I say that modern psychology has not yet touched even the outer fringe of the subject. Personally, I do not at all feel hopeful of the present state of things in either biology or psychology. Mere analytical criticism with some understanding of the organic conditions of the imagery in which religious life has sometimes manifested itself is not likely to carry us to the living roots of human personality. Assuming that sex-imagery has played a role in the history of religion, or that religion has furnished imaginative means of escape from, or adjustment to, an unpleasant reality - these ways of looking at the matter cannot, in the least, affect the ultimate aim of religious life, that is to say, the reconstruction of the finite ego by bringing him into contact with an eternal life-process, and thus giving him a metaphysical status of which we can have only a partial understanding in the half-choking atmosphere of our present environment. If, therefore, the science of psychology is ever likely to possess a real significance for the life of mankind, it must develop an independent method calculated to discover a new technique better suited to the temper of our times. Perhaps a psychopath endowed with a great intellect - the combination is not an impossibility - may give us a clue to such a technique. In modern Europe, Nietzsche, whose life and activity form, at least to us Easterns, an exceedingly interesting problem in religious psychology, was endowed with some sort of a constitutional equipment for such an undertaking. His mental history is not without a parallel in the history of Eastern Sufâsm. That a really ‘imperative’ vision of the Divine in man did come to him, cannot be denied. I call his vision ‘imperative’ because it appears to have given him a kind of prophetic mentality which, by some kind of technique, aims at turning its visions into permanent life-forces. Yet Nietzsche was a failure; and his failure was mainly due to his intellectual progenitors such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Lange whose influence completely blinded him to the real significance of his vision. Instead of looking for a spiritual rule which would develop the Divine even in a plebeian and thus open up before him an infinite future, Nietzsche was driven to seek the realization of his vision in such scheme as aristocratic radicalism.17 As I have said of him elsewhere:

The ‘I am’ which he seeketh,
Lieth beyond philosophy, beyond knowledge.
The plant that groweth only from the invisible soil of the heart of man,
Groweth not from a mere heap of clay!18

Thus failed a genius whose vision was solely determined by his internal forces, and remained unproductive for want of expert external guidance in his spiritual life,19 and the irony of fate is that this man, who appeared to his friends ‘as if he had come from a country where no man lived’, was fully conscious of his great spiritual need. ‘I confront alone’, he says, ‘an immense problem: it is as if I am lost in a forest, a primeval one. I need help. I need disciples: I need a master.20 It would be so sweet to obey.’ And again:

‘Why do I not find among the living men who see higher than I do and have to look down on me? Is it only that I have made a poor search? And I have so great a longing for such.’

The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real. In fact, religion; for reasons which I have mentioned before, is far more anxious to reach the ultimately real than science.21 And to both the way to pure objectivity lies through what may be called the purification of experience. In order to understand this we must make a distinction between experience as a natural fact, significant of the normally observable behaviour of Reality, and experience as significant of the inner nature of Reality. As a natural fact it is explained in the light of its antecedents, psychological and physiological; as significant of the inner nature of Reality we shall have to apply criteria of a different kind to clarify its meaning. In the domain of science we try to understand its meaning in reference to the external behaviour of Reality; in the domain of religion we take it as representative of some kind of Reality and try to discover its meanings in reference mainly to the inner nature of that Reality. The scientific and the religious processes are in a sense parallel to each other. Both are really descriptions of the same world with this difference only that in the scientific process the ego’s standpoint is necessarily exclusive, whereas in the religious process the ego integrates its competing tendencies and develops a single inclusive attitude resulting in a kind of synthetic transfiguration of his experiences. A careful study of the nature and purpose of these really complementary processes shows that both of them are directed to the purification of experience in their respective spheres. An illustration will make my meaning clear. Hume’s criticism of our notion of cause must be considered as a chapter in the history of science rather than that of philosophy. True to the spirit of scientific empiricism we are not entitled to work with any concepts of a subjective nature. The point of Hume’s criticism is to emancipate empirical science from the concept of force which, as he urges, has no foundation in sense-experience. This was the first attempt of the modern mind to purify the scientific process.

Einstein’s mathematical view of the universe completes the process of purification started by Hume, and, true to the spirit of Hume’s criticism, dispenses with the concept of force altogether.22 The passage I have quoted from the great Indian saint shows that the practical student of religious psychology has a similar purification in view. His sense of objectivity is as keen as that of the scientists in his own sphere of objectivity. He passes from experience to experience, not as a mere spectator, but as a critical sifter of experience, who by the rules of a peculiar technique, suited to his sphere of inquiry, endeavours to eliminate all subjective elements, psychological or physiological, in the content of his experience with a view finally to reach what is absolutely objective. This final experience is the revelation of a new life-process - original, essential, spontaneous. The eternal secret of the ego is that the moment he reaches this final revelation he recognizes it as the ultimate root of his being without the slightest hesitation. Yet in the experience itself there is no mystery. Nor is there anything emotional in it. Indeed with a view to secure a wholly non-emotional experience the technique of Islamic Sufâsm at least takes good care to forbid the use of music in worship, and to emphasize the necessity of daily congregational prayers in order to counteract the possible anti-social effects of solitary contemplation. Thus the experience reached is a perfectly natural experience and possesses a biological significance of the highest importance to the ego. It is the human ego rising higher than mere reflection, and mending its transiency by appropriating the eternal. The only danger to which the ego is exposed in this Divine quest is the possible relaxation of his activity caused by his enjoyment of and absorption in the experiences that precede the final experience. The history of Eastern Sufâsm shows that this is a real danger. This was the whole point of the reform movement initiated by the great Indian saint from whose writings I have already quoted a passage. And the reason is obvious. The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something. It is in the ego’s effort to be something that he discovers his final opportunity to sharpen his objectivity and acquire a more fundamental ‘I am’ which finds evidence of its reality not in the Cartesian ‘I think’ but in the Kantian ‘I can.’ The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation from the limitations of individuality; it is, on the other hand, a more precise definition of it. The final act is not an intellectual act, but a vital act which deepens the whole being of the ego, and sharpens his will with the creative assurance that the world is not something to be merely seen or known through concepts, but something to be made and re-made by continuous action. It is a moment of supreme bliss and also a moment of the greatest trial for the ego:

Art thou in the stage of ‘life.’ ‘death’, or ‘death-in-life.’ Invoke the aid of three witnesses to verify thy ‘Station.’

The first witness is thine own consciousness -
See thyself, then, with thine own light.
The second witness is the consciousness of another ego -
See thyself, then, with the light of an ego other than thee.
The third witness is God’s consciousness -
See thyself, then, with God’s light.
If thou standest unshaken in front of this light,
Consider thyself as living and eternal as He!
That man alone is real who dares -
Dares to see God face to face!
What is ‘Ascension’? Only a search for a witness
Who may finally confirm thy reality -
A witness whose confirmation alone makes thee eternal.
No one can stand unshaken in His Presence;
And he who can, verily, he is pure gold.
Art thou a mere particle of dust?
Tighten the knot of thy ego;
And hold fast to thy tiny being!
How glorious to burnish one’s ego.
And to test its lustre in the presence of the Sun!
Re-chisel, then, thine ancient frame; And build up a new being.
Such being is real being;
Or else thy ego is a mere ring of smoke!

J«vid N«mah