De’dan Day’gar Amuz, Shan’idan Day’gar Amuz

By Suroosh Irfani -Daily Times - Lahore, Pakistan
Saturday, April 21, 2007 (Iqbal’s 69th death anniversary)

Pakistan urgently needs to reclaim Rumi and Iqbal’s message for stemming the slide into the home-grown swamps of aspiring suicide bombers, who are threatening to set the country ablaze in the name of Islam and Sharia.

The 13th-century mystic Maulana Rumi and the 20th-century poet-philosopher Iqbal have a common message for Muslims: de’dan day’gar amuz, shan’idan day’gar amuz (learn to see and think in a new way).

The message sums up an outlook of life as a forward assimilative movement, even as one remains rooted in an Islamic heritage. Indeed, the message arose in a historical context when old certainties were crumbling and the new were struggling to be born: Rumi lived at a time when the Muslim world was traumatised by Mongol invasions, while Iqbal’s was a time of awakening of the colonised masses that eventually led to the independence of India and Pakistan.

The above message also reflects what Iqbal believed to be the purpose of the holy Quran: to bring about a transformation in consciousness, open new vistas of creativity and a new understanding of faith. It is in this sense that Iqbal has been aptly termed Rumi- e-Asr (Rumi of our Age), which is the title of a book by Khawja Abdul Hamid Irfani that introduced Iqbal to Iranians in the 1950s.

Small wonder that in representing a new Muslim consciousness, the most frequent references in Iqbal’s poetry are to the holy Quran, the Prophet (PBUH) and Rumi. A sequence that resonates with the popular notion that Rumi’s poetic magnum opus, the Masnavi is the Quran in Persian language.

It is therefore a matter of little surprise that the spiritual nexus between Iqbal and Rumi runs through much of Iqbal’s poetic imagination and philosophical lectures. For example, if a vision of Rumi underpins Iqbal’s first groundbreaking philosophical poem, Asrar e Khudi (Secrets of the Self — 1915), Rumi’s voice also rings through the last poetic work published during Iqbal’s life.

Entitled “What is to be Done, O Nations of the East?” (Pas chay ba’yad kard aei aqwam e sharq) (1936), here Rumi urges Iqbal to act like the prophet Abraham and demolish the fossilised ‘temples’ — the worn out ways of thinking that have paralysed Muslims into inertia. Indeed, Rumi tells Iqbal that as the East begins to wake up, a singular role awaits Iqbal as the Abraham of his age. Hailing Iqbal as the only Muslim to have unlocked the secrets of the West by enduring the ‘trial by fire’ of Western knowledge, Rumi then urges Iqbal to act like prophet Abraham and “ demolish the fossilised thought-idols” holding back the Muslims.

Such reading of Abraham as a symbol of intellectual renewal is voiced by Iqbal himself in his Urdu verses:

Vou ilm jou apnay bouton ka hae aap Ibrahim

Kiya a jis ko Khuda nay dil o nazar ka nadim

What we have here, then, is a symbolic understanding of prophet Abraham’s idol-smashing mission as a critical impulse generating new knowledge — a deconstructive project of creative thought demolishing the ‘idols’ (of one’s own making) which are holding new ideas back. Abrahamic defiance, then, is the ilm that God has made an instrument of Heart and Vision.

These verses signify a radical shift in the religious consciousness of a Muslim at the turn of the 20th century. It is about broadening the traditional understanding of the Abrahamic narrative from an event in sacred history into a symbol — where the trial by fire of prophet Abraham also becomes a trial by fire of another kind for the Muslim intellectual: a struggle for broadening human horizons through knowledge and dialogue, and opening new pathways for Muslim renewal.

However, one of the most dramatic manifestations of this Abrahamic dynamic in modern times is exemplified by two leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: Imam Khomeini and Dr Ali Shariati.

While millions of Iranians hailed Khomeini as Khomeni e Bot shay’kan (Khomeini the idol-breaker) for demolishing Iran’s age old monarchic system, Iranians hailed Shariati as the Teacher of Revolution, (Mo’alem e Enqelab) for casting the Revolution’s intellectual foundations in a contemporary light. As is well known, Shariati was profoundly inspired by Rumi and Iqbal and presented Iqbal as a role model for the Iranian youth. Indeed, the infusion of intellectual and social activism into what Iqbal regarded to be a ‘degenerate’ Sufism resonated with Shariati’s spiritual politics of ‘Islamic spirituality, equality and freedom’ (erfan, ber’a’bari, azadi) — a slogan that epitomised dynamic Sufism, which Shariati described as a “socially committed and politically combative Sufism”.

Such Sufism is very different from quietist mysticism indifferent to injustice and oppression. Shariati’s dynamic Sufism drew inspiration from the traditional notions of spiritual chivalry, Javanmardi in Persian culture, and Futuwwat in Arabic — a word derived from fata, “a handsome and brave youth” . The Quran uses this word with reference to prophet Abraham as an idol breaker.

As for Futuwwat, it refers to the life of the fata — his courage, generosity, hospitality and love for fellow human beings and the Divine.

Shariati’s dynamic Sufism, then, taught the individual, “how to win freedom from the chains of religion...as prophet Abraham, the model fata had done”, and he included Hazrat Zainab, daughter of Hazrat Ali, the fourth Caliph, among his role models.

Clearly, as with Iqbal, Shariati transposed Abraham from a prophet in sacred history to a metaphor of resistance and renewal in the Iran of 1970s, a country going through the throes of rapid modernisation under a totalitarian regime. Here, Shariati’s Covenant with Abraham (Mi’ ad’ ba Ebrahim) signified a new iconoclastic impulse in modern Iran: intellectual struggle and revolutionary resistance against fossilised ways of thinking naturalised by habit and history.

This being so, one could say that the Abrahamic dynamic in our times reflects an ethics of resistance against despotism and injustice, calls for the cultivation of the self as a moral being (khod sazi), entails a creative reclamation of a religio-cultural past, and critically engages with western thought.

In post-revolutionary Iran, the Abrahamic dynamic permeates cultural activity as a critical impulse pushing the boundaries of consciousness in a society where a “ turn to research” and cultural production are among the defining features of a vibrant intellectual life. Such a vibrant cultural scene suggests that the legacy of Rumi and Iqbal is becoming increasingly generalised in Iran. This is bound to have far-reaching implications in promoting the spirit of freedom and justice in an increasingly interdependent world where the production of knowledge is a defining feature.

As for Pakistan, there is an urgent need to reclaim Rumi and Iqbal’s message for stemming the slide into the home-grown swamps of aspiring suicide bombers, who are threatening to set the country ablaze in the name of Islam and Sharia.

[picture: Suroosh Irfani]

Suroosh Irfani teaches Cultural Studies at National College of Arts. The article is a brief version of his paper presented at the Seminar on Contemporary Relevance of Rumi and Iqbal, held in Lahore on 16 April, 2007