Charles Taylor said 'We must reread Iqbal.
This is because, in Canada- Quebec more particularly- kids grew up reading Iqbal. This is because they become bilingual in Urdu and Farsi by the age of 5. Only after reading, the shit-head, Iqbal do they decide to forget both those languages and to focus on just English and French. Prof. Taylor believed that Canadians should re-read Iqbal in old age. They could do so in translation just as Taylor himself had done because, let's face it, nothing worthwhile has been written in Farsi since the Safavids fucked over Iran.
'For a time we could imagine him forgotten, consigned to the oubliettes with the other figures of Islamic modernism from the beginning of this century. But he had to come back.”
Iqbal didn't come back. True, the Iranian Supreme Guide said he was hella smart but nobody in Iran thought Khameni wasn't a senile pile of shite. This is not to say that people from the sub-continent don't like a good qawwali rendition of Iqbal's 'Shikva' on Coke Studio, but nobody thinks he was smart. This is because he wasn't smart. He was Punjabi and thus had shit for brains.
I suppose one might say 'Iqbal was a Pan-Islamist. He predicted the rise of ISIS.' But Iqbal's Pakistan divided the Indian Muslim community.
Why does Khameni like Iqbal? Perhaps because of lines like the following-
تا سیاست مسند مذہب گرفت
این شجر در گلشن مغرب گرفت
قصۂ دین مسیحائی فسرد
شعلہ شمع کلیسائی فسرد
tā siyāsat masnad-e mażhab girift
īn shajar dar gulshan-e maġhrib girift
qiṣṣah-e dīn-e masīḥāʼī fusurd
shuʿlah-e shamʿ-e kalīsā’ī fusurd
The Church, a dim taper as shadows grew bold.
A striking feature of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is the depth of its cosmopolitanism, as expressed, for example, in the wide range of its references to texts and thinkers from across different traditions and epochs.
Sadly, what is evidenced by the book is the wholly provincial culture of a product of a University in British India. True, Iqbal had studied in Europe but so had many other barristers. They wrote in a particular, stilted, dated, style because that is how people of their sort were expected to write. Their range of references were narrow and, in many cases, already obsolete- e.g. Iqbal's gassing on about Bergson though Einstein had already taken that fucker's pants down and made fun of his puny genitals.
In part, this intellectual cosmopolitanism
wholly created by the curriculum of the Universities the Brits had established in India. Lahore, it must be said, was established when 'Orientalism' was dominant unlike Calcutta University which was 'Occidentalist' from its inception.
is a consequence of British colonialism itself,
in which case it is British and isn't cosmo-fucking-politan at all.
which brought together diverse areas and regions in ways that
were convenient to the Brits. They had wanted their officials and the Indians who would serve as clerks or advocates to learn one Classical language (either Sanskrit or Persian) and one vernacular Indian language in addition to English and a bit of French and maybe some German.
enabled not just the circulation of goods and commodities but also texts and ideas in multiple languages and translations.
Tagore's work did circulate widely. One might say his reception was 'cosmopolitan'. Iqbal's wasn't.
This circulation of ideas and texts created what Kris Manjapra and Sugata Bose have called “cosmopolitan thought zones” for Indian thinkers who engaged with the works of writers and thinkers from all over the world.
Not really. Azad's mother tongue was Arabic but it was obvious that there was no contemporary writing in Persian or Turkish or Arabic which was worth reading for Indians. Some Iranians did read Nehru. Few bothered with Iqbal because his Farsi was unidiomatic and he was as stupid as shit. He was not a scholar of Islam and his philosophical views were jejune. In any case, even if a few Iranians read Iqbal, their country was a shithole back then.
Iqbal's work bears the imprint of this cosmopolitanism.
Nope it bears the imprint of the syllabus of Lahore University. The question was whether he'd become a Professor there while practicing law on the side or whether he'd practice law and give a few lectures from time to time.
It blends together 49 writers writers (both Muslims and European),
who were already being mentioned and discussed by English Professors in India or their Indian colleagues. It should be remembered that Tagore was promoted as a philosopher by Radhakrishnan who, himself, became something of a celebrity during the late Thirties thanks to Tagore.
blending them together in relation to key philosophical problems and themes.
Which Iqbal was too stupid to understand because he wasn't Sciencey. Philosophical problems are 'open questions' in STEM subjects. Iqbal didn't know that Einstein had closed certain questions. He was a provincial poet who was given a Knighthood for being a Muslim loyalist unlike Azad.
He also draws parallels between the intellectual situations of Muslim and Western thinkers, for example, by suggesting similarities between al-Ghazali and Kant in terms of their “apostolic” missions.
Kant did not have an apostolic mission. Ghazali could be considered to be part of this or that 'silsila' or apostolic succession. Kant believed there were logically verifiable synthetic a priori truth. Ghazali didn't. Kantian truth is not Ghazalian ذوق, "taste" because, clearly, some rational people lack it.
The most obvious point to make about the relationship between Ghazali & Kant is that the latter was influenced by different schools of Western philosophy which were themselves based on an earlier Scholastic reception of, or reaction to, Ghazali. Since Iqbal was weak in Latin, he could not contribute to this subject. Still, as a philosophical poet he was welcome to gas on about famous thinkers. After all, he had a PhD. But compared to TS Eliot, also a PhD holder and a profounder poet, Iqbal was provincial. Eliot was cosmopolitan. But then, Eliot actually knew Sanskrit. He would have many imitators in the sub-continent. Iqbal would have none.
Thus, Iqbal’s Reconstruction emerges from the cosmopolitan thought zones and global conversations that underpinned Indian intellectual life as a style and way of thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
No. It was stupid, dated, shite even at the time he wrote it. Young Indians were interested in Einstein not Bergson or Nietzsche or, Iqbal's great hero, Mussolini.
In order to put thinkers in different traditions in dialogue with each other, Iqbal de-temporalizes the history of thought, presenting these thinkers as if they were contemporaries who discuss the same philosophical and metaphysical questions.
Ignorant and stupid people have no choice but to 'decontextualize' stuff. That's all Iqbal was capable of. Why pretend he was a Frege or a Brouwer or a Bertrand Russell?
In this way, the “pursuit of conversations across lines of difference” (as Manjapra puts it) becomes central to the way the book positions Muslim religious thought in its encounters with Europe.
Iqbal didn't know how it had encountered Europe though, as a student, he'd been told it had happened. The plain fact is, Europe gained intellectually from encountering India or Islam or China or whatever because Europeans were using their brains to raise productivity and thus get richer and more powerful. Muslims and Hindus were writing either hysterical or sycophantic drivel of a mannerist type. They preferred European rule because White Justice did not accept parricide as a legitimate method of inheriting property.
By de-temporalizing the history of the engagement between Islam and European thought, Iqbal presents the encounter as a conversation among intellectual equals, lifting it above the hierarchies of power created by European colonialism.
If only he had presented a conversation between foxes and hens as being conducted between equals, foxes would have stopped killing and eating hens.
In this way, the style and methodology of the book creates a kind of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism in which intellectual self-assertion, grounded in learned reading, is key.
Iqbal may have been somewhat 'radical' before he got to England but he wasn't subsequently. He stuck like glue to his knighthood. An anti-colonial intellectual in 1922 would scarcely have accepted such a badge of infamy from the King Emperor.
However, this sometimes means that the text reads as if cosmopolitan eclecticism were an end in its own right. The display of wide reading, the suggestion of linkages, or what Iqbal calls “unsuspected mutual harmonies,”16 and the dense, convoluted texture of the book exceeds the imperatives of argumentation. At times the Reconstruction is in danger of being overwhelmed by irresolution, as it weaves together fragments of texts in relation to a wider set of concerns that are sometimes obscured by the richness of its own cosmopolitanism.
What the learned Professor means is- 'Iqbal was Punjabi. Just be grateful he didn't fart incessantly. Anyway, lots of people give meaningless lectures which are turned into meaningless books.'
The cosmopolitan thought zones of Indian intellectuals extended
only if they got to America. It was from America that people like M.N Roy & Chatto ended up in Lenin's Moscow. Lala Hardayal didn't get that far because he kept marrying Swiss or Swedish maidens. Apparently he made a bit of money by writing self-help Philosophy books later on.
beyond the Britain-India axis created by empire.
Britain had outsourced Indology to Hanover back when the two realms had been in personal union. That type of philology spread to other parts of Germany and Europe.
A number of influential Indians travelled, worked and studied in Europe, especially in Germany, and Iqbal was one of them.
German PhDs were cheap and you could pop over for 6 months and get one in between the arduous business of eating dinners at the Inns of Court so as to qualify as a barrister. I can think of no 'influential' Indian who 'worked' in Europe or studied anything useful there at that time. Lohia, it is true, had a German PhD. But it was on Gandhian satyagraha or cow-dung or some such shite. Iravati Karve is the only other person I can think of. She did not have a penis. Thus her stupidity represented a protest against dicks just as Lohia protested against peeps wot spick Inglis gud.
Iqbal was a famous Muslim poet who was invited to give lectures which might appear erudite and 'cosmopolitan' even if they were no such thing.
(Iqbal) explores and reconstructs relationships between Islam and the West.
That relationship was clear. The West was advanced. Islam was backward. There was little point 'exploring' this shitty situation. Reconstructing your relationship with people who are richer, smarter and more powerful than you depends on doing sensible things so as to become more productive and thus a bit richer and more powerful. Gassing on about Plato doesn't help anybody.
In particular, he focuses on the impact that Neoplatonism had on the development of Islamic mysticism, which he argued played a role in the decline of Islamic civilization.
Though that of Europe rose under that same influence.
In the Reconstruction, Iqbal is keen to draw attention to Islamic Hellenism in order to rebut Eurocentric notions of history.
Greece is part of Europe. Saying Muslims were once totes into Greek civilization is 'Eurocentric'.
He stresses the creativity of Islam’s engagement with Greek thought, showing how Muslims added to and transformed Hellenistic learning.
and then gave it up save in the shape of, utterly useless, 'Unani Medicine'.
In his earlier English work, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (1907), he argued that this partly stemmed from the very nature of that engagement, which took place through processes of translation. Because “careless translators” of Greek philosophy introduced “a hopeless mass of absurdities” in the texts, the commentaries on Greek philosophy by thinkers such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and others became “an effort at discovery, not exposition. . . . They had largely to rethink the Philosophies of Aristotle and Plato.”
This view reflected the very rudimentary nature of Arabic philology at that time. Still, it should have been obvious that Arabic words would have many more meanings not known to the pedant who had compiled the dictionary you were relying on.
Consider Borges's story 'Averroes search' which assumes that Averroes had never seen a play in a theatre or a puppet show or anything of that sort. Thus he writes- ' Aristu ( Aristotle) gives the name tragedy“ to panegyrics and the name 'comedy“ to satires and anathemas. There are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur’an and the mu’allaqat of the mosque.' As a matter of fact, Averroes's Spain had touring companies of actors as well as the even more popular shadow puppet theatre. The Quran contains references to 'comedies' (plays with happy endings) e.g. Joseph & Zuliekha as well as to tragic outcomes- e.g. the story of Thamud.
A similar point has been made by contemporary scholars, who characterize the translation activity that brought together Islam and Greece as a consciously creative act, rather than
something dudes did in their sleep?
(to use Iqbal’s words) an act of “servile imitation.”
that would be producing pastiches of poor quality- like a Bollywood remake of Schindler's list which features a dancing elephant.
Translation both in the sense of re-creating texts by converting them from one language to another, and of merging different conceptual languages and cultures into each other, was a key intellectual strategy of Indian thinkers and writers in the colonial period, as well as of Muslim thinkers in the wider Islamic world.
Sadly, this was not the case. The Japanese translated everything they could lay their hands on and soon started producing original work of equal quality. Muslims and Hindus were too lazy to bother or, speaking truthfully, the domestic market was simply too small or shallow.
While making an analogy between the Quran & Plato's Republic,
though there is no similarity between them.
Iqbal argues that the intellectual revolt against Greek thought by some Muslim thinkers, especially against the speculative nature of Aristotelian logic, paved the way for the experimental and empirical attitudes that underlay the development of modern science.
There was empirical research being done under the Caliphate. It has been suggested that Islam began to fall behind because of the disruptive effect of invasions- e.g. that of the Mongols- and an increasing distaste for empirical work, especially in medicine where corpses of the executed were no longer dissected for research purposes.
With regard to science, the Reconstruction is an amalgam of different narratives.
i.e. the academic prejudices of the period. One could certainly point to the scientific and empirical attitude of Imam Jafar-as-Sadiq and Jabir Ibn Hayan who was known as 'Geber' in the West. It is striking that Islamic sciences were advanced by people of different ethnicities. Moreover, ideas and technologies from distant lands- e.g. China- were quickly adopted or improved on. At one time, it was fashionable to say that 'Asiatics' could do empirical work well enough. What they were bad at was abstraction and deductive logic. The truth is rising general purpose productivity creates a market for innovation and systematization which in turn raises total factor productivity. We are still in the dark as to why there was a great divergence between the West and the Rest which may well have occurred as early as the thirteenth century.
For Iqbal, Muhammad stood between the ancient and the modern world, with the source of his revelation belonging to the former but the spirit to the latter.
The source of his revelation in Jewish and Christian. Its spirit could be said to be modern. What is certain is that it had great utility.
Another strand in the Reconstruction argues that while Sufism played a great role in the spread of Islam, its current 'representatives are not capable of “receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience.”
I suppose Iqbal was thinking of the 'Pirzadas' of Punjab. No doubt, there were Muslim mathematicians and Scientists who could find Sufi doctrines useful in visualizing the strange new world of Quantum Mechanics.
Young Muslim STEM subject students around the world may well agree with Iqbal's view that
religion (and not Islam alone) and science (are) compatible, arguing that both “may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies” in the wake of recent developments in physics. In Iqbal’s view these undermined “materialism”; the foundations of Newtonian physics
Actually, by embracing 'action at a distance' Newton was rejecting the mechanistic world view. Einstein fought a long battle against 'non-locality' or 'entanglement' of the sort which has prevailed thanks to empirical confirmation of the Bell inequality. Great strides are currently being made in quantum computing. We now have a very different conception of 'matter'. No doubt, it will continue to change into something yet more rich and strange.
could thereby opening up the possibility of the validity of religion’s understanding of reality and its “spirituality.”
Apparently, there was a Pakistani nuclear physicist who thought the power of 'djinns' could be harnessed by science.
For Iqbal, humanity is in need of “a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import directing the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis.”
Does this mean 'vilayet-e-faqih'- i.e. the rule of Islamic clerics? Khameni may think so. Apparently some followers of Shariati believed the opposite and tried to assassinate him over four decades ago.
Iqbal refers to ideas coming to thinkers as being like poetic inspiration. He regards inspiration “as a universal property of life”; the growth of plants, the evolution of animals, and humans “receiving light from the inner depths of life, are all cases of inspiration.”
Pan-psychism appears to be a perfectly respectable philosophical position. I suppose Iqbal's chief fame was as a poet. If Tagore got to gas on about Science, why not Iqbal?
They also reinforce the eclecticism of the book, by mixing different modes of writing and thinking in ways that make ideas like “inspiration” cut across the distinctions between them.
In Indian Islam, there was a tradition of the Emperor looking at the recommendation of different schools (mazhabs) and picking the one which suited him best. The problem with this type of eclecticism is that it tends to be self-serving in a short-sighted manner.
In Iqbal’s intellectual history of Islam and its relation to the West, there are no fully formed ideas but only anticipations of ideas that are in continual process of being re-thought.
In other words, there is no history as such. There are just some half-baked hypothesis uttered at random.
For example, he refers to how the “idea of degrees of Reality” appears in the writings of Shihabuddin Suhrawardi Maqtul, how this is “worked out on a much larger scale in Hegel,”
The difference is that Hegel was referencing a popular tradition associated with people like Boehme which reflected the rising productivity and political importance of the common people. This was associated with the Reformation and the spread of literacy and instruction in useful subjects. No doubt, Suhrawardi's ideas were eagerly received by the middle class, but they failed to gain political power.
and then “more recently” in Haldane’s Reign of Relativity.
As I said, Iqbal was provincial, not cosmopolitan at all. Haldane was an important British politician. He wasn't a mathematical physicist. Still, as a man who had himself moved to the Left (he joined the Labour party and served its first administration as Lord Chancellor) we may say that he rejected 'privilege' and thus could subscribe to Einstein's theory which denied that there was any privileged frame of reference.
So, too, Ibn Khaldun is seen as a forerunner of Bergson
Bergson was highly regarded at one time. But that time had passed.
and as anticipating the “modern hypothesis of subliminal selves.”
i.e. the notion that the Pope might want to pinch the bum of a pretty lady.
Iqbal's central contribution was to emphasize the development of the 'ego' (khuddi) rather than to seek for its subordination and dissolution. The trouble is that everybody has a big ego then there can be no mutually advantageous solution to collective action problems. Politically, this is a recipe for either Balkanization or the rule of a dynasty or that of the Army.
Thus, for Iqbal the reconstruction of Islam partly involves the reconstruction of an individuated selfhood within a reinterpreted Islamic framework, in order to ground a modernizing anti-colonial self affirmation.
It was already well grounded in things like Tanzimat before Iqbal was born. His book was
a riposte to Spengler’s view in The Decline of the West (1918–23) that (in Iqbal’s words) “Islam amounts to a complete negation of the ego” and that it is “thoroughly ‘Magian’ in spirit and character.”
Herodotus tells us that the Magi had been slaughtered a long time ago.
Iqbal saw his “main purpose” in the Reconstruction “to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from these Magian overlayings which . . . have misled Spengler.”
Why secure a vision of something which didn't exist? Iqbal's real importance for Islam lies in his attack on the Qadianis. Apparently, his father had been attracted to that movement and this alarmed the son. To ban a specific Islamic sect, you would need to get rid of kaffirs or create an Islamic state. It was the secular nature of the British Raj which had enabled the Qadianis to expand. Pakistan must be created not just to ethnically cleanse kaffirs but also to reclassify Qadianis as such. Remarkably, it took civilian rule, under Bhutto, to accomplish this goal. Iqbal, it must be said, was ahead of the curve in spotting in Jinnah- who was not known for piety at all- as the leader who would deliver what he wanted. I suppose Charles Taylor thinks this is why Iqbal should be re-read. Atheistic politicians should help turn countries into theocracies or to foster theocratic minorities within the country. Why content yourself with Quebecois terrorism when you can also have Khalistani or ISIS terrorism?
In an interview given a decade ago, Taylor said 'Something we don’t really see in the West is a party like the BJP, where some of its major thinkers have been people without any piety at all.'
The Anglican Church has been called the Tory party at prayer. Taylor must know that Disraeli was its head. On the other hand, Taylor is right that Trump is a deeply religious man. He has never had sex with porn stars. He merely prayed with them. That is why Evangelicals vote for him.
What is strange is that Taylor forgets that Partition was caused by Jinnah's Muslim League. But Jinnah was not a practicing Muslim. His daughter married a Christian and her children were brought up Zoroastrian.
People like Savarkar were
freedom fighters.
atheists
like Jinnah, Savarkar was not committed to orthopraxy. But he was a minor figure. Shyamprasad Mukherjee split from his Mahasabha to form the Jan Sangh with help from the RSS. The Jan Sangh morphed into the BJP.
mobilising religion for political ends, which produces this mobilisation of popular piety in a very sinister fashion.
in Canada.
This is quite different from certain kinds of Islamic anti-secularism, motivated by fundamentalist but nevertheless deeply held beliefs.
Canada expended blood and Treasure killing Muslims during the war on terror. Meanwhile, jihadi and khalistani terror was sprouting up in its own backyard. That was fine because everybody knows only Modi kills Muslims. Only Jews were killed by NATO in Iraq and Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden wasn't kidnapped and killed. Obama sent him some nice chocolates.
Taylor's own 'Commission for Reasonable Accommodation' supported a ban on public officials displaying religious symbols on their person- i.e. wearing crucifixes should be banned for policemen, judges etc. However, Taylor changed his mind. Terrorists should be employed in these roles and it is reasonable to accommodate their sartorial preferences.
Re-reading Iqbal reminds us that Canada could follow the Pakistani path. Re-reading Taylor reminds us that Professors of non-STEM subjects have shit for brains.
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