“BAYKHATAR kud para atish-i-Namrud mein ishq; aql hai mehv-i-tamasha-i-labi-bam abhi,” meaning: the one moved by intense love did fearlessly jump into Namrud’s blaze (to subdue it), while reason merely watched from above (weighing pros and cons), and did nothing (my free translation). The message in these lines from Allama Iqbal was disputed by Dr Javid Iqbal at a recent talk show.

Other verses from the Allama may be recalled to further elaborate his endorsement of “ishq” (admittedly a potent passion) as a creative force in human affairs. I have been thinking about his view, but I have also been thinking about Dr Javid Iqbal’s position that it is reason (“aql”), not passion, that Muslims must rely upon if they are to overcome their disabilities.

The contrariness between reason and passion has been a recurrent theme in western philosophical discourse, and I propose to open a window or two on this debate. I will focus on David Hume (1711-1776), most influential of the 18th century English philosophers, who explored this subject at some length in one of his works, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740).

Nothing is more common in philosophy, he says, than to assert that men are virtuous to the extent that they follow the dictates of reason. Those holding this view maintain that if any other influence comes in the way, it must be set aside. Assuming that there is a moral order in human affairs, divinely appointed or inherent in human nature, they take reason to be man’s capacity to discover this order and, under its guidance, distinguish right from wrong, and direct action to that which is right.

Hume does not go along with this conventional wisdom. He sees reason only as the human capacity to make connections between causes and effects. As such it cannot be, by itself, the motive to any action a person wills. Its domain is that of ideas; human will, on the other hand, places us in the realm of realities. Arithmetic, which is all reasoning, is useful in every art and profession, but it does not motivate action. It will help a merchant figure out what a certain customer owes him, but it is not its function to tell him to recover the money owed him, or what to do with it when it comes in. Abstract reasoning can do no more than direct our attention to cause-effect relationships.

When we encounter the prospect of uneasiness or satisfaction from an object or situation, an emotion of aversion or proximity to it will result. In settling a course of action, we have to discover related objects or situations, making up the totality of the cause-effect relationship. This is where reason comes in. It did not cause the original impulse to aversion or proximity, but it could now direct its course by pointing to the likely consequences of available options.

In other words, reason can neither give rise to nor prevent volition. Nothing can oppose or retard an impulse of passion but a contrary impulse. In Hume’s understanding, the alleged combat between reason and passion is nothing more than a loose and inexact employment of words. In fact, “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Passion seeks to bring about a new situation or modification of an existing one. It conflicts with reason only when the person moved by it assumes the presence of conditions that do not really exist. Again, it offends reason if the means at hand are insufficient to achieve the chosen end, that is, if the connection between causes and effects has been miscalculated. Otherwise reason has nothing to say about the worthiness of the passion at work.

In sum, reason does not determine ends; it can at best facilitate their realisation. Taking a radical example, one may claim that reason has no say in the matter if a person has chosen to desire the world’s total destruction or his own complete ruin. Nor is it contrary to reason to prefer one’s lesser good to one’s greater good and desire the former more ardently.

Hume concludes his discussion with the distinction between “calm” and generous passions implanted in human nature (for instance, love of life or benevolence to children), on the one hand, and on the other the “violent” or volatile ones, such as anger at someone who has hurt you and your desire to have revenge even if it will bring you no advantage.

Others in more recent times have taken positions similar to that of Hume. Graham Wallas (in Human Nature in Politics, 1910) and Walter Lippmann (in A Preface to Politics, 1913) argued that men desire first, and reason afterwards to justify their chosen ends, or to find means of obtaining them. Writers of this persuasion believe that man, when he is the most creative, is a wilful rather than a rational being. George Santayana, a Harvard philosopher, wrote that reason is not an end in itself but only an instrument for providing the pleasure of comprehension to those who seek the truth of thing, which a great many men do not seek. Reason is desirable also because it enables us to plan safe and economical action.

In this train of reasoning the falseness of an opinion is not necessarily objectionable. According to Friedrich Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil, 1885), the more important question is whether the opinion is life-preserving and life-furthering. Myths can be useful, and they are to be judged in terms of their ability to express a people’s will and energise them.

The disagreement between the empiricists such as Hume and the traditional thinkers (for instance, John Locke and other natural law theorists) is not a confrontation between right and wrong. The two sides are speaking from different perspectives. The traditionalists are normative thinkers, concerned with how men should act and what should motivate them. The empiricists want to know how men do actually make choices and act. Yet the two approaches need not be regarded as mutually exclusive. Hume is not saying that all normative discourse should cease because men will do what they will do. But one should not expect a whole lot from it. At one point he says also that passions may come accompanied by judgments and opinions to whose influence they may then be subject to a degree.

We began this discussion with a quotation from Allama Iqbal, in which he appeared to place passion (“ishq”) higher than reason (“aql”). One may want to hear him further in this regard. There is, however, a methodological problem. He did not discuss the subject in his prose, and we do not normally expect sustained and internally consistent expositions in poetry. Poets speak as the spirit moves them, which may change course from one poem (or even one couplet) to the next. While we cannot, then, attribute to the Allama an unequivocal position on reason and passion, a trend on his part may be discerned.

Keep in mind the verse we quoted at the beginning. In a well known couplet he says there are worlds beyond the stars we have discovered (and reached), but there is more to do and, therefore, there are additional challenges for man’s passion (“ishq”) to meet. He implies that, acting as a creative force, passion determines the goal here. A few lines in a poem, entitled Zauq-o-Shauq, merit attention. Passion, he says, is the first guide to reason and the exploring eye, and without it law and codes are mere idols in the temple of abstractions. The dedication of Abraham, the fortitude of Husain, and the happenings at Badr and Hunayn exemplify the role of passion. Mohammad (PBUH) personified passion while Abu Lahb (the crooked and inveterate enemy of God) represented “aql” (reason). It is apparent from one of Iqbal earlier poems (Aql aur Dil) that in his view reason is mainly an explorer, finder, and calculator.

Passion moves Abraham and Husain to pursue and defend, without regard to the cost involved, that which is right. In the case of Mohammad (PBUH) it works also as a creative force. At Badr, where reason would have advised withdrawal or surrender, passion enabled 313 men to defeat an army of 1,000. Here passion served as a great energiser.

In all of this, Iqbal appears to be fairly close to Hume. He would readily accept Hume’s distinction between generous and violent passions, and that between creative and destructive ones. He would applaud love and benevolence but reject hate as a motive. He would also agree with Hume that passion may appropriately be subject to the influence of judgments and opinions (or, let us say, the community’s values). He might add that there is no need to call upon reason to discover the moral order for us, for God has already spelled it out. That leaves reason with only an instrumental role.

Is this discussion relevant to Pakistan? The country is admittedly being ravaged by violence arising from uncharitable passions such as hate and vengefulness. Reason, as an agent for discerning cause-effect relationships, will serve militants in devising means to achieve their ends as much as it will serve their opponents. It can do little to create goodwill between contending groups. Following Hume one may say that since an impulse of passion can be thwarted only by an opposing impulse, social and political forces in Pakistan must spread the more generous passions (love of the fellow man, and respect for human rights, among others) to counter the forces of hate and revenge.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE passage of the Protection of Women Bill by the National Assembly and lately the Senate has vindicated the basic principle that in a democracy, be it Islamic, laws are made and unmade in the assemblies and not in the seminaries.

Article 227 of the Constitution indeed bars the parliament from enacting laws which are repugnant to Islamic injunctions but it is a matter for the members of parliament, and no one else, to determine. If the theologians were to be given the power to veto the decisions of parliament, Pakistan would become a theocracy — a concept that Mr Jinnah totally rejected and a vast majority of the people do even now despite being devout Muslims.

The Constitution provides for a Council of Islamic Ideology to advise on the point of repugnancy but the decision, nevertheless, lies with parliament. The Constitution does not make the advice binding nor does it suggest any other course if it were to be disregarded. Binding advice would detract from the supremacy of parliament which all political parties, even the most orthodox among them, are committed to uphold. In this case, advice was neither sought from the council nor did it chose to tender it.

By threatening to resign from parliament if the bill were to become law, the religious parties seemed to suggest that a body of priests or Islamic scholars should be superimposed over parliament. If that is what they want, they should make it a part of their manifesto for the next general election which is not far away. They should not be demanding now, backed by the ultimatum of mass resignations, that the will of the minority must prevail over the majority. That would amount to rubbishing the parliamentary system and practices or whatever little is left of both after the numerous amendments to which the Constitution has been subjected successively by Z.A. Bhutto, Ziaul Haq, Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf.

However, the religious leaders, with Qazi Hussain Ahmad in the lead, cannot be blamed much for invoking the extraneous pressure of their peers in the mosques and madressahs to sabotage the bill. The path to it was shown to them by Chaudhry Shujaat, President Musharraf’s chief political strategist, who took the bill (it now seems without the consent of the president and his own parliamentary group) to some ulema after it had been considered and approved by a select committee of the House. Resultantly, zina bil raza (fornication) is being made a penal offence which has angered the supporters of the bill without appeasing its opponents.

The controversy over the proposed law has reached a stage where it has divided the political parties and is tending to undermine the integrity of the state institutions and the Constitution. The MMA alliance itself stands in danger of falling apart on the point of en masse resignations as Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of the JUI its leading component party, appears averse to it.

The religious parties forming the alliance have enormously increased their presence in the assemblies by pooling their seats and resources in the last general election without significantly increasing their vote bank. It would be a setback to them and national politics if a splintered religious right ceased to exercise a check, as it has been doing, on the government which being backed by the army, tends to be overbearing and often acts irresponsibly — as it has in gathering a swarm of ministers, for instance.

Of greater concern to the liberal elements and human rights activists should be the fact that further, and much-needed, reforms to the legal code may be stymied by the rumpus caused by the women’s bill. The current bill, unless further whittled down by the president under clerical pressure (Chaudhry Shujaat is not giving up), may bring some relief to the women raped or accused of adultery but Gen Musharraf may find his liberalism too stretched to purge the country’s legal code of many other harsher and more discriminatory religious laws enacted by Ziaul Haq.

Sections 295-B and C that Zia added to the penal code have made defiling the name of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) punishable with death, and the desecration of the Holy Quran with imprisonment for life. Both these sections are invoked often with ulterior motives as much against the Muslims as against the Hindus, Christians and the sequestered Ahmadiyya community. Hardly anyone has ever been tried and convicted by the courts under these laws but quite a few innocent people have fallen victim to mob fury and a larger number deprived of their freedom and property.

A youth who had spent his childhood years committing the Holy Quran to memory was lynched to death on rumours that he had burnt one. A young Ahmadi lawyer and an old Hindu lady suffered a similar fate. These laws have been used by the powerful to drive the weak out of their ancestral homes to grab their lands. Consequently, more people from Pakistan are said to have sought asylum in Europe, Canada and Australia on grounds of religious persecution than from any other country.

Then, three more sections, 298-A, B and C, were incorporated in the penal code during Ziaul Haq’s time providing long prison terms for Ahmadis if they posed as Muslims or used Islamic terms. Just one of the numerous illustrations of the absurd application of this law is to be found in the conviction of an Ahmadi after long years of trial whose only fault was that he lived in a house on which the “kalima” was inscribed and later he was seen praying facing the qibla in the police lock-up.

All the six sections of the penal code relating to religious offences have contributed to the making of Pakistan a bigoted, intolerant society far more than the Hudood ordinance on rape and fornication. Thousands of otherwise law-abiding, decent and educated people compelled to seek asylum in other countries to escape the discrimination and rigours of these laws have helped foster this image abroad.

The timid and vacillating manner in which the women’s bill has been handled should convince President Musharraf that the Q League is not the party to promote his idea of enlightened moderation or to project Pakistan’s soft image. Though the bill has been passed by both Houses of the parliament, Chaudhry Shujaat is still bending over backward to do whatever more he can to dissuade the dissenting clerics from resigning only because in them he sees his “natural allies” in the next elections. It naturally follows that if Gen Musharraf is seeking a career in politics, which he surely is, he must look for new allies.

Finally, a question to the pious opponents of the women’s bill: If they suspect that the passage of the bill would make Pakistan a vast whorehouse, was it one before 1979 when Ziaul Haq promulgated the Hudood Ordinance?