February 19, 2002

Suroosh Irfani teaches cultural studies at the National College of Arts, Lahore

Shiraz, home to Persian mystics like Hafez and Saadi, has always been a site of memorable encounters for me, including those with books. During a recent visit to this provincial capital, only a stone’s throw away from the Persian Gulf, I came across the Persian translation of Paolo Coelho’s Veronica decides to die, in a bookshop across the Shiraz university medical school. Coelho’s flair for mystical riddles and Sufi tales has made him one of the most widely read writers in post-revolutionary Iran.

His Veronica is a riveting account of a young woman’s passage through the tedium and excesses of modern life, an attempted suicide in a monastery, the ordeals of a mental institution, and rebirth through love and wisdom. Indeed, Veronica seems to be the feminine counterpart of Harry Haller, the twentieth century’s most profound anti-hero immortalized by Hermann Hesse in The Steppenwolf, a novel giving a ground-breaking analysis of the inner hell of a man satiated and estranged from life, even as he struggles through the ‘dark night of the soul’ towards healing and wholeness.

To be sure, if there is a connection between the psychological development of the individual and the historical development of the times, as Erik Erikson observed many years ago, then The Steppenwolf stands out as a testament of the kind of spiritual struggle underpinning the present historical moment — where ‘man’ is no longer seen as fixed and enduring, but as an experiment and transition that Hesse believed marked the beginning of “a long pilgrimage towards the ideal harmony”.

Steppenwolf, then, is a Faustian tale about the split between the rarefied world of intellectuality, music and order, and the chaos of instincts — where the quest for the self means a passage through the abyss of doubt and despair, with the ego shattered and refashioned in the magic theatre of the Jungian collective unconscious. The novel furnishes a disturbing analysis of a sickness of the soul “that strikes the strongest in spirit and the richest in gifts” even as it holds out the reality of a higher world of spirit and art beyond madness and death.

Hesse’s crowning achievement is his transfusion of western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche, as indeed Eastern philosophy and mysticism into popular western culture, long before such eclecticism was appropriated by later day magical realists. Small wonder that something of the Steppenwolf’s ambience resonates in some of the best known emblems of popular culture — from Pink Floyd’s music, to Stanley Kubricks’ Eyes wide shut where excesses in a magic theatre of sex and death mark a transformative return to ordinary life.

Both Veronica and the Steppenwolf, then, are pointers to a meaning producing spiritual quest where an encounter with death is a prelude to life in what amounts to a secular affirmation of the Prophet’s saying ‘die before you die’. Indeed, these works seem to form part of a moral discourse of individual freedom and choice, at the cost of “an unthinkable and endless suffering”, leading to surrender and enlightenment — a discourse that forms the underbelly of a hedonism that most Muslims see as the only western reality.

I first discovered Hesse some 25 years ago as a student of Psychology at Shiraz university. An Iranian friend, who always reminded me of the Ethiopian Emperor Haille Selasie, gave me a copy of Demian, an earlier semi-autobiographical novel by Hesse that Thomas Mann hailed as a literary milestone comparable to James Joyce’s Ulysses. It chronicles an adolescent’s quest for identity and meaning amidst the chaos of a world torn by war, materialism and a fossilized religiosity. I read the novel just as I was making a traumatic liberating transition from chemical engineering that I was then studying at Imperial college, London, to psychology at Shiraz university - a crisis that eventually opened me to Jungian analysis under an Iranian-American Sufi psychoanalyst.

Interestingly enough, Demian was the product of a personal crisis as Hesse underwent psychoanalysis of the Jungian kind. The novel is therefore rich in archetypal imagery as it redefines the relationship between the temporal ego and the timeless self by accessing a primordial spirituality in the collective unconscious, the deep psychic strata that Jung believed was common to humanity.

I read Demian like no other book. Its incandescent words and images gave me a foretaste of what I was myself to experience in my confrontation with the unconscious.

To be sure, Demian’s relative ‘lightness’ as compared to The Steppenwolf’s weight made Hesse the cultural icon of successive generations in the West, and also for many Iranians, as most of his works have been translated into Persian.

Using a Nietzschean ambience that pits intellectual mediocrity and middle class security against the creative chaos of living dangerously, Demian is in fact a trail blazing manifesto for a new conception of the individual: Every individual is “an experiment on part of nature, a throw into the unknown”, his only vocation should be to “allow this throw to work itself out in his innermost being. Humanity is not something complete that must be maintained and protected, but a distant goal towards which we were marching”. As to religion, “it’s all one, whether you take part in Christian communion or make a pilgrimage to Mecca”.

Moreover, because darkness and light reside within each of us, becoming conscious of our own evil is our only hope in a world “where our capacity for destruction is weighed against the soul’s capacity for compassion and regeneration”.

However, the high point of Hesse’s spiritual humanism seems to be his Journey to the East, acclaimed as “ one of the most elevated spiritual and ethical allegories” of our time. In the league of the journeyers to the East, each pilgrim is his own prosecutor and witness in an interpenetrating universal conscience. In this sense, the journey is a corollary of the sufi’s journey from the amnesia of every day life with eyes wide shut, (khab-i-ghiflat), to an inner awakening.

However, once the novel’s narrator joins the league, he realizes that the expedition “had always been moving towards the East, towards the Home of Light...our great pilgrimage was only a wave in the eternal stream of human beings towards Home”. The past and present mingle and dissolve as the league’s founders — among them Zoroaster, Baudelaire and Plato — meet Leo, the enigmatic servant who turns out to be the league’s president,and possibly one of the seven sleepers of the cave whom the Quran terms a sign of God in suraal kahf.

Even so, the journey is far from a seamless high. As members struggle against doubt and despair, they realize that “despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life”. And that “children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other”. Moreover, the journey is aborted and the narrator never attains the objective of his journey — a vision of princess Fatima, the inner feminine that for many Sufis signified divine wisdom, as French Islamologist Henry Corbin’s translation of Sufi treatises suggests.

To be sure, while Hesse regarded India as his spiritual home and was hailed as a German Bodhisattva, the affinity of many of his ideas with the sufi tradition has remained largely obscured — specially the notions of a timeless East as the abode of Light, Fatima as sophianic wisdom, and servanthood as an ideal of homo divinitus that in Iqbal’s Hallajian flights erases the boundaries between God and ‘His servant’ (abdayhu). Indeed, apart from Iran, there seems little recognition of Hesse in the Muslim world, notwithstanding the Steppenwolf’s moving soliloquy as a ‘witness’, recalling Iqbal’s ‘complaint to God’ (shikwa) :

“Who read the cloud scripts of the drifting mists by the night? It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruin of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness, and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped secretly at the last turn of the labyrinth of chaos for revelation and God’s nearness?”

As with many Sufis, such ‘ruination’ as a prelude to surrender and rebirth runs through the works of Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth century sufi poet whose passions of the path have been movingly captured in Nigel Watts’ The way of love:

“I should have lived my life as others do. I should have blocked my ears to the call, stayed at home, followed the easy path from my house to the madrassah and back.

Now I find I have ruined my life for Him, and there is no rebuilding it.In a drunken state, I burned my professor’s chair, the home in which I lived. Now there is nowhere for me to sit, or lie or rest. Just smoldering remains. Now look at me — even if I wanted, there could be no home any more. I am more naked now, than when I came into the world”.

Clearly, the timeless wisdom of Rumi’s verses that made him immortal seems rooted in the terrifying ordeals of an inner experience that shattered his personality and remolded him in the furnace of divine love.

Such a traumatic transmutation lies at the heart of the sufi concept of khod shaykani, or self-breaking that for Iqbal constitutes a specifically Adamic attribute. An attribute which many Muslims seem to have renounced for totemic solutions and bin Ladenism, even as it is appropriated by Steppenwolf, “a man molten by the fire of new knowledge and reborn through suffering and surrender”.

As for Erikson’s observation about the interrelationship between psychological and historical development, there seems much sense in it. This is borne out by western ascendancy in inner and outer worlds today, as indeed by the examples of Muslim Spain and India, where the emergence of mega sufi thinkers like Ibne Arabi and aesthetics of Taj Mahal were coeval with political and cultural power.

This being so, the relative absence of a self-consciously suffered creative transmutation in the present Muslim moment seems to lie at the heart of an intellectual inertia that has reduced Muslim society to a virtual ghetto. Indeed, in the context of a society like Pakistan’s that so readily gets sold to the likes of Saddam Hussain, Osama bin Laden and Mulla Omar, one wonders if the path of meaning and surrender a la Veronica, Steppenwolf or Rumi makes much sense here.

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