THE distinguished scholar from India, Shamsurrahman Faruki, was on a short visit to Pakistan. The Iqbal Academy had invited him to deliver a lecture on Iqbal.
Faruki’s works cover a vast field pointing to different branches of Urdu literature. But perhaps most representative and most valuable are his studies of Mir and Dastan-i-Amir Hamza.
His study of Mir has been published in four volumes under the title, Shar-i-Shor Angaiz. His book on Dastan-i-Amir Hamza may be seen as an introduction to an ambitious plan of an in-depth study of this voluminous dastan. This dastan runs in 46 big volumes and Faruki has planned to present a detailed study of each and every volume separately. And after listening to his lecture on Iqbal, how I wish he had chosen Iqbal, too, for an in-depth study.
The question he had chosen to deal with appeared simplistic — how to read Iqbal. But the way he discussed it led us to conclude that most of the scholars and the critics engaged in the study of Iqbal have been reading him the wrong way, and admiring him for the wrong reasons. He did not deny the fact that “Iqbal, the philosopher-activist, political and religious thinker, active in politics though not a full-time politician, was seen by the Muslim Community of South Asia as performing an ongoing, meliorist role in the Muslim society of his time.” But he insisted that “whatever other status Iqbal enjoyed had been conferred on him because of his status as a poet. So any literary consideration of Iqbal could ignore, so far as such a proceeding was possible, the philosophical or political content of his poetry, but could not ignore its literary content.”
Iqbal himself, according to him, bothered more for what goes to make poetry than for anything else: “Take care of the poetry,” he seems to say, “and the philosophy will take care of itself.”
Iqbal took care of the poetry to the extent that he was not content to benefit from any one literary tradition alone. He drank deep from five powerful poetic traditions, which, according to Faruki, are the Arabic-Persian, the Indo-Persian, the European, the Indo-Sanskrit, and Urdu. “With its wealth of allusion, its direct and indirect echoes of other poets, and its wide background studded with poems and poets of the past Iqbal’s poetry is like a panorama of Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Sanskrit, German and English poets of the past. And there is never any doubt as to who is in control: the presiding genius is Iqbal and no one else. He manipulates, uses, abandons, re-embraces, refashions, approaches from unexpected angles.”
As for Iqbal’s linkage in Urdu tradition, he, according to Faruki, owes more to Mir Anis than to any other Urdu poet. In support of this view, he quotes from Hayden White, who says that every writer writes within a tradition and hews the wood of his or her experience in terms comfortable to the traditionally provided matrices thereof.
Now come to Anis. “Mir Anis’s marsiya” he says, “is the best pre-modern model in Urdu of narrative-historical, narrative-lyrical, and oral dramatic poetry, and Iqbal’s poetry extends and explores the possibilities created by Anis.” And he adds: “Iqbal was aware of his legacy from Mir Anis, as his Urdu poems from all periods of his poetic activity amply demonstrate.”
In Persian, Iqbal, according to Faruki, is indebted more to Bedil than to anybody else.
Faruki also explained Iqbal’s indebtedness to the Sanskrit and the European poetic tradition.
So this was the way Iqbal took care of poetry and managed to derive benefit from five great poetic traditions of the East and West. This puts him in an advantageous position where he is seen “as a perfector of different styles in Urdu poetry, and as the inventor of many new ones, for instance, the dramatic dialogue, the verse style that is suited to speech rhythms, the narrative of the imagined landscapes of the mind.”
Steeped deep in the major poetic traditions of the East and West, Iqbal appears to be in a commanding position. Faruki says “All modes, all manners of poem making are within Iqbal’s practical range; the celebratory, the narrative, the lyrical, the dramatic, the hortatory, the speculative, the ironical, the satirical, the comic, the tender, everything melts in his hand and takes whatever shape he wants to give it.”
Faruki pointed out to one more quality in Iqbal’s verse, which, according to him, is the hallmark of great poetry. “In fact”, he said, “it is to be doubted if there ever can be great poetry without the quality that Amir Khusrau called ravani (‘flowingness’).”
It is difficult to determine how a piece of poetry achieves this quality. But this much is, according to him, sure that the poetry of Mir and that of Mir Anis have more flowingness than any of the pre-modern poets. Then he refers to Iqbal and says: “Iqbal would have been placed at the very highest pinnacle of ravani, had we found time to read his poems as literature and not as philosophical dissertations or politico-religious manifestos ......”
THE distinguished scholar from India, Shamsurrahman Faruki, was on a short visit to Pakistan. The Iqbal Academy had invited him to deliver a lecture on Iqbal.
