LOVE of God, gnosis of God and obedience to God are the linchpins of Sufism. Although to some love results in gnosis, but love and gnosis are mutually independent ideals as ecstatic Sufism hardly talks of cognition and cognitive Sufism seldom talks of love. The Quran supports mystic-intuitive knowledge which does not require any particular exercise and rites of initiation and when it is disclosed, is perfectly ‘natural’ knowledge. So, the Quranic doctrine of cognition is diametrically opposed to Sufi-gnosis which turns mysticism into mystification. Hence, the supra-intellectual knowledge — which ‘infallible’ Sufi intuition claims as its exclusive domain — arguably has no roots in the Quran.

However, moral Sufism constitutes both an aesthetic ideal of love and gnostic ideal of cognition, both meant for the realisation of moral tasks. So, the ecstatic acts of mediaeval Sufis are of no value as the Prophet (PBUH) and his companions never indulged in these practices. As faith without good works is equivalent to having no faith at all (6:158), it is on this touchstone that the Sufi principle of ishq needs to be judged.

The labyrinthine Sufi doctrine of ishq seems a riddle through and through. However, Iqbal offers it as a definite and defined idea. His academic stay in Europe showed him the dilemma of man and led him to faith from territorial nationalism. He concluded that Islam presents certain values of ethical orientation crucial both to the survival and development of mankind.

As the process of history is cumulative and evolutionary, there could be no cut and dried specific moral imperatives; these are rather to be harvested from revealed and prophetic sources. These are to be precisely articulated from the entirety of the Quran and Prophetic Sunnah rather than individual verses and hadiths. Since it is the moral orientation of the Quran and the general directives of seerah which determine the ethical value of particular injunctions, without this orientation no injunction has real life, let alone ethical meaning.

Iqbal proposes symbiosis of ‘aql’ and ‘ishq’.

Iqbal’s thorough acquaintance with the thought-classics and actual state of affairs of both the Muslim East and the West had uniquely equipped him to judge their performance. He judged them on the principle of ishq, which means acreative forward movement. Here forward movement rules out backward and stationary movement, while the term creative ensures that the movement is meaningful. On this premise, while he found the somnolent East in the throes of hibernation and hence devoid of ishq, he found the Faustian West alive and moving, but this movement being meaningless and purposeless was harmful and destructive. The West was inventive, but not creative in the sense of Iqbal’s ishq. For ishq is a positive moral creativity, of which Ibrahim — the archetype monotheist — is a model who summoned up all the reserves of his positive nature to scientifically approach reality.

Thus, man’s essential task is to get mastery over nature and then use this mastery, under the human initiative, to create a good world order. For the scientific pursuit — without harnessing it for the creation of a moral order — is vain, dangerous and destructive, as the West’s technological performance manifests. On the other hand, mysticism devoid of a scientific, organic picture of the universe is an exercise in futility as the void spiritualism of the East depicts. This was Iqbal’s critique of the West and the Muslim world that aql (scientific pursuit) without ishq (positive moral energy) is a misguided devilish exercise, while ishq without aql was not just sterile but even pure self-deception. The ills of the West were rooted in secularism while those of the Muslim world in void spiritualism. He­­nce, he proposes symbiosis of aql and ishq, as a panacea to the human crisis.

Iqbal concluded that the secular West would hardly seek any negotiation with any moral ideology, however, the Muslim world could be awakened from slumber to turn the sociopolitical ideals of the Quran into reality. He said that Muslims owe it to themselves and the world at large a revival of the élan vital of the Quran for the democratic and economic organisation of mankind. He dreamed of Pakistan as a first step towards this task. To him, ishq informed by reason is equipped with and capable of creating the necessary conditions to build a moral world order which man pledged at creation.

Iqbal had envisioned Pakistan as an epitome of pure progress — moral and material — but it is torn apart between the moribund right influenced by mediaeval thought and the spineless, secular elite tuned to Western modernity. The remedy lies in the fusion of modern ethos with the moral ideals of Islam. It demands the supervening role of ishq which to Ghalib “lights its candle with lightning bolt to see its task through”.

The writer is an academic.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2025