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IT has recently been pointed out that Iqbal’s poetic corpus is replete with contradictions. One obvious explanation is that the intellectual growth of a thinker entails a lack of harmony between at least some of his ideas. Another explanation might consider the competing intellectual currents of East and West that were a constant feature of Iqbal’s personal development.
But any contradiction-focused criticism of Iqbal, in addition to undermining the poet’s complicated intellectual development, belies a deeper misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of poetry. For what is poetry without the shifting sands of meaning that move between two propositional truths? Meaning is created not by the propositions taken independently, but by the oscillation of poetic expression between them.
In Iqbal, you will find both a critique of Sufism and its simultaneous defence, an inclination towards individual solitude and a subsequent drive towards social activism, a polemical unpicking of modernity and a grateful embrace of its many gifts, a militant glorification of the sword and a subtle vindication of the pen, a condescending diminution of rationality and a humble acceptance of its indispensability.
Iqbal is a great poet because of these apparent contradictions, not in spite of them. To the poetic heart, an apparent contradiction is only apparent. In other words, it is a paradox. Anything short of that fails to capture the complexity of the human being and the world in which he lives. The interplay of the finite and the infinite, the divine and the earthly, the spiritual and the mundane, can only be captured by the power of the poetic paradox.
The heart verifies what it receives even when it cannot explain it.
It is through the juxtaposition of two apparently conflicting propositions that we are opened up to the kind of knowledge that is received by the heart in a moment of ecstatic illumination, where it finds itself in the presence of truth. This is not discursive knowledge acquired by rational thinking, but intuitive knowledge received by an intimate experience of nearness with truth. The heart verifies what it receives even when it cannot explain it. It doesn’t need to. In the paradoxical world of the poet, the receipt of true knowledge is liberated from the fetters of rational explanation.
In its moment of opening, the heart pierces through the veil of physical appearance and catches a glimpse of the gardens of truth that lie beyond. The simultaneous affirmation of two beliefs that seem contradictory is precisely the moment when the reader realises that what is mirrored in the poetry before him is the paradoxical nature of his own experience.
The challenge for modern readers of Iqbal is the subduing of the poetic heart by the rational mind that is so emblematic of our age. The rational mind, shaped by a physical conception of reality and a scientific view of knowledge, cannot go beyond its own discursive contours. There is no place for contradictions in rational thinking
On its own, the rational mind has not the tools to realise the divine reality it is pointed towards when it encounters Ghalib’s paradoxical verses: “hum ne dasht-i-imkan ko aik naksh-i-pa paya”or “ranj se khugar hua insaan toh mit jaata hai ranj”. Ghalib, like Iqbal, inherited the poetic paradox from the Indo-Persian literary tradition that traces its intellectual roots right back to the Holy Quran.
The God of the Quran is everywhere (58:7) and, simultaneously, beyond everything that might be associated with Him (59:23). The human being is made in the finest form and, at the same time, reduced to the lowest of the low (95:4-5). The life of this world is nothing more than fleeting amusement (29:64). Yet, the world is a serious place that wasn’t created for play (21:16).
The Quran, much like the poetry that follows in its shadow, speaks to the human conscience in all its fullness. It is meant to be received by those who go about life relying on both faculties of the intellect: the eye of the rational mind and the eye of the poetic heart. It captures and communicates the multilayered nature of reality: the apparent and the real, the hidden and the manifest, the immanent and the transcendent. In a universe paradoxically governed both by its recipient’s free will and by its Author’s predetermination, the Quran invites the Muslim towards a complete apprehension of self and world.
An intellect that relies on the rational mind alone remains half-blind, aimlessly wandering in the physical layer of reality. It is not the mark of a great intellect to accommodate a contradiction without accepting it. True greatness of intellect lies in the ability to contain two opposing ideas and, by living out the apparent contradiction between them, attain the conviction that both of them are equally true.
The writer studies law at Oxford.
Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2025
