Vaqt ki Raagni, which includes Muhammad Hasan Askari’s essay on Ibn-e Arabi and Soren Kierkegaard, appeared posthumously a year after his death in 1978. The bulk of the essays in this volume were written in the 1960s, a few in the 1970s, and the last four in the 1940s. In the 1960s, Askari was writing principally for the literary journal Saat Rang, ably edited by its owner Ather Siddiqi, who had started it at the behest and encouragement of Askari himself. Like most Urdu literary journals, it ceased publication after a few years. Later, in the 1970s, when the late Suhail Ahmad, a poet, critic and professor of Urdu at Lahore, started his Mehraab — a sporadic miscellany of creative and critical writing — largely to fill the gap left by the second demise of the celebrated literary journal, Savera, he especially invited Askari to write for it. Shabkhoon (Allahabad) was still another venue where a few stray pieces of the author found their way during this period.
Of the sixteen essays brought together in Vaqt ki Raagni, the last four, dating from an earlier time, although penetrating and insightful as Askari’s writings always are, really do not belong in this collection. They are thematically at odds with the other twelve. Their inclusion must be at tributed to Suhail Ahmad’s “eejaad-i-banda” — or “inventive exuberance,” if you will. The rest of the essays are all of a piece, indicative of the single, consuming engagement of their author with the problem and place of Reality within eastern civilisations. Questions such as what is literary taste, how it is born, what are its foundational assumptions, what it means to accept western literary concepts and influences, and whether such influences can be accepted without injury to one’s essential cultural ethos as it unfolds in empirical time are revisited in these essays from varying perspectives — literature, music, metaphysics, and writing-scripts — with a frightening intensity of focus. Askari eventually concluded that in order to deal with these ques tions it was necessary to first trace them back to a core concept — and that concept was Reality. But which Reality? The one grasped by man’s rational faculty? By his emotions? Senses? By all or none of these? Individually, none of these apparati of cognition, inasmuch as it is the instrument of a finite and contingent being, was necessarily self-existent. Hence it could only speak for itself and not for the cosmos as a whole. And collectively, they were all merely part of something still higher, self-existent and beyond temporality, indeed part of Existence itself. Askari felt that this Reality had to be metaphysical, well beyond the material world, but which nonetheless contained the material world within itself as a possibility of its phenomenal becoming. He arrived at this concept of Reality through Tasavvuf, as expounded in the metaphysics of Vahdat al-Vujud (Unity of Being) by its greatest theoretician Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240), a native of Murcia in south-eastern Spain.
The question of whether everyone in society was always conscious of this ineluctable relationship between one’s meanest or sublime act and Reality was perhaps less important for Askari. However, no informed cultural discourse — especially no literary discourse in South Asia with such formidable western values looming large overhead since the arrival of the English — could afford to bypass it. A lack of clarity regarding this question had clouded the thinking of most Urdu intelligentsia since the time of Sir Syed, Muhammad Husain Azad and Hali — men who ardently undertook to effect a transformation of their society in order to bring it abreast of that of their English overlords.
Askari’s chief purpose in the present essay is a comparative study of the treatment of Abraham’s narrative by Soren Kierkegaard in his Fear and Trembling and by Ibn-e Arabi in three chapters of his classic work on the metaphysical theory of Tasavvuf, the Fusus al-Hikam. Actually only one of Ibn-e Arabi’s chapters, fifth in order and scarcely three-and-a-half pages in length, deals strictly with Abraham. The other two, devoted as they are to Isaac and Ishmael, complement and conclude the narrative, enabling Askari to fully work out and validate his thesis.
The third book discussed in the early part of the essay, André Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres, is peripheral to Askari’s discussion, but nonethe less important as the much needed springboard for the later comparison of the interpretive methods of Kierkegaard and Ibn-e Arabi, Askari’s main objective. Gide provides him with the needed point of departure, and in a curious but not wholly unexpected way, its introduction into the essay has much to do with Askari’s particular writing style, characterised as it is by a brutal and blistering irony, if astonishingly understated.
Needless to say, a perusal of Fear and Trembling and the relevant chapters of the Fusus would be quite rewarding (the former is a delightfully slim book, the latter only a few pages long), if only to verify whether or not Askari has misrepresented either author. My own reading has not revealed distortions or misrepresentations; hence I have also not felt it necessary to trace each idea of the two authors back to its source. Had I even tried, it would no doubt have proved impossible to resurrect them intact since Askari rarely quotes verbatim but rather paraphrases the original in his own Urdu, and that, moreover, is interspersed with his own text. However, a careful reading of the original texts does bear out Askari’s accurate reading and comprehension of them. Whether his conclusions are compellingly drawn is quite another matter, which I’ll address below.
There is little doubt that in this as well as in his other essays Askari’s intended audience is the insider — the Urdu reader and writer. As for his analysis of Ibn al-Arabi, it is quite simply brilliant, indeed inspired; both the insider as well as the outsider will find much of value in it. That said, Askari’s treatment of Kierkegaard does raise some questions, at least for me, and some of the essay’s premises may give pause to a western reader as well. It is not so much a question of misrepresenting Kierkegaard’s ideas — Askari is fairly accurate there — as it is of insufficient regard to the historical context of those ideas. Even for the insider, it would be quite pertinent to be made aware of what some of these pauses might be, but this is hardly the place to focus at length upon the subject; a few points may nonetheless be briefly mentioned.
Askari assumes, here as elsewhere, that without a prior understanding of their own distinctive cultural traditions and histories, South Asians cannot properly attempt to understand or imitate the West, much less accomplish the task with reasonable success. However, in that case neither would they properly comprehend the West without reference to western history and culture. While his exposition of Ibn-e Arabi’s ideas is brilliant beyond a doubt, it remains grounded in Islamic culture and its particular spiritual and intellectual milieu, which is how it should be. When Askari turns to Kierkegaard, he overlooks the fact that Fear and Trembling might also have something to do with a different history and culture, even if we disregard the individual biography of its author, conceding to Askari that one’s own life is of little moment before prophets. Askari seems to imply that Kierkegaard somehow deviated, and hence subverted or cheapened, the notion of prophecy, as though “prophecy” were a construct with uniform meaning across all monotheistic traditions. The only valid critique of Kierkegaard’s failure would have to be, necessarily, located against the Christian backdrop of the meaning of prophecy and Abraham’s role as a prophet, not against how Abraham himself as well as the notion of prophecy are viewed by Judaism or by Islam. Put more dramatically, how valid would it be for a Muslim to fault a Christian for his view of the Christ as God or as the Son of God? In spite of certain similarities between Christianity and Islam regarding Jesus, their one basic disjuncture regarding his divinity is so extreme that one cannot assume that an identical narrative will ever emerge about this “status” from these two traditions.
Moreover, the word “prophecy” subsumes a wider range of meanings than the Islamic “nubuvva,” and the two words converge in meaning only in a very limited sense. Hence, neither word is a satisfactory substitute for the other. The conceptual substitution of “prophecy” for “nubuvva” can be attempted only at the cost of disregarding those historical imperatives which shaped the evolution of the notion of “prophecy” in the West over time. While the meaning of nubuvva — and hence the treatment of Abraham — has remained relatively consistent and uniform through the ages in the Islamic tradition, the Jewish Patriarch Avram (Abram) has, on the other hand, gone through an entire series of transformations over time. One can easily discern contemporary anxieties and concerns — whether apologetic, polemical or theological — in the transformation of Abraham’s figure and in its treatment in pre-Christian and postbiblical Judaism. Likewise I’m not sure that the image or the role of Abraham is, on the whole, identical in the Islamic and Christian traditions.
Finally, to underscore the inherent complexities of the issue, I’d like to quote the following: “Moreover the message of each prophet, if examined in detail, depends more on the particular traditions to which it was heir and the historical-cultural setting of the prophet’s activity than upon a transcendent ideal that applies to every member of the group.”1
Being unaware of the Islamic view of Abraham, for which he can hardly be faulted, Kierkegaard had other concerns to deal with, other demons to exorcise — bequeathed to him by his own history and religious tradition. On the one hand, he was fighting the Hegelian overemphasis on rational thought, which could even comprehend faith, and on the other, the fairly substantial baggage of guilt inherited from his penitent father, to say nothing of his own “dread” that was more or less a spiritual state inspired by no fixed object. (Recall his youthful indiscretions, like impregnating Ane out of wedlock and the ensuing sense of guilt that chased him all his life.)
Askari also faults Kierkegaard for having used three separate styles, one of which, the novelistic, raises his particular ire because he feels its sphere is the psyche (ego) and is, therefore, not at all suitable for a solemn and sublime subject such as “prophecy.” To begin with, a comparison of the Fusus and Fear and Trembling, two works which couldn’t be more stylistically apart, is itself a question which is not even raised by Askari, much less compellingly answered. The Fusus deals squarely with the metaphysics of Tasavvuf using a highly symbolic and complex language not easily grasped by the reader. Fear and Trembling, on the other hand, as described by its author, is a “dialectical lyric”. This is further complicated by the fact that it was released by Kierkegaard under the pseudonym of “Johannes de silento” (John of Silence),2 which Alastair Hannay, the translator of Fear and Trembling, indicates was allegedly borrowed by Kierkegaard “from one of the Grimms’ fairy-tales.”3 All of this gives the work a narrative density which is anything but random. Far from being random or, as Askari implies, the result of Kierkegaard’s confusion, these styles — voices, really — as well as the pseudonym, are part of a deliberate narrative scheme. They are strategically deployed through the work to create its compelling dialectical back-and-forth and its subtle meaning, which reaches its fruition in the idea that faith — contrary to Hegel’s contention that the transparency of the Absolute Mind can grasp it — “simply has no place in a system of thought, that ‘faith begins where thinking leaves off.’”4 On another level, since Kierkegaard believed (or at least his author-persona Johannes did), unlike Hegel, that nothing at all could ever be said about faith “except that it is something which, if you have it, you will not be able to explain to anyone else,”5 perhaps the choice of diverse voices and the combination of styles ranging from lyrical to dialectical to philosophic discourse was inevitable in order to capture some of this ineffability of faith. Finally, while the Fusus is a statement, par excellence, of certainty about faith, Fear and Trembling is a statement, par excellence, of the quest for certainty about faith, with its attendant hazards and perplexities.
These considerations aside, the value of Askari’s analysis and presentation is beyond contest. As a study in method and reasoning this essay remains without precedent or parallel in Urdu literary criticism.
1. Gerald T. Sheppard and William E. Herbrechtsmeier, “Prophets,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 12. Ed. Mircea Eliade, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 99.
2. Fear and Trembling is by no means the only work of Kierkegaard’s to appear under a pseudonym; indeed he routinely published his books under different pseudonyms.
3. (Reprint; London: Penguin Books, 2003), 100–11.
4. See ibid., 11.
5. Ibid.
