[postlink]http://newbestmotivator.blogspot.com/2009/05/ego.html[/postlink]
A POEM hangs on and old grave in Delhi, the burial site of an Islamic saint. The poem was written by Muhammad Iqbal, a Moslem poet from the Indian continent who composed it when he was twenty-seven years old. He wrote in praise of the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya.
This was around about the year 1903, and at this time Iqbal was still very close to Sufism. Two years later he left for Europe. He studied at Cambridge, London and Munich, and there, in the lively activity of Europe, he found a valuable model. "Through their ambition for action,' he wrote,'the Western nations have towered over the other nations of the world'. According to Iqbal, the literature and ideas of the West provide the best guide for Eastern nations wishing to appreciate the 'secret life'.
Iqbal was not without criticism of the West, and in this he differs little from other Islamic or Eastern thinkers. However, Iqbal, who regarded modern western thinking as the 'director descendant' of the culture of medieval Islam in Spain and Sicily, later voices more strident criticism of something existing in his own past--Sufism.
Iqbal's poem on Nizamuddin Auliya's grave remains, even though Iqbal himself changed. He was no longer a devotee of Sufism. "Mysticism is the sign of decline of a nation ,'he is quoted as saying. 'All religious teaching that obstructs the flowering of the human identity' is something 'worthless'. In other words, Iqbal had become an 'activist' who saw self as one with the wave: "If I roll, I exist. If I stop, I no longer exist'. But Sufism is passive. The Sufis stress the striving for 'extinction of self' within the Almighty. There, human identity is blottedout. To Iqbal, this is not what should happen. As Rajmohan Gandhi wrote in his work Understanding the Muslim Mind, "Iqbal hoped for man to become a gem, an emerald, not a drop of water.'
Iqbal did not seek union (wisal) with God, but firaq or separation. He wrote in a poem that in union there is the desire for death, but in separation there is the enjoyment of searching.
Man is not just a creature that lays down his head with faint whining in God's lap. Man does not need to speak as Chairil Anwar did when he knocked on God's door:'I am lost, destroyed'. Man is rather God's partner, His creative colleague. Man has his own independence. In a collection of Iqbal's poems, Payam-i-Mashriq, Iqbal relates a conversation between man and God: 'You created the night--but I turn on the light. You created the clay--but I make the pots. You created the wide expanses--but I create the gardens.'
Iqbal goes on to speak further of that important pivot of his wellknown philosophy, khudi. This word can mean 'self' or 'ego' or 'identity'. To Iqbal, its meaning is close to 'declaration', 'reality', of ,'self-realisation'. For Iqbal sees that Adam (meaning man was sent into the world from Heaven not in order to be punished, but rather to be God's representative. Man is not burdened with sin, but rather is given freedom, and it is this that Iqbal calls 'the freedom of human ego'.
The difficulty for man is that this freedom is often frightening. Therefore,man calls upon laws and sets limitations. But how far, for how long and by whom? For those living souls who give birth to wisdom and poetry and those active minds that engender new ideas and discoveries cannot all merely be handed established time-worn limits ad infinitum. Here lies man's capacity to not become 'lost and destroyed'.
So, how can man's khudi move freely and yet not deviate? If we read the writing of Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson,who seems to endeavour to understand Iqbal's teaching in the book quoted above, the Iqbal himself finally unable to find a satisfactory answer to his complex problem.
On 20 April 1938 Iqbal died. We recall a line of his last poem, sad and anxious: 'another wisdom will follow--but then again, maybe not'.
A POEM hangs on and old grave in Delhi, the burial site of an Islamic saint. The poem was written by Muhammad Iqbal, a Moslem poet from the Indian continent who composed it when he was twenty-seven years old. He wrote in praise of the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya.
This was around about the year 1903, and at this time Iqbal was still very close to Sufism. Two years later he left for Europe. He studied at Cambridge, London and Munich, and there, in the lively activity of Europe, he found a valuable model. "Through their ambition for action,' he wrote,'the Western nations have towered over the other nations of the world'. According to Iqbal, the literature and ideas of the West provide the best guide for Eastern nations wishing to appreciate the 'secret life'.
Iqbal was not without criticism of the West, and in this he differs little from other Islamic or Eastern thinkers. However, Iqbal, who regarded modern western thinking as the 'director descendant' of the culture of medieval Islam in Spain and Sicily, later voices more strident criticism of something existing in his own past--Sufism.
Iqbal's poem on Nizamuddin Auliya's grave remains, even though Iqbal himself changed. He was no longer a devotee of Sufism. "Mysticism is the sign of decline of a nation ,'he is quoted as saying. 'All religious teaching that obstructs the flowering of the human identity' is something 'worthless'. In other words, Iqbal had become an 'activist' who saw self as one with the wave: "If I roll, I exist. If I stop, I no longer exist'. But Sufism is passive. The Sufis stress the striving for 'extinction of self' within the Almighty. There, human identity is blottedout. To Iqbal, this is not what should happen. As Rajmohan Gandhi wrote in his work Understanding the Muslim Mind, "Iqbal hoped for man to become a gem, an emerald, not a drop of water.'
Iqbal did not seek union (wisal) with God, but firaq or separation. He wrote in a poem that in union there is the desire for death, but in separation there is the enjoyment of searching.
Man is not just a creature that lays down his head with faint whining in God's lap. Man does not need to speak as Chairil Anwar did when he knocked on God's door:'I am lost, destroyed'. Man is rather God's partner, His creative colleague. Man has his own independence. In a collection of Iqbal's poems, Payam-i-Mashriq, Iqbal relates a conversation between man and God: 'You created the night--but I turn on the light. You created the clay--but I make the pots. You created the wide expanses--but I create the gardens.'
Iqbal goes on to speak further of that important pivot of his wellknown philosophy, khudi. This word can mean 'self' or 'ego' or 'identity'. To Iqbal, its meaning is close to 'declaration', 'reality', of ,'self-realisation'. For Iqbal sees that Adam (meaning man was sent into the world from Heaven not in order to be punished, but rather to be God's representative. Man is not burdened with sin, but rather is given freedom, and it is this that Iqbal calls 'the freedom of human ego'.
The difficulty for man is that this freedom is often frightening. Therefore,man calls upon laws and sets limitations. But how far, for how long and by whom? For those living souls who give birth to wisdom and poetry and those active minds that engender new ideas and discoveries cannot all merely be handed established time-worn limits ad infinitum. Here lies man's capacity to not become 'lost and destroyed'.
So, how can man's khudi move freely and yet not deviate? If we read the writing of Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson,who seems to endeavour to understand Iqbal's teaching in the book quoted above, the Iqbal himself finally unable to find a satisfactory answer to his complex problem.
On 20 April 1938 Iqbal died. We recall a line of his last poem, sad and anxious: 'another wisdom will follow--but then again, maybe not'.