Islam and Open Society Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal

Notes

Notes 1. Sayyid Amir Ali, The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam with a Life of the Prophet, London: Christophers, 1922:349. Henceforth this title will simply be referred to as The Spirit of Islam. The 'House' refers to the family of the prophet of Islam and its direct descendents. 2. Spirit of Islam, p. 232. 3. Muhammad Iqbal, The Mysteries of Selflessness: A Philosophical Poem, English translation from the Persian by Arthur J. Arberry (available online at the Iqbal Academy Pakistan site: http://www.allamaiqbal.com/), originally published in 1918 to follow the 1915 work The Secrets of Self, together representing Iqbal’s decision to write a philosophical poetry. 4. ASRAR-I-KHUDI: The Secrets of the Self, trans. into English from the Persian by Reynold A. Nicholson (available online at the Iqbal Academy Pakistan site: http:/ /www.allamaiqbal.com/), Prologue, line 12. 5. The Secrets of the Self, line 33 & 34. 6. The Mysteries of Selflessness, 'The Author’s Memorial to Him Who is a Mercy to All Living Beings'. 7. From the Introduction to Djamchid Mortazavi and Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch’s translation into French of The Secrets of the Self followed by The Mysteries of Selflessness (Les secrets du soi suivi par les mystères du non-moi, Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 7. In a book of interviews with Rachel and Jean-Paul Cartier entitled Islam, l’autre visage ('Islam, the other face', Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch talks about the profound resonance Iqbal’s thought had in her own spiritual life and which led her to adopt the Islamic faith. In any case, Iqbal’s work has found in her a translator that allows the Francophone reader to savor all of the beauty of his poetry. Elsewhere, in their Panorama de la pensée islamique (Panorama of Islamic Thought, Paris: Editions Sinbad, 1984), Sheikh Bouamrane and Louis Gardet say of Iqbal that this 'source of inspiration and meditation for the young people, scholars and politicians of today and tomorrow … is perhaps the greatest Islamic scholar of the 14th century of hijra, when his range of knowledges, his breadth of mind and the courage of his positions is taken into account', pp. 310-311. 8. The date 22 February 1873 is given by his biographer Sheikh Abdul Qadir, who knew him as a student, at the end of the 19th century and stayed his friend throughout his life. This date has often been used by many commentators. But Muhammad Hanif Shahid, who edited Sheikh Abdul Qadir’s recollections under the title Iqbal the Great Poet of Islam (Lahore, 1975), indicates in this work that the research undertaken to determine the exact date of birth of the philosopher poet Islam and Open Society 58 led to that of '3, Ziqaad 1294 A.H', given by Muhammad Iqbal himself, and corresponding to 9 November 1877. The biographical elements found here are drawn from this work by Sheikh Abdul Qadir. 9. Later to become Iqbal College. 10. It is also important to mention in his regard that he shared the ideas of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), who stressed the need for Muslims to firstly emerge from their state of intellectual backwardness through education. In 1875 he founded Aligarh College, which in 1922 became a university and was a place of propagation of his own modernist ideas. We learn from Lini S. May (Iqbal. His Life and Times, Lahore, 1974, p. 52) that Mîr Hasan inculcated his disciple Iqbal with the following doctrine: “divine unity, human unity”, and that it signified, on the political level among others, the need for a unity between Hindu and Muslim Indians against the separatist forces within each community. 11. Iqbal the Great Poet of Islam, p. 71. 12. Ibid., p. 72. 13. Ibid., p. 27. 14. Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch has translated this work into French under the title La métaphysique en Perse (Paris: Sinbad, 1980). 15. From Iqbal, the Poet of Tomorrow, Khawaja Abdur Rahim, Lahore 1968:7. These are the proceedings of a symposium dedicated to Iqbal in Lahore in 1963. Dagh (1831-1905) was a grand master of Urdu poetry to whom Iqbal had sent his poems in order to receive his comments. Regarding the ghazal poetic form, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch writes: 'It was originally always a poem of profane love, then it often came to take on a mystical meaning. The ghazal, which always has a particularly deliberate...