A Chapter on Muhammad Iqbal from my book, Introduction to World Philosophies: A Chronological Progression.

Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal

1873 – 1938

Poet and philosopher, Iqbal was the greatest versatile genius of the Muslim renaissance in the sub-continent of India and the Muslim world. His writings gave birth to the ideology of Pakistan, a separate state created in 1947 by partitioning India which was under British rule at that time. Iqbal first studied Arabic and philosophy in Lahore, now a city in Pakistan. He then went to Cambridge to study law where he entered Trinity College and studied Hegel and Kant. His passion for philosophy took him to Germany, where he received his doctorate in philosophy. Bergson and Nietzsche among the philosophers of the West had the greatest influence on him. His best-known book is a work of philosophy, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) in which Iqbal entwined Eastern and Western elements, together with Sufism and traditional concepts, into a single world view of a revived Islam. During this period of his life Iqbal had already been writing great poetry in Urdu, a national language of Pakistan that is widely understood throughout the Indian subcontinent. However, his best poetry is in Persian, and he is recognized as one of the greatest poets in that language.

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, reflecting his main ideas, is encyclopedic. For him philosophy is the recognition of religion as the most perfect form of social consciousness. He says, “Philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis.”¹ He never denied the role of science and philosophy in the process of cognition, but was convinced that religion alone is capable of delivering mankind from its plight. He was very much influenced by Bergson’s esoteric views, which he found similar to those of Rumi, but was critical of Bergson’s idea of the élan vital as being unteleogical. Iqbal identifies God as the vital impulse whose creative force is conscious and has an open-ended purpose rather than a predetermined plan. God is the creative consciousness and in Him thought and being are one.

Iqbal’s philosophy and metaphysics were greatly influenced by Rumi, whom he revered as his spiritual mentor. Inspired by Rumi’s concept of the individual, Iqbal developed his philosophy of khudi, “selfhood,” or life of the ego consisting of the experiences, feelings, and volitions of the self. To grasp the nature of khudi it is necessary to cultivate an intuitive insight of what is behind this flux. The activity of khudi is essentially personal and private, just as one’s pleasures, pains, desires, and thoughts are exclusively one’s own. For Iqbal the life of the ego, or khudi, is directive energy; an organic unity of will, perception, and judgment that wills, directs, selects, and creates. It is judged by its aspiration, desires, aims, attitude, and judgments. Iqbal said, “My experience is only a series of acts, mutually referring to one another, and held together by the unity of directive purpose. My whole reality lies in my directive attitude. You cannot perceive me like a thing in space or set experiences in temporal order; you must interpret, understand and appreciate me in my judgments, in my will, attitudes, aims and aspirations.”²

Iqbal said, “The ultimate of ego is not to see something, but to be something. . . . The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation from the limitations of individuality; it is, on the other hand, a more precise definition of it. The final act is not an intellectual act, but a vital act which deepens the whole being of the ego and sharpens his will . . .”³ Khudi is the individuality of a man; the higher it is, the more supreme is the selfhood, individuality, personality, and uniqueness. His concept of khudi also reflects Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch―in English Superman―a man of will, capable of heroic living.

Iqbal argued that in God’s creativity many things appear that involve suffering and reflect moral evil. He explicated that to think of life without suffering is to have an unrealistic grasp of the nature of life. For him suffering is a natural phenomenon. Even the immortal soul is not without suffering as it graduates after death to higher forms of struggle. Satan is a mythic figure who stands for resistance, initiating the fall of man as an awakening from consciousness to self-awareness. Iqbal as a monadologist, viewed universe composed of atomic selves, and the more a self is self-conscious, the nearer it is to God.

Iqbal criticized the strong empiricism in Western thought for leaving religious experience out of its account. After all, according to Iqbal, the religious experience has played a vital role in human history. Why should the evolutionist place more weight on the instinctive knowledge of animals than on the higher experiences of the seers, saints, and prophets? If some religious claims based on intuitive experience have proved inadequate, the same can be said of some scientific accounts based on sense perception that have turned out to be false. It is the nature of all the sources of human knowledge to be corrected as their understanding progresses. Although realizing that present-day intellectual deliberations cannot afford to go against scientific assertions, Iqbal argued that it is intuition that can reveal and explain the true nature of material world.

Iqbal’s experience of Europe impressed him very much.  European scientific achievements and cultural and philosophical richness were very exciting for him, but he found the effects of capitalism to be inhumane. This convinced him of the superiority of Islamic values in the preservation of a balanced civilization. In his view a combination of God’s revelation and human experience and achievement was needed. He also found that the achievements of Western science were in part due to Islam. Islamic thought in its interaction with Greek philosophy gave birth to the “inductive intellect” that penetrated Europe via the Muslim universities of Arab Spain and the philosophers of the Muslim world.

Iqbal strongly opposed the European idea of nationalism. As he returned to India he preached a universal Islam beyond national sentiments. He was disturbed by factionalism and the narrowness of traditional dogma in Islam. Iqbal was the only thinker with an Eastern temperament and knowledge of European philosophy who carried Islamic philosophy and traditions with him. Thus a synthesis of three great world philosophies elevated him to become a towering figure in the world, especially in Germany, where famous Orientalist Annemarie Schimmel was one of his main followers. His works have been widely translated into many languages throughout the world. ― MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF

Notes:

1. Iqbal: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 1962, p. 2.

2. Ibid., p. 103.

3. Ibid., p. 198.

In a world full of Muslim strife and Islamophobia this city in 
Michigan marks the entry of American Muslims into US political mainstream.  It is a step that needs to be replicated around the US to complete the process of Muslims as another group that is entering 
the national life as citizens with all responsibilities and 
privileges that entails.

http://news.yahoo.com/first-muslim-city-council-portrait-changing-michigan-city-172807887.html?soc_src=mediacontentsharebuttons&soc_trk=ma

Is lengthy intellectual property protection the main culprit for loss of the middle class jobs? It is a thought provoking article shared by Zafar Khizer. 

A widely held view of the economy is that technology is destroying middle class jobs. The argument is that we use to have all these relatively high paying jobs in manufacturing and other sectors requiring routinized work, which are now being displaced by machines, or in the near future, robots. Pretty soon robots will also be driving our cars, busses, and trucks, as the technology for self-driving vehicles becomes cost efficient.

The result of the loss of these jobs is supposed to be a shortage of jobs for workers without sophisticated skills. This means that more workers will be fighting for a rapidly shrinking number of jobs, leading to more unemployment and underemployment and lower pay. On the other hand, the folks who develop and therefore own the technology will be getting rich.

That sounds like a pretty bad story, at least from the standpoint of inequality. The loss of middle class jobs means that fewer people will be in a position where they can comfortably raise a family. From this perspective, we may try to redistribute income to help out the losers, but the underlying problem is technology, and no one wants to try to stop the development of technology.

The evidence for this story is actually quite weak. Productivity growth has been very slow in recent years, the exact opposite of robots taking all our jobs. Also,the data contradict the story of disappearing middle class jobs, as opposed to weak job growth overall. But the basic theory behind the argument is even weaker. The problem with the theory is that government policy, not technology, determines what it means to “own” the technology.

This point should be straightforward. Technology is simply knowledge. No one inherently owns knowledge. The government gives ownership of technology through patent or copyright monopolies or other forms of intellectual property. These monopolies allow individuals or corporations to sue anyone who uses technology without their permission. Patent infringers can pay large fines and even face jail if they persist.

It is this protection that allows those with sophisticated skills to get rich from technology. It is not the technology itself. If we envision robots doing everything in a world without intellectual property, then robots would be incredibly cheap. After all, robots will be producing robots. Robots will be making and driving the trucks that deliver robots, as well as loading and unloaded the trucks.

This means that for a few dollars we should all be able to buy ourselves robots that will clean our house, wash our clothes, cook our meals, mow our loans, and do any other necessary task that we would rather not do ourselves. They should even be able to grow fruit and vegetables for us in our backyard.

In this story, because everything is now so cheap, real wages might skyrocket. We all should be able to put in just a few hours of work a week or month to pay for our robots which will then take care of just about all of our needs.

But the folks arguing that technology will increase inequality obviously have a different vision of the future. They expect that we will have long and strong intellectual property laws that will allow them to charge high prices for the robots and thereby makes lots of money for themselves. And, they actively work to ensure that we have strong protection for intellectual property.

We have been treated to an excellent example of such efforts in the final negotiating rounds for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. According to news accounts, one of the last major sticking points was the number of years that pharmaceutical companies could claim for exclusive control over the test data they used to establish a drug’s safety and effectiveness. The United States insisted on the longest possible period. Another sticking point was that the United States insistence that the other TPP countries extend the length of copyright monopolies to 70 years.

In both of these cases the explicit intent is to redistribute money from the bulk of the population to those who own these intellectual property rights. Of course this redistribution is justified with an argument about incentives, but that doesn’t change the fact that is an upward redistribution of income engineered by the government.

http://www.cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/losing-middle-class-jobs-and-owning-technology

posted by f. sheikh

The Indus civilization flourished for half a millennium from about 2600 bc to 1900 bc. Then it mysteriously declined and vanished from view. It remained invisible for almost 4,000 years until its ruins were discovered by accident in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists. Following almost a century of excavation, it is today regarded as a civilization worthy of comparison with those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as the beginning of Indian civilization and possibly as the origin of Hinduism.

More than a thousand Indus settlements covered at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. It was the most extensive urban culture of its period, with a population of perhaps 1 million and a vigorous maritime export trade to the Gulf and cities such as Ur in Mesopotamia, where objects inscribed with Indus signs have been discovered. Astonishingly, the culture has left no archaeological evidence of armies or warfare.

Most Indus settlements were villages; some were towns, and at least five were substantial cities (see ‘Where unicorns roamed’). The two largest, Mohenjo-daro — a World Heritage Site listed by the United Nations — located near the Indus river, and Harappa, by one of the tributaries, boasted street planning and house drainage worthy of the twentieth century ad. They hosted the world’s first known toilets, along with complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world’s stubbornly undeciphered scripts.

Follow the script

The Indus script is made up of partially pictographic signs and human and animal motifs including a puzzling ‘unicorn’. These are inscribed on miniature steatite (soapstone) seal stones, terracotta tablets and occasionally on metal. The designs are “little masterpieces of controlled realism, with a monumental strength in one sense out of all proportion to their size and in another entirely related to it”, wrote the best-known excavator of the Indus civilization, Mortimer Wheeler, in 1968¹.

Once seen, the seal stones are never forgotten. I became smitten in the late 1980s when tasked to research the Indus script by a leading documentary producer. He hoped to entice the world’s code-crackers with a substantial public prize. In the end, neither competition nor documentary got off the ground. But for me, important seeds were sown.

More than 100 attempts at decipherment have been published by professional scholars and others since the 1920s. Now — as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities — it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.

Since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1799, and the consequent decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs beginning in the 1820s, epigraphers have learnt how to read an encouraging number of once-enigmatic ancient scripts. For example, the Brahmi script from India was ‘cracked’ in the 1830s; cuneiform scripts (characterized by wedge-shaped impressions in clay) from Mesopotamia in the second half of the nineteenth century; the Linear B script from Greece in the 1950s; and the Mayan glyphs from Central America in the late twentieth century.

Several important scripts still have scholars scratching their heads: for example, Linear A, Etruscan from Italy, Rongorongo from Easter Island, the signs on the Phaistos Disc from the Greek island of Crete and, of course, the Indus script.

In 1932, Flinders Petrie — the most celebrated Egyptologist of his day — proposed an Indus decipherment on the basis of the supposed similarity of its pictographic principles to those of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1983, Indus excavator Walter Fairservis at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, claimed in Scientific American² that he could read the signs in a form of ancient Dravidian: the language family from southern India that includes Tamil. In 1987, Assyriologist James Kinnier Wilson at the University of Cambridge, UK, published an ‘Indo-Sumerian’ decipherment, based on a comparison of the Indus signs with similar-looking ones in cuneiform accounting tablets from Mesopotamia.

Three problems

In the 1990s and after, many Indian authors — including some academics — have claimed that the Indus script can be read in a form of early Sanskrit, the ancestral language of most north Indian languages including Hindi. In doing so, they support the controversial views of India’s Hindu nationalist politicians that there has been a continuous, Sanskrit-speaking, Indian identity since the third millennium bc.

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-civilization-cracking-the-indus-script-1.18587

posted by f. sheikh