Iqbal – a poet and a philosopher

God has treasuries beneath the Throne,

The keys to which are the tongues of poets.

(Hadith of Prophet Muhammad)

IQBAL’S PHILOSOPHY OF CREATIVE EVOLUTION

During the twentieth century, a famous poet-philosopher of east, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938) in his epic Payam-i- Mashriq delineated human being’s quest to understand the universe from the heavens to the core of human heart. Iqbal a national poet of Pakistan—following his mentor Jalaluddin Rumi and inspired by the Hadith of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) that God has treasuries beneath the Throne, the keys to which are the tongues of poets triggered by the flight of his thought, reached there and probed using the key to his poesy-tongue what is hidden far beyond the power of crazy Ishq. As his imagination reached there whatever Iqbal envisioned, he expressed in his Farsi (Persian) tongue:

نعرہ زد عشق کہ خونی جگرے پیدا شد

Love exclaimed that one with a bruised heart has appeared!

حسن لرزید کہ صاحب نظرے پیدا شد

Beauty shockingly trembled that one with vision has born.

فطرت آشفت کہ از خاک جہان مجبور

Nature perturbed as from the dust of predetermined world

خودگرے خود شکنے خود نگرے پیدا شد

A self-preserver, a self-breaker, and a self-observer has marked his existence

(Payam-e-Mashriq—Message of the East)

But in response to the poet of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s notion of “reason has equaled, force has made Supreme,” Iqbal set his view of human power in the “wedding of love and intellect.” Iqbal in his epic Payam-i- Mashriq (Message of the East) exhorts: “Man born of passive clay but a center of creative and dynamic energy, gifted with the powers of love, action, and intelligence, and stirs the void of Universe to reconstruct it nearer to his heart’s desire.” Understanding the vastness of the terrestrial realm and man’s greatness Iqbal expresses:

ز انجم تا بہ انجم صد جہاں بود

خرد  ہر جا  کہ پرزد  آسماں بود     

و لیکن چوں بخود   نگریستم  من

  کران ِ بیکراں در من نہاں بود 

There were hundreds of universes from star to star

Wherever the intellect flies, it would find new universes!

But as I looked deep down into my own self

A boundless ocean of creativity was hidden within me.

Iqbal further arguing about naturally embedded power of creativity in man, depicting in Payam-i- Mashriq proclaims; “Words spread all around from heavens to the realm of Eternity warning “Beware, O’ veiled elements, the tearer of veils is born!” According to Iqbal due to the power of creativity man has been able to transcend his limitation, to conquer the space and time, just as his favorite teacher philosopher Bergson has pointed out, “man has developed motor mechanism, perfected marvelous instrument of language and evolved a rich social life which has enormously increased his powers of activity” which Iqbal present symbolically as:

سوۓ آسماں رہگذر ساختیم          ز طیارہ ما بال و پر ساختیم       

With the aero plane we made our wings

We wedded our way to the skies.

Thus, according to Iqbal in man’s process of active reconstruction, he has become a co-worker with Divinity, justifying the proclamation of God that He has created man in His own image. Iqbal believes man has taken the initiative of consciously bringing about far-reaching changes in the natural as well as the social and moral world around him. He presents man equipped with the power of creativity, has not only evolved his own being, but also has brought about a new order, a new beauty of life, and has made improvement wherever he found a missing point or a gap in God’s created world, even in the sphere of man’s own life.

تو شب آفریدی چراغ آفریدم        سفال آفریدی ایاغ آفریدم

بیابان وکہسار و راغ آفریدی       خیابان و گلزار و باغ آفریدم

من آنم کہ از سنگ آئینہ سازم       من آنم کہ از زہر نوشینہ سازم

You created the night, I created the lamp

You created the clay; I created the vase!

You created the forest, mountains and deserts.

I created flower beds, orchards and gardens!

I am the one who made mirror out of stone,

I am the one who extracted elixir out of poison.

Iqbal has all the time remained dissatisfied with the imperfect world he found around him. However, realizing that the imperfection and incomplete things in this world are challenges left by God for man to make best use of his latent creativity. But Iqbal at the same time feels irritated and complains to his Creator:

صد جہاں می روید از کشت ِ خیال ِ ما چو گل          یک جہاں و آں ہم از خون ِ تمنا ساختی

طرح ِ نو  افگن کہ ما جدت پسند افتادہ   ایم           ایں چہ حیرت خانۂ امروز و فردا ساختی

Hundreds of worlds spring out of the field of my imagination like flowers,

You created but one world and that also steeped in the blood of desire!

Bring new patterns into being for we by our nature crave for novelty!

What is this labyrinth of today and tomorrow that you have created?

With all this philosophy of creative evolution, Iqbal projects his vision of man’s restless and inquisitive nature who is engrossed in ceaseless quest after fresh scopes for self-expression. For Iqbal, man as a possessor of a free personality is superior to all other created beings capable of shaping his own destiny and that of the Universe around him—sometime adjusting himself to it, sometime by pressing its forces into the service of his increasing needs or desires.

MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF

April 21, 2024.

“What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew?” By Nicholas Kristof

During the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago, then-Senator Joe Biden passionately denounced then-President George W. Bush for failing to act decisively to ease suffering. Biden expressed outrage at China for selling weapons used to kill and maim civilians, and he urged me to write columns demanding the White House end needless wretchedness.

Darfur and Gaza are very different, of course, but I recall the senator’s compassion and urgency — and I wonder, where has that Joe Biden gone?

Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign — and it could get worse if Gaza cascades into a full-blown famine or violent anarchy, or if a wider war breaks out involving Iran or Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a military base in central Iran early Friday underscored the danger of a bigger and more damaging conflict that could draw in the United States.

Consider just one example of America’s fingerprints on this war under Biden’s leadership. In January, the Israeli military dropped a bomb on a compound in Gaza used by the International Rescue Committee, a much-respected American aid organization that is supported in part by American tax dollars. The International Rescue Committee says that the near-fatal strike was caused by a 1,000-pound American-made bomb, dropped from an American-made F-16 fighter jet. And when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?

“Biden owns that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden and Obama administration official who now runs Refugees International, another aid group. “They’ve provided the matériel that sustains the war. They provided political support that sustains the war. They provided the diplomatic cover at the U.N. that sustains the war.”

“They’ve been saying UNRWA is an arm of Hamas,” Senator Van Hollen told me. “There’s nothing — nothing! — in the intelligence to support that claim. That’s a flat-out lie.”

It now appears that while Biden was too slow to confront Netanyahu for killing Gazan children, he acted too hastily against the U.N. agency trying to save Gazan children. “We contributed,” Van Hollen noted, “to punishing over two million civilians who relied on UNRWA.”

That makes his complicity in the cataclysm of Gaza all the more tragic. As a young man, Biden watched Lyndon Johnson’s dream of being remembered for his “Great Society” collapse in the face of youthful opposition to an unpopular and cruel foreign war, with Johnson’s failures leading to the election of a corrupt president from the other party. I hope Biden takes action to avoid a repeat.

Biden might listen in particular to one close adviser who is apparently in anguish over Gaza — for she is right.

“Stop it,” Jill Biden reportedly told her husband. “Stop it now, Joe.”

Full Article

Annie Jacobsen: ‘What if we had a nuclear war?’

As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– all designed to prevent, or deter, nuclear world war III. In the course of my work, countless people in the upper echelons of US government have told me, proudly, that they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure the US never has a nuclear war. But what if it did?

“Every capability in the [Department of Defense] is underpinned by the fact that strategic deterrence will hold,” US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is responsible for nuclear deterrence, insists publicly. Until the autumn of 2022, this promise was pinned on STRATCOM’s public Twitter feed. But to a private audience at Sandia National Laboratories later that same year, STRATCOM’s Thomas Bussiere admitted the existential danger inherent to deterrence. “Everything unravels itself if those things are not true.”

The US maintains a nuclear launch policy called Launch on Warning. This means that if a military satellite indicates the nation is under nuclear attack and a second early-warning radar confirms that information, the president launches nuclear missiles in response. Former secretary of defense William Perry told me: “Once we are warned of a nuclear attack, we prepare to launch. This is policy. We do not wait.”

The US president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. He asks permission of no one. Not the secretary of defense, not the chairman of the joint chief of staff, not the US Congress. “The authority is inherent in his role as commander in chief,” the Congressional Research Service confirms. The president “does not need the concurrence of either his [or her] military advisors or the US Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons”.

When the president learns he must respond to a nuclear attack, he has just 6 minutes to do so. Six minutes is an irrational amount of time to “decide whether to release Armageddon”, President Ronald Reagan lamented in his memoirs. “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope… How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?” And yet, the president must respond. This is because it takes roughly just 30 minutes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to get from a launch pad in Russia, North Korea or China to any city in the US, and vice versa. Nuclear-armed submarines can cut that launch-to-target time to 10 minutes, or less.

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh

“Modi’s Temple of lies”  By Siddhartha Deb

(Worth reading article in NYT. Pakistan is paying a heavy price for its religious extremism, which is not easy to reverse. Unfortunately, India is heading in the same direction of religious extremism and abandoning its secularism. f.sheikh)

The sleepy pilgrimage city of Ayodhya in northern India was once home to a grand 16th-century mosque, until it was illegally demolished by a howling mob of Hindu militants in 1992. The site has since been reinvented as the centerpiece of the Hindu-chauvinist “new India” promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism has fed distrust and hostility toward anything foreign, and the receptionists at my hotel were sullenly suspicious of outsiders. There was no hotel bar — a sign of Hindu virtue — and the food served was pure vegetarian, a phrase implying both Hindu caste purity and anti-Muslim prejudice.

In education, government institutions are run by ignorant functionaries of the ruling party, and from school textbooks to scientific research papers, the Hindu nationalist version of India is pushed forward, myth morphing into history. In the private universities that have begun to crop up in India, Mr. Modi’s government keeps a close eye on classes, panels or research that might be construed as criticizing his government or its idea of a Hindu India.

This is not sustainable, even if it seems likely that Mr. Modi will ride to a third victory in national parliamentary elections that begin Friday and conclude June 1. Mr. Modi’s India is marked by rampant inequality, lack of job prospects, abysmal public health and the increasing ravages of climate change. These crises cannot be addressed by turning one of the world’s most diverse countries into a claustrophobic Hindu nation.

Perhaps even the prime minister and his party can sense this. Their crackdowns on opposition political leaders, manipulation of electoral rolls and voting machines and freezing of campaign funds for opposition parties are not the actions of a confident group.

But the truth is harder to hide than ever. Mr. Modi and his party are giving India the Hindu utopia they promised, and in the clear light of day, it amounts to little more than a shiny, garish temple that is a monument to majoritarian violence, surrounded by waterlogged streets, emaciated cattle and a people impoverished in every way.

One comment by a reader in NYT;

Navdeep

Dayton OH5m ago

The facts don’t match the bluster of the BJP. Most of their achievements were initiated by their predecessor: Congress. The VAT and liberalization of the economy were under Manmohan Singh of Congress, an Oxford educated Economist. Unlike the uneducated and ultra orthodox BJP government that believes in Hindu astronauts 4,000 years ago and cow waste curing every human malady. Instead of moving to enlightenment, India is heading back to the Dark Ages of superstition and disbelief of science. India deserves what it gets with the population voting for Modi. It’s all fine and good when they demolish someone else’s house, wait till they come to demolish yours.

full article