‘A Stranger in the City’: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Muhammad Iqbal’s self-portraiture as a stranger and shows how he frees the notion of strangerhood from its association with exile, migration, alienation or withdrawal from a community, foregrounding the originary sense of the word ‘stranger’ or gharīb as a means by which newness breaks into a closed system. It shows how the Iqbalian stranger, or Iqbal the stranger, exemplifies the self-differentiating, heterogeneous, intractable, indocile, individuating forces that resist assimilation to any larger whole and remain irreducible to representations and significations given to them, and in doing so asks and addresses important questions about selfhood and community, freedom and belonging, ethics and politics. The paper also demonstrates how Iqbal’s self-portraitures function as the principal means of access to the ways in which Iqbal poses and pursues his key philosophical, ethical, and political questions, and outlines how they refuse to be assimilated to a vaster discursive ensemble of autobiography or reduced to a quest for identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Muhammad Iqbal
• stranger
• selfhood
• community

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The terms ‘self-portrait’, ‘self-portrayal’, ‘self-portraiture’ are conventionally used for the work of painters such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, among several others. Outside the field of painting, these terms have been used, almost interchangeably, to talk about the autobiographical writings of those paradigmatic philosophers across traditions for whom self-presentation has been an integral part of their philosophical corpus. They include Augustine, Montaigne, Ghazali, Maimonides, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, to name a few. Though the aims, stylistic conventions, and audiences of such self-portraits vary historically, there has hardly been any sustained theoretical reflection concerning the genre of self-portraiture. Unlike the genre of autobiography where there is a huge, and growing body of critical work, self-portrait is a genre struggling with its own identity and place in the general body of philosophical literature.

2 In his doctoral dissertation ‘The Development of Metaphysics in Persia’ (1908) Iqbal pays special attention to the radically new elements in the metaphysics of various thinkers who were exiled or persecuted by the political powers of their times. For instance, Shaikh Shahāb al Din Suhrawardī, also known as Shaikh al Ishraq Maqtūl, Wahid Mahmūd, Mirza `Ali Muhammad Bāb of Shiraz, among several others. In Jāvīd Nāma Iqbal gets together radical, mostly persecuted thinkers across traditions and affirms his admiration for, and a sense of belongingness to, their tribe.

3 Among several other implications of Iqbal’s rehabilitation of strangerhood, legitimation of dissent within the Islamic tradition stands out. Instead of weakening, contaminating or threatening Islam, strangers and their strangerhood allow Islam to experiment with newness.

4 The most important writings that foreground the figure of the stranger include:

(a)	Ayn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī’s Complaint of a Stranger Exiled from Home
(b)	Ibn Arabi’s The Meccan Revelations
(c)	Ghazali’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences

5 One could examine the Iqbalian stranger in light of the long history of marginalisation and alienation, exclusion and exile, apologia and execution that strangerhood in Islam has been associated with, and compare and contrast this figure with the historical figures who have suffered these difficult conditions that strangerhood is marked by. One could also locate the figure of the stranger in Iqbalian corpus in the prophetic moral tradition wherein strangerhood consists in belonging to a group of people who call into question the depravity of the society they are a part of and strive to undo the ways in which their society has become estranged from ethical ways of being. However, a close examination of these connections and parallels falls outside the scope of this paper whose focal point is to illuminate the ways in which Iqbalian stranger, or Iqbal the stranger, revaluates and instantiates the concept of starangerhood. Underscoring the ways in which Iqbal’s revaluation and instantiation of strangerhood is informed by Islamic religious and intellectual history merits an independent study, a task I hope to take up in future.

6 In Jāvid Nāma Iqbal invokes Prophet Muhammad’s famous remark that Islam began as a stranger, will return to strangerhood, and that blessed are the strangers. He also remarks that the concept of the stranger/strangerhood has not been mined for its polysemic potential and its significant ethico-political implications. Ghurbat in case of Islam, Iqbal suggests, does not refer to a pitiable vulnerability to the tyrannical forces of time and world. It does not imply the triumph of majoritarianism or the inevitability of exile for Islam either. Recasting strangerhood as a mode of experimenting with newness, Iqbal describes ghurbat as the principal means through which newness breaks into a given order of things.

7 Iqbal kept getting hate mail from the leaders of Hindu Mahasabha. Excerpts from some of the letters sent by S.V. Lalit, a representative of the Hindu Maha Sabha leaders—Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya and Dr. Moonje are quoted in Hafeez Malik’s Iqbal in Politics, 171–172.

8 B. R. Ambedkar’s discussion with Gandhi dated October 17, 1932 retrieved from https://www.mkgandhi.org/Selected%20Letters/amb-gandhi%20corr..htm.

9 Cited in Hakim (1988, 121).

10 Jāvīd Nāma, Iqbal’s Persian epic poem (1932), stages an imaginative journey of Iqbal’s nom de plume Zinda Rud through various cosmic spheres. Led by Jalaludin Rumi (1207–1273), a thirteenth-century Persian poet, Zinda Rud finds the Ptolemaic model—a finite series of concentric planetary orbits—limiting, so we have in Jāvīd Nāma both planetary spheres and the spheres beyond them, all populated by exemplars—both historical and mythical. The text is structured around a series of conversations that Zinda Rud has with his interlocutors or ‘fellow-travellers’ across nations, intellectual traditions and historical eras—Rumi, Mansur Hallaj, Tahira Qurat ul Ain from Persia, Bharathari, Vishwamitra, Buddha and Ghalib from India, Said Halim Pasha from Turkey, Shah Hamdhan and Ghani Kashmiri from Kashmir, Nietzsche and Marx from Germany, Tolstoy from Russia, Zurvan (Zoroastrian god of time) and Saroush (ancient Iranian angel of resurrection) from ancient Iran, among several others. The conversations never reach any clearly articulated conclusions, just as the notion of travel that the text works with is one that is not directed towards any destination.

11 It is important to pay closer attention to the ways in which Iqbal the radical advocate of freedom, difference, individuality comes to stress the inevitability of constraint, unanimity, even exclusion in defining Islamic community. Despite the sense of falsity of boundaries, in thought and world, Iqbal engages in drawing, even policing, the dividing lines when it comes to Ahmadis, followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who interpreted Islam differently. Notwithstanding his clarity on the fragility of our sense of belonging and his wariness regarding the most rigid forms of belongingness, Iqbal finds himself compelled to assert such belongingness with great ferocity in the face of the Ahmadi question. Iqbal’s response to the Ahmadi issue and his set of arguments against Ahmadis continue to be (ab)used in justifying the horrifying attacks on non-Muslim and 'deviant' Muslim groups. Though Iqbal would have been horrified by the status of such communities in Muslim majority states, it is his reasoning on the Ahmadi question that is invoked to justify these various forms of intolerance. A detailed account of the problem and Iqbal’s problematic response to it falls outside the scope of this paper, and shall be taken up elsewhere at a later point. What needs to be stressed here is the ways in which Iqbal does make the idea of a community function as an excuse for the exclusion of the other, a defence thrown up against the other and insists on containing difference when it begins to threaten the borders that separate the tolerable from the intolerable. This problematises Iqbal’s avowals of, and odes to, strangerhood in more ways than one.

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Saliha Shah

Saliha Shah works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Women’s College Srinagar, Kashmir, India. She recently obtained her doctorate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled ‘Between Poetry and Philosophy: A Study of Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures.’