Abstract
This is a tale of two thinkers across time and space who have been read together but in conventional ways as representing the meeting of the East and the West. I propose instead a different relationship between them, that of hidden relays and realizations, in which one who comes later receives and actualizes a potential in the writings of the one earlier but in implicit ways to avoid the political and theological pitfalls of his times. To draw out this line of transmission requires me to offer a different reading of a famous poem by the one who comes later than that usually proffered. The tale starts with the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal visiting the Mosque of Cordoba during a sojourn at Spain in 1933 and writing a lyrical poem (ghazal) of the same name to mark the event. The poem, widely considered a great work, has been well plumbed for its formal qualities and for the themes with which Iqbal has long been associated, such as a new appreciation of the Muslims’ past and harkening to Muslims of the future. If we take into consideration that Iqbal was an avid reader of philosophy and poetry, with an attraction to German thought, then his engagement with the writings of the eighteenth-century thinker Goethe provides a way to rethink the Muslim present within the poem. It becomes a space of possibility for Muslims, historical ruins, and poetical verse, which is neither about bemoaning a lost caliphate nor anticipating Muslim becoming but about Muslim participation in nature as natural beings.
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Notes
This is not unlike my argument in Muslim Becoming in which I show how Iqbal relied upon Bergson to insert a new temporal horizon within the project of self-cultivation to becoming good Muslims, which is that of a near as-yet-indeterminate future over that of the eventuality of the afterlife (N. Khan, 2012).
We have ample demonstration that Iqbal was interested in the entire tradition of German Idealism, including Kant, Fichte, and Hegel (see Popp, 2019). However, I have not been able to uncover from existing scholarship whether Iqbal read Novalis or not. It is very likely that he knew of Novalis and even perhaps read his writings because Novalis was one of the first to write about Fichte, and Iqbal would have had access to Novalis’s writings on Fichte by the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. Furthermore, Novalis was considered the quintessential romantic poet and that would have held appeal for Iqbal. Finally, Iqbal was very enamored of Goethe and it is likely that he would seek to know what others saw in Goethe and to that end to read their essays on Goethe.
There are other elements and additions, but I have limited myself to details of the Muslim original. See Lamprakos (2016).
Perhaps the way to understand Iqbal’s naturalism as distinct from that sought by Azad and Hali is to point to Iqbal’s attraction to Marxism and his interest in humans not so much as natural beings as such but as natural beings on account of their bodies, which imbricate them within an economic system that abstracts value from labor, but which also stand to wear down, age, and decay (see Sevea, 2012).
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Khan, N. Iqbal Before the Mosque of Cordoba: Goethean Crossings. SOPHIA 62, 533–553 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00959-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00959-y