MUHAMMAD IQBAL The Spiritual Father of Pakistan

MUHAMMAD IQBAL The Spiritual Father of Pakistan

Hermann Schafer

The house on Neuenheimer Lanstrasse 58 in Heidelberg is an ordinary residential house. The garden in front separates the building from the street. Noteworthy, however, is only a small board “Mohammad Iqbal 1877-1938, national philosopher, writer and spiritual father of Pakistan lived here in the year 1907”. This inscription, a page from an unknown book of history, reminds one that the idea of the Pakistan State received its philosophical impulse on the Neckar.

Muhammad Iqbal, however, was no emigrant like Lenin who envisaged a future Soviet State during his exile in Zurich. His objectives were not the barricades or the class-war. Like his Prophet in Medina, Iqbal came to this world to ignite a fire in order to make people the messengers of God and to reconcile Islam and Christianity. As he worked on this creative style in Heidelberg and later in Munich, nobody knew him. He had, however, till then only got the respect of a small circle of poets and philosophers in the Universities of Cambridge, Lahore and Munich. After his law studies in England, the young Professor of Islamic Philosophy came to Munich in 1905. He required three months to learn the German language. Three years later, he completed his studies in the history of religions at Munich. Iqbal was conferred a Doctorate with special distinction by a German university. It played a special spiritual relationship with Germany for the “Father of Pakistan” which continued up to his death.

That in these times, an Indian had decided to come to Germany was extremely exceptional. For 150 years, the Indian subcontinent belonged to the British empire. The English deter-mined all mediums for higher education. In spite of this, the young Iqbal did not interest himself in Shakespeare but in Goethe, “the friend from the garden of Weimer”. The first meeting between the two had already taken place in Lahore. Iqbal repeatedly read Faust. The tragedy was also published in Urdu. Iqbal had the ear to listen to the spiritual noises contained in Faust and to recognise the dramatic call for Islam.

Now in far away Lahore, Heidelberg was a magic word for the young Indian. On the Neckar, he found the vision to integrate the ideas of the Orient with the European history of the West. From Heidelberg come the origins of Faust, the student Johann Faustus. However, what interested Iqbal was Goethe’s answer to the basic conflict. As Herder, Schlegel, Ruckert, Nietzsche and the romantics of the “Heidelberg Circle,” Faust also sought refuge in the Orient. In the “West-East Divan,” Iqbal has shown the way how Western civilisation and the appeal of Europe and Christianity can reconcile each other. Goethe’s letter to Adele Schopenhauer demanded Iqbal’s complete power of imagination to understand. “We all live in Islam but we must have the courage to choose our own form of worship.”

In the following years, Iqbal wrote stories on Heidelberg, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Goethe. A hundred years after the “West-East Divan,” a continuation of the spiritual dialogue of Iqbal was published in his book “Message from the East” (Payām-i Mashriq). Later in Jāvīd Nāmah, which he wrote in the frame of the Eternal Comedy of Dante, Iqbal called upon the Muslims of India to recognise their self-confidence. He got away from the mystics of the time and observed himself in his work as the son and representative of his Creator. In his social criticism, he rejected the works of Karl Marx for Islam, because they were without light and were contrary to transcendental withdrawal which was necessary for life in a free society.

The road from Heidelberg to Islamabad is one of the biggest adventures of history. As President of the All-India Muslim League, in December 1930, Iqbal called for a Muslim State in India. One year later, he repeated his position at the Round Table Conference in London. From the alphabets of the provinces of Punjab (P), Afghan frontier (A), Kashmir (K), Sind (IS) and Baluchistan (TAN) came the name “Pakistans”. On 23 March 1940, the Pakistan ideology of Iqbal became the official programme of the Muslim League. Seven years later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan saw the light of the world after the bloody division of India.

Iqbal, powever, did not live to see the day which he had dreamed for Indian Muslims. He died in 1938 and left behind him fourteen philosophical and poetic works. The most important parts of his works have been well translated into the German language by Professor Annemarie Schimmel of the Harvard University. The evening of his death, Iqbal spent in conversation with Hans Hasso of Veltheim-Ostrau.