Iqbal- the 20th Century Reformer Read online

  Ali Shariati

  Iqbal:

  The 20th Century

  Reformer

  Edited by

  Laleh Bakhtiar

  ABJAD Book Builders and Designers

  © Laleh Bakhtiar, 1991

  © Laleh Bakhtiar, e-Book, 2011

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  eBook ISBN 10: 1-871031-28-1

  eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-871031-28-7

  Published by

  ABJAD Book Designers and Builders

  3023 West Belmont Avenue

  Chicago IL 60618

  (T) 773-267-7001 (F) 773-267-7002

  [email protected] www.kazi.org

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Short Biography of Ali Shariati

  Author’s Preface

  Iqbal: Manifestation of the Islamic Spirit

  Introduction

  Chapter One: A Manifestation of Self-reconstruction and Reformation

  Chapter Two: Not Deceived by the West

  Chapter Three: Ideology

  Chapter Four: World View

  Appendices:

  A. Guide to the Volume Titles of Shariati’s Collected Works

  1. Volume Titles

  2. Detailed Guide to Contents of the Volumes of the Collected Works

  B. Indices to the Collected Works

  1. Alphabetical Index to the Translated Volume Titles of the Collected Works

  2. Alphabetical Index to the Transliterated Volume Titles of the Collected Works

  3. Alphabetical Index to the Translated Lecture Titles in the Collected Works

  4. Alphabetical Index to the Transliterated Lecture Titles in the Collected Works

  5. Chronology of Shariati’s Lectures from the Fall 1968-Fall 1972

  C. Works by Laleh Bakhtiar, Ph. D.

  Foreword

  ‘Am I not (alast) your Lord,’ (asked God, and) replied they, ‘Yea! We do bear witness.’ (7:174). This formed the initial covenant (ahd) of man with God. Through it, man inherited the heavens and the earth and in return for God’s promise of a Saviour and a Final Day, man assumed a responsibility to care for that which was entrusted to humanity.

  The human being who recalls the acceptance of the covenant, who assumes the responsibility, one ‘who has made the promise’ is known as one who is ‘committed’, ‘engaged’ (mutahid). In the view of Dr. Ali Shariati, this is the real artist for he or she is committed to the promise given that day and creates in anticipation of God’s promise.

  His point of view serves as an awakening to those who have not comprehended all of the criteria of art, to those who are not aware of the relationship between art and society and to those who think that society is beyond the realm of assistance by an artist. In this school of thought, the artist is bound to the promise and serves as a vehicle for its expression for it is through this expression that humanity continues to remember and recall.

  It is only artists, in his view, who, like the prophets of old, takes the sins of others upon themselves because a ‘real artist’ is attentive, engaged in social action and responsible. Their very attentiveness weighs down the sorrow they bear and builds artists into the form of messengers who, as prophecy was sealed with Muhammad, must remain unfulfilled.

  At the same time that they themselves remain unfulfilled, their art continues to be expressed and to ennoble for one of the major roles that art plays is to ennoble matter. The ‘matter’ of Shariati is humanity, people, the masses. With this in view, the real art of any society is faith and struggle upon this way. Anything less than this is to forget the covenant.

  Islam is centered on Unity and is expressed in art through what has been called ‘unity in multiplicity’, ‘multiplicity in unity’. Can one find a more appropriate symbol of multiplicity than humanity itself, created in the image of the One God, struggling and full of faith as it recalls the covenant by which it bound itself to God?’

  Laleh Bakhtiar

  Editor

  Preface

  ALI SHARIATI (1933-1977), a contemporary Muslim social activist, devoted his life to paving the way for the return to what he and those who followed him believed to be a non-distorted Islam.

  Ali Shariati left over 15,000 pages of lectures, letters, books and journals which were gathered together, divided into subjects and published from 1976-1986 in Persian in thirty-five volumes called The Collected Works. As comparatively few pages of his works have been translated into English, the almost fifty page English Guide and Indices to the Collected Works, appearing at the end of the present lecture in the Appendices, addresses this need in order to give those interested in Shariati’s ideas and his place in history an understanding of the extent and breadth of his work as well as an insight into his creative abilities which were so strong that the titles themselves call out to be heard.

  The “Index” gives all information heretofore unavailable on each of the titles including date, place where the lecture was given, and the surrounding circumstances, where known. Page numbers are given showing where a lecture can be found in the Persian Collected Works and indication of English translation where relevant.

  There are five additional indices given in the appendices of the Index in order to facilitate access to (1) the translated titles and (2) transliterated titles of the 35 volumes. In the third and fourth indices, every title that appears within the Collected Works (CW) is listed (3) alphabetically in translation and (4) transliteration followed by the number assigned to the work in the “Guide to Shariati’s Collected Works.” The fifth (5) is a list of the Dated Works According to Dates produced during his most prolific period of 1968-1972. Through this one can follow, day by day, the blossoming of the creative energies of this son of Islam and Iran, a man about whom Jean Paul Sartre said, “I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati’s.”

  It is hoped that this work will be viewed as an attempt to give wider scope to Shariati’s ideas and that interested readers will contact the publisher with any information or criticism that they may have. This then can be passed on to other readers. Inshallah.

  Laleh Bakhtiar

  A Short Biography of Ali Shariati

  Born: November 23, 1933 in Mazinan, Sabzivar, Khorasan Province

  1940 Enters school

  1950Enters Teachers’ College, Mashhad

  1952Teaches in the village of Ahmadabad near Mashhad

  1955Writes Maktab-I vasitah (The Median School of

  Thought and Action)

  1955Translates Abu Dharr Ghifari. Enters the Faculty

  of Letters, Mashhad University. He writes a

  series of articles entitled “Toynbee and History”

  for the Khorasan newspaper. He writes an

  article entitled “Which one am I?” for the

  Farhang magazine in Mashhad.

  1957As a member of the National Resistance

  Movement, he, along with his father and

  other members is arrested in Mashhad and

  sent to the Qazil Qaleh prison for six months.

  1959He translates Prayer by Alexis Carrel.

  He receives his B. A. from Mashhad University,

  Faculty of Letters and as he was at the top

  of his class, he should have been sent to

  France, but he encounters political difficulties

  1960 He translates Optimism and Pessimism by

  John Isolah and his translation is published

  in the magazine o
f Quds (Khorasan)Province.

  The political difficulty is somehow resolved

  and he is sent to France. He studies two

  majors: Sociology and the History of Religions.

  1961In France, he joins the Algerian Liberation

  Movement and is very active. He wrote

  “What should we lean upon?” an article

  published in one of the French magazines.

  He translates “What is poetry?” by Jean Paul

  Sartre and printed in Paris. Because of

  his activities in the Algerian Liberation

  Movement, he is arrested in Paris and

  sent to the City Prison where he holds

  an interview with Givz which is printed

  in Togo in 1965.

  1962He publishes an article in Paris entitled,

  “The Death of Franz Fannon.” After receiving

  two Ph.D.s in the fields of Sociology

  and the History of Religions, he returns to

  Iran. He is arrested on the Irano-Turkish

  border in Bazargan and he spends

  several months in the Qazil Qalah prison.

  1965He works as a high school teacher in a village

  near Mashhad and then teaches in a school in

  the city of Mashhad. Finally, he is hired as

  an assistant professor by Mashhad University.

  1967-

  1973He begins to lecture in Mashhad, the Husayniyyah

  Irshad in Tehran, Tehran University and other

  centers and universities in Tehran and other

  cities and this is the most productive period of his life.

  1973

  Sept.The Husayniyyah Irshad is closed and the secret

  police (SAVAK) try to find Shariati. As they are

  not successful, they arrest his father and put him

  in prison for more than a year. One month after

  his father’s arrest, Shariati turns himself over

  to the police and spends eighteen months

  in solitary confinement in the Komitah’s prison,

  the Shah’s prison for political prisoners which

  was similar to Hitler’s Dachau.

  1975-

  1977He continues to live in Tehran and Mashhad,

  but was active only at nights where he gave lectures

  in secret until morning in other people’s homes

  so that SAVAK could not find him. But this type

  of life did not suit his enthusiastic nature,

  as an immigrant towards God, so he goes to Europe

  to continue his struggle.

  1977

  May 16 He migrates to Europe. After thirty days,

  even though he had entered Europe in disguise,

  SAVAK, with the help of the British Intelligence

  Service, martyred him.

  1977

  June 19 He attained what God had promised him.

  1977

  June 27 He is buried next to Zaynab’s tomb in Damascus.

  Iqbal: Manifestation of the Islamic Spirit

  Author’s Preface

  Muhammad Iqbal is among those illustrious, intellectual, human visages who have been gifted to humanity by the fertile culture of Islam. Islam has produced great human beings in all aspects of the human spirit. The family of humanity is obligated to it for many exceptional people. Iqbal is one of them.

  What distinguishes Iqbal from the line of other great men is the fact that this man appears like a tall, fruitful tree, bears leaves, and fruit during an age when the pasture land of Islam and Islamic culture had been infected by pests and had sunk into the sorrowful and death-like silence of autumn. The uprooting flood and storm of Western colonialism had fallen upon it while its calamity-stricken farmers were fast asleep and its so-called guards had become its plunderers. Its landowners? All herds of rebellious wolves, foxes, and hyenas. As Hafiz has said, “After the poison that blew over the garden, it is amazing that flowers maintained their color and nasturtiums, their scent!”

  In such a season and from such a ruined pasture, there suddenly emerges a man who, like a free-standing cypress tree, caught the eye of friend and foe alike. He speaks to the feeble bushes, to the yellow and trembling willows, to the tender and ripe twigs, as well as to the thousands of seeds containing hundreds of blossoming and blooming passions and emotions, their heads rising out of the earth, and their faces turning towards the heavens, all of whom remain buried under the feet of the enemy, all of whom, out of fear of this evil season and disastrous flood, submit to the fate of ‘dying secretly and rotting silently’.

  Iqbal proclaimed: Within this parched and pest-infected pasture land, the Islamic spirit continues to surge. Hidden within this soil is a cultural source overflowing with the essence of life. The very substance of its growth—a fertile culture and movement. If you immerse your dry and short roots, which now remain uncovered upon the earth, endangered by the polluted air and poisonous winds which blow from the West reaching into the depths of the fertile soil of your own culture; if you obtain morale and energy from the life and faith of the first Islam, then, in spite of this poison which has come to your autumn-immersed land of Islam from the plundering and culture-robbing West, you will be able to evolve strong and firm, like patient and courageous trees. You will, then, like them, grow from your own roots, bear leaves and fruit under the sun and rain of your own culture and once again create a civilization out of the life, greenness, and cultivation of this destroyed and anguished wilderness.

  Yea. Is it not this very spirit which blew over the burned sands of the Arabian peninsula and, in that silent wilderness in which even plants are afraid to grow, in a period of ten years, nurture people from a few hollow, skeleton-like, nameless, and untitled slaves, bedouins, and savages who are then able to blow a new spirit into the history of human civilization and cause a new race of human beings to appear upon the earth? Is it not this very spirit which, in a period of less than a quarter of a century, not only frees several, abased, poverty-stricken tribes from the colonist chains of the two great military, political, and civil empires of Byzantine and Iran, but it builds them into warriors, as well, men who are then able to free great masses of the East and the West from the domination of despotic rulers, Caesars, Kings, priests, high priests, and landlords?

  Muhammad Iqbal teaches the same lesson to the colonized Muslims of the world of today, not only with his words, but with his very ‘being’, as well. He shows us that, in spite of ignorance, inner stagnation, and imprisonment in the jungle of foreign military entanglements, Islam still has the ability to create great geniuses, beautiful, deep, and powerful spirits. Its culture can still draw back its children from the embrace of Western civilization and cultural forms, nourish them in its own embrace, and develop an Iqbal from an Indian youth who had found his way from a sick, colonized country to a powerful colonizer—European civilization.

  Iqbal is a multi-faceted individual. This is not accidental. Such is the Islamic spirit. And such is the God of Islam, the Book of Islam, the Prophet of Islam, the exemplary followers of Islam, the Medinah of Islam, and even the mosque of Islam. Allah possesses both the Majesty of the Jewish Deity of Yaweh and the Compassion of the Deity of the Christians. The Quran contains the social tendencies of the Pentateuch and the spiritualism of the Gospels. At the same time that the Prophet of Islam is a Moses-like, liberation-seeking mujahid (struggler upon the Way of God), he is a Jesus-like spirit of love. Medinah has both the weapons and power of Byzantine as well as the philosophy and thought of Athens. The mosque is both a place of worship, a place of council, and an academy of sciences.

  Ali is a worker at the same time that he is a political leader, a military hero, a pious Muslim mystic (arif) and, finally, an eloquent orator, a wise hakim, a man who has borne anguish, has patience, practices silence, and is loved.

  Iqbal is the offspring of such a family. He is nurtured by such a school of thought and acti
on. He is a philosopher, politician, mujahid, scholar, Muslim mystic, Islamologist, and poet, and he is conversant with both Eastern and Western culture.

  In the eyes of European philosophers, he is a person like Henri Bergson, but he never allows philosophy to make him forget the anguish of the people nor the fate of his hungry, captive nation. He emerges from the solitude of profound philosophical meditations and from the secure and painless intellectual, scientific, and theoretical discussions to fight head on against British colonialism alongside the liberated mujahid.

  Drowned in Islamic history and philosophy, he is not alienated from the modern world or from the culture, civilization, and science of the world. He does not confine himself to the framework of past centuries but familiarizes himself directly and deeply with the new civilization, science, and thought. He becomes a man of this century. His education, his studies in Europe, and about European culture and spirit do not distance him from himself nor from his own history, culture, and faith, that is, Islam. He does not become a European-like scholar who, upon returning to the East, finds he has become unfamiliar with his own people’s way of life, spirit, anguish, nature, and characteristics bringing self glorifying nonsense as a gift for his people which ‘the/ had taught him in order to make him the middle-man for their colonist oppression.