by Ali Shariati
We are confronted by a fiery world view. In desire for action, we are speaking about fiery and revolutionary action, one which is the product of the explosion of pain and the flames of love.
Iqbal’s version, then, is incomprehensible for those who conceive of it in relation to bourgeoise technology or Marxist economics or its philosophical climax—American pragmatism. He terms it ‘intoxication of deeds’. In this cozy drinking place, who drank the intoxicating wine of deeds? It is the mujahid.
In the Sufi spiritual path,
there is only the state of intoxication.
In the mullah’s Divine Law,
only words intoxicate.
I see not the intoxication of deeds
in the song of a dead, dejected, foolish poet
who is neither asleep nor awake.
I do not see that mujahid
in whose veins there is only
the intoxication of deeds.
Yea. These are the states of intoxication, words of intoxication, intoxication of thoughts, and, finally, intoxication of deeds characterizing four distinct types of intellectuals with four different world views: Sufi, jurisprudent, poet, and mujahid, respectively.
Now we can ask a question. Where is the philosopher? Iqbal’s answer would undoubtedly be that a philosopher, in principle, is not intoxicated. In this world view, we clearly see the logical connection between anguish, love, and action or deed. Furthermore, we can observe that these three are not subjective verbal principles but are, in fact, innate qualities, dimensions as well as natural and inseparable characteristics of this world view.
In order to properly understand this world view, which Iqbal calls the fiery, bloody, significant, aesthetical, glorious, powerful Haidar vision, one must become familiar with his language. Iqbal calls it ‘the religious world view.’ What do we conceive from the word ‘religion? If we rely on what the religious masses and the bulk of the non and anti-religious intellectuals conceive of as religion, not only have we not understood Iqbal’s words but we have taken them in a hackneyed, degrading, and even contradictory sense. It would be a misunderstanding and it would even defeat the purpose of the exercise.
The two groups of the religious believers and the anti-religious intellectuals today, while being in fanatical conflict with each other, in intellectual and even scientific areas, when it comes to the definition of religion, strange as it may seem, both agree. Both agree as to its edicts and beliefs but differ in the stage of beliefs and are therefore divided into believers and non-believers.
Both conceive of heaven and hell as reward and punishment or garden and fire, respectively. Both regard the creation of Adam in the same language as that used by Islam and in the same version as he did, having been the father of humanity.
Obliged to compensate for the gluttony of their fathers, human beings had to resort to imploring, entreating, and flattery of God, begging saints close to God to intercede on their behalf in order to beg God’s forgiveness and persuade Him to admit the offspring of that rejected sinner, Adam, into heaven after his death.
Both groups have identical conceptions of the promised expectation. Oppression and corruption are pre-determinedly rising and enveloping the world. Every effort is made by man for the cause of justice and salvation against oppressors, the system of exploitation, and against rising ascendancies of those who make money. Both would be doomed to failure in advance and, in fact, against the will and pre-determined design of Almighty God concerning the mo vement of history and man’s certain destiny.
As a consequence, every action taken by man vis-a-vis the destiny of people, the history of society and the future would be negated. Furthermore, one has to submit to the domination of corruption and the rule of cruelty. One has to justify the status quo and the irresistible and ever-increasing victory of oppressors, executioners, wrong-doers as well as the enemies of truth and humanity.
One has to bear witness to the denunciation of freedom and justice as well as the forced retreat of purity and goodness and ultimately, at the end of time, people will be saved, justice will be victorious, and a savior will appear. Generally speaking, human beings are not responsible, neither in the appearance of oppression or corruption in their society nor in the emergence of the ultimate justice and salvation. Everything depends upon your luck.
Our believing men and women who observe their ritual prayer and even supererogatory prayers and the progressive, revolutionary, scientifically-minded, socialist intellectuals approach the question of expectation and anticipation in the same way. Both think the same way in this respect, the only difference being whether to believe or not to believe. What a useless clash! Disagreeing over a problem which has been wrongly put in the first place and erroneously understood! Consequently all their disputes over proving or disproving it are nothing but nonsense....
Let us not put our trust in either one who is a religiously-minded believer nor in one who is a scientifically-minded intellectual. Let us not be deceived by the religion of this one nor the civilization of the other as neither of them understands the meaning of God’s verse in this book.
They both read it equally bad and erroneously, both the book which is written with the signs of elements and particles of words as well as the book written with the elements of signs and by words of particles.... Let us read the text of a third book—the heart—which deepens, enriches, and beautifies men. Let us recognize, spot, and extricate the seed of selfishness which is concealed in the swamp of earthly, worm-like life and cultivate it under the caressing touch of a soft, energizing ray of life. Let us warm up and illuminate the dust of the silent cemetery and cold, dark imbroglio of our world by its radiation. Let us see that every dust particle of this world is like a restless world expecting to find its meaning. We who are servants of the sun should inform those words so that they can turn towards the source of the sun with their empty, earthenware jugs.
Iqbal calls this particular world view, the religious world view, the essence of which beauty, glory, and courage are incorporated and in which anguish, love, and action are natural characteristics and emanations. Thus, he seeks to distinguish it from the philosophical world view or Sufi or romantic world view. What he refers to as the philosophical world view comprises as much of the materialistic world view as well as the idealistic one.
At the same time, he fears that because of the emphasis upon one God and a kind of mystic language which is used, his intellectual school may be mistaken for the mullah’s religion or the Sufi school of thought because although he has extended the concept of God more than any other theist philosopher or religious orator and he has inflamed love more than any Sufi, yet, he has no link to these two groups and his God and love bear no resemblance to their God and love.
This is the great difficulty which people like Iqbal face. Those who advance a new theory, a novel idea, and an unprecedented and shallow ideology never face this difficulty. Their minds are at ease and their reader’s task is quite easy because the language they use is essentially simple, straight-forward, and one-dimensional—expressions and clauses are not subject to any dispute and are far from being ambiguous. Their language contains no symbols, ambiguity, metaphor, metonymy, association, or instances of multiple meaning. Every word, expression, and version has only that meaning given to it by a writer or a speaker.
But those people who have been speaking about the truth of religion or maktab, those who have studied various nationalities, civilizations, and cultures over the centuries, who have come to know numerous geniuses, sentiments, powers, regimes, classes, groups, opportunities, exigencies, seeking of truth, political plots, individual and collective treasons, ethnic and racial prejudices, philosophical, scientific, mystic and religious principles, known or unknown interpretations, forgeries, justifications and versions, colors, tricks, uses and different social and economic systems, changes, transformations, movements, revolutions, interminglings and mistakes as well as innumerable intellectual, cultural, historic, tr
aditional exchanges, and so forth, speak with a language that has 3000 years of culture behind it.
Invariably, they fear being misunderstood because the concepts they are putting forward or the expressions they are using have been current in the course of a long history and have been common among different, even opposing, intellectual, tribal, class, political, or social schools, factions, and poles. Naturally, there is the risk that the concepts put forward by such thinkers will be interpreted in a manner opposite to what they originally intended.
Everything belongs to God. This is a principle which is the foundation of Islamic monotheism and which considers God as being the sole owner of everything. An anti-colonist and Islamologist, an Abu Dharr Muslim, who is an enemy of capitalism and who believes that discrimination is incompatible with monotheism, would lay his anti-monopolistic ideals and his aspirations for equality and justice on this principle. He would reject exploitative ownership and individual capitalism on that basis, that is, because ownership is exclusive to God, which means, to all of His creatures.
But we see that the first person who emphasized this principle and accepted it as his slogan was Muawiyah who said, “Everything belongs to God. As I am His representative, you are His servants, so I shall give money to whomever I wish and deny it to whomever I wish.”
This argument was stretched to the point that Abu Dharr, for whom this principle was useful in his struggles against exploitation and hoarding, shouted angrily at the Caliph, “Don’t say everything belongs to God! Say everything belongs to the Muslim people!”
You see how difficult it is to speak about Islam. We speak about love, worship, the Quran, prayer, hajj, martyrdom, Ali, and so forth, and suddenly we find ourselves confronted by a most ardent Sufi, a most dogmatic frequenter of the ritual prayer niche, the most reactionary pseudo-clergyman of the Damascus and Baghdad court as well as the most degrading pseudo-religious scholar of the Isfahan and Tehran courts. Such comparisons and contrasts are rather shocking and certainly displeasing for we who write and comment upon things and much more so for our readers and listeners! Islam ranges from ‘All and Husayn to Muawiyah and Yazid, as far as persons are concerned.
The phrase ‘religious world view’ should be taken exactly as Iqbal meant it to be taken. In order not to misunderstand him, the words ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ should be considered as if we are encountering them for the first time and should, therefore, wait until he has defined and explained them.
All theists and religious philosophers speak on the deity, which marks the difference between them and material, secular, agnostic, or even atheistic philosophers. But Iqbal’s God bears little resemblance to the God of these people.
The main efforts of theist philosophers are directed towards proving the existence of God, which, by necessity, rejects the proof advanced by atheists. In their view, God constitutes one of the essential subjects and after discussing affirmative attributes, they deal with other points. Furthermore, they attempt to prove the existence of God in the same way, for example, as Newton proves the law of gravity. They discuss Him in the universe as though He were a King in a country or an architect of a building. It is as if they have the same relationship to Him that Edison had to electricity. That is to say, the same relationship exists between a discoverer and a researcher and the thing being discovered. It is very similar to Greek philosophers who were searching for the main elements in nature, that is, water, fire, atom, and so forth.
God in the religious world view, as understood by Iqbal, has and is the following universal attributes: Absolute Being, Existence, Ultimate Truth, the principal focus of Light, Energy, Motion and Life; creative Source of Beauty and Love, Absolute Glory, Magnificence, genuine Source and Final Cause of values; justification for and devotion to Truth and Justice, Freedom, Position-taking, Piety, Faithfulness, Sacrifice, Altruism and Martyrdom in man; Essence of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, Final Direction, Change, Motion, and Evolution of the Spirit of nature; Conscious Will of the universe, the Sun of the universal system, the Kabah of the circumambulation of gestures, the Substance of all signs, the Existence of all phenomena, the invisible Mystery of all testimonies, the course of Motion by which all things follow certain rules, the Reason why all things are rational, logical and scientific; constancy of the Principle of Change, Unity of and inner-linking Solidarity and Coordination among phenomena and events; impossibility of accidental and fruitless things; the reason why any truths, events and attributes have a definite Direction, pre-determined Measure and set Objectives. Finally, in Iqbal’s version, God means the concept of Being, the Essence of phenomena, the Conscience of nature, the ‘Me’ of ‘me’s’, the Soul of the universe and the Self of the macrocosm.
To find God, thusly, that is, to see and conceive of Him in a way different from that which is seen and understood by philosophical materialism or philosophical idealism or the way of the theologian for whom He is words or the way of Sufis for whom He is states, if they do not deny Him altogether, leads to another kind of knowledge. Such knowledge does not stop at physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy and is not contented with the interpretation and justification of relationships and phenomena but seeks to glance at the mystery, seeks the secret of existence, follows the footsteps of truth to the vast plain of eternity and also familiarizes itself with the T of nature and the ‘self of the universe.
Nevertheless, neither does he deny or belittle earthly nature nor overlook natural phenomena nor underestimate scientific laws, but, on the contrary, he regards nature as a boundless and valuable ocean in which pearls of final secrets and metaphysical truths can be found only through swimming, plunging, and submerging and he can avail himself of shells containing pearls of truths and secrets of braving the storms and waves in this deep ocean.
They are the words of the divine truth and secrets inscribed on the Guarded Tablet, the language in which the pen of pre-destination has written this scripture and also they are seekers of this knowledge who have divine awareness and who are conversant with the science of the book.
Those people who know nature, those who meditate on the earth, on heaven and what lies between the two, who look at the camel created for barren, waterless deserts and for sandy plains, at the sunlight and moonlight that follow each other in continuous succession, at cloud, wind, rain, stars, pastures and mountains which have pierced the earth as nails and hold it in position, which anchor and maintain this revolving sphere in space, those who watch the breath of dawn, at the night and day which continuously look at the fig, olive, spider, honeybee, termite and, in short, who seek God everywhere—yea—their look and observation are not metaphysical or one which aspires to materiality, wealth, or pleasure or negates reality as Sufis, theologists, philosophers imagine or of that which materialists, atheists, or the enemies of religion conceive.
Nor is this view the same as that imagined and conceived by idealism, subjectivism, spiritualism, nihilism, surrealism, humanism, mysticism, Berkeley subjectivity, archetypal images of Plato, Plotinus’ indulgence in fanciful theories, anti-world futurity of spiritualism, asceticism, or monasticism, Buddhist introversion, a tendency towards heaven exhibited by Hinduism, anti-rational, anti-social, anti-progressive, anti-material Taoism of Lao Tzu, the extreme spiritualism of Christianity, or by the present religious attitude of a sustained loss in this world and in the next.
It is an attitude that sees the phenomena of the universe, the motion of history and society as well as people and struggle to subsist as a divine, holy sign, and tradition. It views the sense of direction exhibited by the honeybee which in a mountainous labyrinth, in pitch darkness and from the remotest of places, finds its way back to its hive simply by using its common sense, to be just as important as the prophetic power which guides men and shows them the path to their final destiny and to the place where they can quench their thirst and satisfy their hunger after passing through many struggles of instinct and passions and after overcoming attachments, customs, confusions of though
ts, temptations, signs of blindness and propensity towards stagnation and precipitation, and so forth.
The prophetic power points to the correct direction by the narration of stories which act as landmarks and by the testimony of the pure leaders that act as signposts so that people not go astray. This power completes the instinct of the human being, that is, the place where instinct stops and this power begins in order to fulfill the mission of guidance. It is not a coincidence that the name of both powers, the guiding power of the instinct of the honeybee and the guiding power of the prophets are the same: revelation.
Appendices:
A. Guide to the Volume Titles of Shariati’s Collected Works
1. Volume Titles
Volume 1: To Familiar Listeners
Volume 2: Revolutionary Self-development
Volume 4: Return
Volume 5: Iqbal and Us
Volume 6: Hajj: Reflections on its Rituals
Volume 7: Shiism
Volume 8: Prayer
Volume 9: Alid Shiism/ Safavid Shiism
Volume 10: Class Orientation in Islam
Volume 11: History of Civilizations (I)
Volume 12: History of Civilizations (II)
Volume 13: The Fall into the Desert
Volume 14: History and Knowledge of Religions (I)
Volume 15: History and Knowledge of Religions (II)
