Abstract
Iqbal’s Jāvīd Nāma and his work in general articulate their own distinctive notions of space and an alternative sense of global geography to that centred on Europe. It is in relationship to this alternative imaginary geography that he envisages distinctive relationships between self, locality and a global geography. As in preceding Indian travelogues in Urdu and Persian, there are multiple sites of self-differentiation in his work, but these sites are created through his distinctive notion of travel as an internal process. Moreover, these sites are imbricated with multiple axes of identity formation, in which there is a play-off between race as a European concept, and terms of identity drawn and reworked from an Islamic lexicon. In this interaction between these two sets of terms, the concept of nationality becomes highly problematic. One might go further and suggest that Iqbal’s work confronts the impossibility, and perhaps even the undesirabilility, of becoming national.
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Notes
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2: p. 101. Ricoeur does not deal with autobiographies specifically, but the unstable temporality of autobiographies makes them especially illuminating for his explorations of the rhetoric of temporality in texts.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, translated by J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953).
For a similar deployment of this trope combining memory and prophecy, Jayakar recounts how, when he was born, the family astrologer prophesied the death of Jayakar’s father, ‘a prophecy which was to be fulfilled’; Jayakar, p. 1. Surendranath Banerjea also uses this trope when he recalls his premonitions of his father’s death; see his A Nation in the Making. Being the Reminiscences of Fifty Years of Public Life (1925; Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 14–15.
Robert Sewell and Sankara Balkrishnan Dikshit, The Indian Calendar with Tables for the Conversion of Hindu and Muhammadan into A.D Dates & Vice Versa, with Tables of Eclipses Available in India by Robert Schram (London: Swan Sonneschein, 1896), p. 39.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology or the Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology (1830–1833; London: John Murray 1867), 2 vols., 1: p. vi.
David R. Oldroyd describes the geologist’s task as ‘a kind of hermeneutic exercise’ in which the earth’s strata are similar to a book, which has to be ‘read’. See David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth. A History of Ideas in Geology (London: Athlone Press, 1996), p. 4.
I have taken the phrase ‘geologically informed landscape’ and ‘geologizing’ from Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nahire. Geology and American Landscape Painting 1825–1875 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. xi.
John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 151. On the sense of deep time, see ibid., p. 168.
See my ‘Putting God in His place: Bradley, McTaggart, and Muhammad Iqbal’, Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 4 (1993), no. 2, pp. 208–36, republished in revised form as ‘God, self and politics: Bradley, McTaggart and Iqbal’, in T.J. Cribb (ed.), Imagined Commonwealths. Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 219–45. In these papers, I examine the distinctive nature of Iqbal’s mysticism as an inverted Sufism.
J.M.E. McTaggart, Philosophical Studies (London: Edward Arnold and Company, 1934), pp. 110–31. McTaggart (1866–1925) was a British Hegelian philosopher whose early reputation rested on two works (Studies in the Hegleian Dialectic, 1896, and Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 1901) which developed and expounded Hegel’s Logic. His magnum opus is considered to be the Nature of Existence (2 vols., vol 1, 1921; vol. 2, 1927) in which he worked out a systematic deductive philosophy arguing that ultimate reality consists of being composed of loving perceptions of one another by a community of selves.
Ibid., p. 50.
Michael Gilsenan, Recognising Islam. Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990), p. 82, p. 86. See also J.C. Burgel, ‘Ecstasy and order: two structural principles in the ghazal poetry of Jalal al Din Rumi’, in Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (London: Kaniqahi Nimatullah Publications, 1992), pp. 61–74.
Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963), p. 121. For a direct reference to the mi’raj in the JN, see JN 20/1–3.
Reconstruction, p. 99. Swami Vivekananda also refers to the mi’raj in his RajaYoga in terms of what I call the ‘problem of return’, but his conclusion as to its significance is different from Iqbal’s; see Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga (1956; New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982), p. 81.
A.R. Tariq (ed.), Speeches and Statements oflqbal (Lahore: Sheikh Ghulam Ali and Sons, 1973), pp. 33–4.
For both poems see Kulliyat-e Iqbal Urdu, p. 83 and p. 159. For a useful English translation with facing Urdu text, see D.J. Matthews, Iqbal. A Selection of the Urdu Verse. Text and Translation (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1993), pp. 16–17, pp. 28–9.
Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of pan-Islam. Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 306.
Ibid., 214. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement. Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 208, pp. 211–12.
Roger Owen, State, Power & Politics in the Making of the Modem Middle East (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 19–23; M.E. Yapp, The Near East since the First World War (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 2–5.
Yapp, The Near East since the First World War, p. 45.
Although this date is not beyond dispute, B.S. Miller argues that this is the most likely. See B.S. Miller, Bhartri and Bilhana. The Hermit and the Love-Thief (1978; New Delhi: Penguin, 1990), p. 3.
For two detailed studies of references to Visvamitra in Vedic and post Vedic literature, see B.H. Kapadia, Visvamitra in the Vedic, Epic and the Puranic Literature (Gujarat: K.A. Amin, 1971) and B.B. Chaubey, Visvamitra in Vedic and Post Vedic Literature (Hoshiarpur: Vishvesharanand Vishva Bandhu Institute, 1987).
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. ix.
Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab. Culture in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
A.R. Tariq (ed.), Speeches and Statements of Iqbat (Lahore: Sheikh Ghulam Ali and sons, 1973), p.14.
Ibid., pp. 235–46.
Bernard Lewis, Race and Colour in Islam (New York, 1971), pp. 7–9.
Ibid., pp. 66, pp. 72–3.
Ehsan Yarshtar (ed.), Encyclopaedia Iranica (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 1: p. 700–1.
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987), p. 167.
Reconstruction, p. 115. For an examination of this issue in relation to the development of the Ahmadiyya movement, see Yohann Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous. Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 49–82.
Sir Arthur Keith, Ethnos or the Problem of Race (London, 1931), pp. 89–91.
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 93–6.
Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam. Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 217–8.
All-India Muslirn League papers (Karachi: Quaid-e Azam Academy, hereafter AIMI. papers), 503: Memorial presented to British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs by Aga Khan et al., January 1, 1919.
Foundations ofPakistan. All India Muslim League Documents: 1906–1947, 3 vols. ed. by S.S. Pirzada (Karachi: National Publishing House, 1969), Presidential Address, 5th Session, Calcutta, March 3–4, 1912, 1: pp. 244–5.
Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 55.
Ibid., pp. 59–60.
Abul Kalam Azad, Masalah-e khilafat va jazfrah-e Arab (Lahore: Khalid Book Depot, 1963), p. 111, p. 116. For the need to establish a priority of credence on the basis of distinguishing different types of dictum in Islamic law and in hadith, see especially pp. 102–4. Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958) joined the Indian National Congress in 1920, and participated in the Indian Association of Muslim theologians who were sympathetic to political nationalism and expelling the British from India. He was also a pan-Islamicist, and an opponent of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), a leading Muslim modernist. Azad became Minister of Education in post-Independence India, a position he held until his death in 1958. See also his autobiography, India Wins Freedom (1958, 2nd edn, 1988; this edition contains sections which were cut from the 1st edn).
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Majeed, J. (2007). The Aporia of Muslim Nationalism. In: Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286818_6
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