Why Iqbal Is So Hard to Read

the following is from my upcoming dissertation on the Jāvīdnāma

At times, Iqbal’s intertextuality alludes to his own concepts in subtle ways. The title for his final complete Urdu work, Ḍarb-i-Kalīm, is often translated as The Strike of Moses or The Staff of Moses. While the moniker “Kalīm” does, in fact, refer to Moses in the Islamic tradition, the motif of kalīm as one who has immediate experience of God is an important symbol in Iqbal’s works. In a famous poem in his second major Urdu work, Bāl-i-Jibrīl, Iqbal says:

In an exquisite use of allusion, symbol, and double meaning, Iqbal brings together a series of concepts into a single rubāʿiyyah that can be completely lost if read in a single pass. First, hakīmī (philosophizing) is contrasted with kalīmī (direct experience of God in the mode of Moses). The second two lines also create contrasts, but those contrasts are directly taken from the story of Moses. First, shāhī (kingship) is contrasted with faqr, which holds a double meaning: the literal meaning is poverty, but, for the Sufis, faqr has long been used as a moniker for the love of God. The contrast, then – that of poverty/love of God on one hand and kingship on the other – is a perfect contrast that alludes to the story of Moses, who forsook his place as the son of the Pharoah and instead embraced poverty as and escaped Egypt.

This escape from Egypt and embracing estrangement is the allusion in the final line in which Iqbal uses the word “gharībī” to describe the concept that protects one’s khudi. The word gharīb in Urdu carries two meanings, though in Farsi and Arabic, the second is more dominant. The first meaning is that of poverty, and this is the more colloquially familiar one. The second, however, means strange or estrangement. Iqbal uses gharīb in this meaning often in Farsi, like when he says about Soroush in the Jāvīdnāma:

Thus, when taking all the allusions and double meanings together, one can see how the second couplet is an explanation of the first couplet; that is, how kalīmī is the hidden secret to khudi. When one chooses poverty and estrangement – not as an ascetic, but as an active actor in the world like Moses – as a consequence of actions that lead to the direct experience of God, one safeguards one’s khudi rather than trading it for kingship and comfort. Kalīmī, thus, in Iqbal’s universe of concepts, is intrinsically linked to the act of direct experience of God that comes from choosing khudi no matter the difficulty of the circumstance.

The Jāvīdnāma begins with Iqbal choosing estrangement from the known universe to seek the love of God and his own khudi in another realm. It concludes with Iqbal having a direct experience and conversation with God, thereby becoming a kind of kalīm. Thus, the meaning of the title of his final work, Ḍarb-i-Kalīm is not, in fact “The Strike of Moses.” The kalīm here does not refer to Moses; it refers to any person who achieves the rank of kalīmī. It is also worth noting that Zarb-i-Kalim opens with a poem titled Lā ilāha illā Allah in which Iqbal discusses all the material means by which a person can sell their khudi, and that the statement lā ilāha illā Allah is the only protection from that trade – which is exactly the allusion Iqbal makes in the above quoted verse.

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