[00:00:05] INTRODUCER:
We’ve given you the, uh, academic ten minutes. The time has come for us to, uh, begin our program today. Uh, this is, uh, one in a series, uh, of lectures called the Agnes A. and Constantine E. A. Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul.
Uh, this lectureship was established in nineteen twenty-eight, and, uh, the only stipulation that was set up by the, uh, person who endowed the money for the lectureship was that in each academic year, at least one lecture be given on the immortality of the soul or some kindred spiritual subject. And so we’ve always interpreted the, uh, command of the, uh, donor very broadly. And if you look at the list of people who have, uh, given lectures in the past, although it’s not listed, uh, here, uh, i-in the program for uh, today, you would find that some of them are mathematicians and others are physicists.
Uh, you have a list of their names, but you don’t have a list of their particular professions. At any rate, uh, we are indeed honored today to have as our speaker somebody who can truly talk about a subject very much germane to the, uh, topic of the lecture series. It is usual to say that we are delighted to have in our midst, uh, a particular person who comes here to speak.
But then you can also say, we are really delighted
(laughter)
to have a speaker here. And in that sense, I would stress that we are indeed delighted to have Professor Annemarie Schimmel here. This is her first visit to Berkeley.
I didn’t realize that. It’s very unfortunate that we have waited so long to have her here. I’ve had many pleasurable occasions to hear her speak, and it is indeed, uh, a great delight to have somebody as knowledgeable a-and as fluent, uh, a speaker, uh, as, uh, Professor Schimmel.
Uh, Professor Schimmel is a native of Germany, uh, received her, uh, Dr. phil at the, uh, ripe old age of 19, and, uh, has gone on from there, uh, to a variety of academic, uh, positions, uh, uh, two of which she holds today. Uh, one is a professorship of Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn, and the other is Professor of Indo-Muslim Culture at Harvard University. Uh, she tells me that, uh, next year will be her last year at Harvard.
She’s received a number of honorary doctorates, uh, having taught both in Turkey at the, uh, uh, Ankara University and at, um, uh, having lived for a number of years in Pakistan, uh, she is, uh, very close to a number of different cultures, of different, uh, universities, uh, of different societies in the world. Uh, she received a, a, a D.Litt from the University of Sindh, uh, a D.Litt from the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, uh, LLD from the University of Peshawar, uh, a Doctor of Theology from the University of Uppsala in Sweden, uh, and a PhD from Selçuk University in Konya in Turkey. Uh, among the many, uh, honors and awards, there’s a very unusual one, unusual for people in the academic world.
She’s had a boulevard named for her in the city of Lahore in Pakistan, which gives us, uh, just one indication of the esteem in which the people of that area, uh, hold her. Uh, Professor Schimmel is fluent in a number of languages. I’ve, uh, had, uh, instance to marvel at this in the course of lectures of hers that I’ve heard, where she’s quoted from a variety of languages which she has mastered.
And she has translated poetry from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Sindhi, and English into German. Uh, these, uh, works are, uh, published. Uh, it’s not just that she does it for her own pleasure, she actually has published these translations.
It’s a remarkable, uh, body of, uh, knowledge of literature that she’s made available. Uh, those of you who have followed her, uh, academic, uh, career and followed her publications, know her best for her works on mysticism, the mystical dimension of Islam, for example, uh, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam, or the work that she’s done on Muhammad Iqbal. And today she’s going to combine those areas of her work in the lecture that she is, uh, to deliver.
She’s given it the very tantalizing title, To me, it certainly is. I was a little worried after reading it, Heaven Is No Holiday. Uh, after all, I’m planning to go there someday, and I was hoping for a holiday.
Uh, the subtitle is Eternal Life in the View of the Sufis and of Muhammad Iqbal. It’s a really great pleasure to introduce Professor Annemarie Schimmel.
(applause and cheering)
[00:06:00] ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL:
Ladies and gentlemen, in the middle of the eighth century of our era, a woman was seen in the streets of Basra in Iraq carrying a torch in one hand, a ewer full of water in the other hand. It was Rabia, the great woman mystic of Islam. And when one asked her what she intended to do with these two things, she said, “I am going to put fire to paradise and pour water into hell so that these two veils disappear and no one worships God anymore out of fear of hell or in hope for paradise, but worships Him only in hope for His eternal beauty.”
This story, which has been repeated time and again, and which incidentally was brought over to Europe by Joinville, the chancellor of the French King Louis the nin- the Ninth, I mean, has, in a nutshell, the ideas of the Sufis about eternal life. And we have to keep in mind that at the time when Rabia said these daring words and acted in an act of, uh, aggression toward the time-honored ideas of hell and paradise, at the same time, or slightly before, her compatriot, the great preacher Hasan of Basra, had re- em- at- admonished the Muslims, “Oh, son of man, remember you are lonely.
You will die lonely. You will be resurrected lonely. You will have to face your Lord all alone, and it is upon Him to forgive you or to cast you into hell.”
Hasan al-Basri was certainly in tune with many sayings in the Quran, because the Quran, in its earliest parts, is strongly formed by the impression of the n-nearing Sa’ah, Al-Qari’ah, the Hour, the one that knocks at the door, and mankind are constantly warned to think of this terrible hour when they’ll see the fruits of their actions. The Quran has described the pains of hell and has described the happiness of the blessed, and always admonishes people to remember that even the smallest grain of good they have done, they’ll see in the other world, and so the smallest grain of evil. In fact, uh, the descriptions of hell and paradise as they are found in the Quran and as they were elaborated by the preachers and by the littérateurs are extremely impressive.
The descriptions of hell even more than those of paradise, but this seems to be something common in the history of religion, that it is always easier to describe negative and terrible things than bless- bliss and happiness. Nevertheless, as all of you know, one of the great accusations medieval Europe and the medieval Christianity voiced against Islam was that the paradise was too sensual, and the idea of black-eyed virgins waiting for the peace, for the pious seemed horrible, uh, to the Christian clerics who dreamt of virginity and of eternal bliss bes- beyond all these apparently very sensualistic pictures. It was, uh, certainly not easy to understand what was meant with it, but the interpretations, as we shall see, varied in the course of time.
The whole instrumentarium of resurrection is described in more or less detailed in the Quran and was again elaborated by the pious authors. The acts of men are weighed on a big, on big scales. The books where the writing angels have written down their actions and their thoughts are either black or white.
When they are black and are given in the left hand, man is condemned. In the other case, he may be saved, and he has to cross a bridge sharper than a hair and sharper than a sword. It is this kind of ideas which, uh, horrified people and which was always admired, feared, and, uh, interpreted by philosophers, by mystics, and by the rank and file of the Muslims.
Would one really remain in eternity in hell? Was there no hope for someone who had sinned that hell would end one day? Finally, a solution was found.
Many of the theologians believed that hell would also end one day because since there is nothing eternal but God, even hell, something created, must end one day, and with it, the pain of those who have suffered there. All these ideas, uh, have been elaborated by theologians and by Sufis, And, uh, when you read one of the most important books written during the Middle Ages by a pious Muslim who, after being a scholar, a philosopher, a theologian, finally found his spiritual peace in Sufism, namely Imam Al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, then you can see that even he, with all his knowledge and with his deep interest in mystical Islam, still repeats these same ideas. The 40th book of his Ihya Ulum ad-Din, which is now available in a good English translation by C. G. Winter.
This book tells us of the fear of people at the approach of death. It tells us about punishment and about the recompenses the pious will receive in paradise. And he follows exactly the lines of his predecessors, going into every detail, something that sounds for us perhaps slightly surprising when we read it in the work of someone who was a leading mystical master of his time.
And to this day, books on Islam will often give you these details. I remind you only of the book by Le Gai Eaton, Islam, which is an excellent introduction, but in whose last chapter again, the heavenly rewards, the houris, and so on, are described in great detail. But what did the mystics do?
How did they imagine the day of death and the time that came later? First of all, one had to find out what happened to the Muslim after his or her death. Munkar and Nakir would ask him or her in the grave about his faith.
That is why the profession of faith is, uh, whispered into the dying person’s ear, and then one is not sure whether the soul will go immediately to the judgment or will stay in the tomb until the general day of resurrection will arrive. The Swedish scholar Eklund has devoted a learned book to this question, and in general, it is accepted that the soul either feels already its future state, namely the happiness and vastness of paradise, or the narrowness and terrible fear of hell in the grave. But in many cases, we can judge that a person is immediately admitted to his or her later place, because Islamic history, and especially the history of Sufism, abounds with stories when a pious person appeared to his friends in his dream after he had died, and being asked how he fared, gave exact accounts of his life in the grace of God.
Because in all these stories, and that is a very typical aspect of such stories, the grace of God is expressed as prevailing over His wrath. “My mercy precedes my wrath,” says Hadith Qudsi. And all the pious people who appeared to their friends after their death gave witness to this truth, And it was sometimes only a small act of piety that was more important than all the years and years of dutiful ful-fulfillment of the ritual duties.
The favorites– my favorite story is that of Shibli, the great mystic of the 10th century, who was seen after his death, and when he told his friend why he had been saved, it was not because of his fasting and praying, not because of his numerous pilgrimages or his numerous alms. It was because in a cold winter night, he had found a small freezing kitten on the road in Baghdad and had put it into his fur coat and saved its life. That was his key to, to happy life ever after in eternity.
There was, uh, certainly a consolation in this feeling, and there was also a consolation in the, the feeling which developed very early in Islam that the believers were not left alone. It is said that the Prophet Muhammad, during his heavenly journey, pleaded with God that his community should be admitted into paradise. And innumerable poems have been written about the moment when in the dreadful heat at this extremely long day of resurrection, all of a sudden, the prophet appears with his green flag, the Liwa al-Hamd.
And while every other prophet, including the innocent Jesus, will say, “Nafsi, nafsi, I myself, I myself want to be saved,” the prophet of Islam will come forth and will say, “Ummati, ummati, my community, my community should be saved.” And God will grant his request. This idea of Muhammad as a shafi’, the intercessor for his community, has certainly eased the fear of the terrible day of judgment.
And there was something else that helped the believers make death somewhat more tolerable. That was the early teaching, based on the Quran, that those who die fighting for the faith, and that could be taken in a very wide sense, those who die as martyrs will go to paradise without any difficulties. They will immediately enter without undergoing all the terrible questioning in the tomb and at the gates of, of the other world.
For this reason, an expression has developed, or a kind of expression which shows the jubilant joy of those who hoped to die for the faith. It is the idea that the other world is like a wedding festival. And when we read the descriptions in Urdu poetry, for instance, of the martyrs of Karbala, how they set out to the fatal, uh, battle in the year six hundred and eighty, we always read that the heroes put on their most beautiful garments, put on perfume as though they were the bridegrooms for eternity.
And from the same idea that death is nothing that has to be feared, but is rather the union of the loving soul with its beloved, the festivities in honor of Muslim saints, the, the anniversaries of their death are called Shabe Aroos, the night of wedding, or simply Urs wedding, because one knows that the soul of the deceased saint will then be united with the eternal beloved. This idea goes back to early Sufism. It was, as far as we can see, a Persian mystic, Yahya ibn Mu’adh
al-Razi, who is also called the preacher of hope, who said for the first time, “Death is beautiful because it joins the lover with the beloved.” The love mysticism, which had been introduced by Rabia, with whose story I began, had taken roots in the ninth century in the whole Islamic world and found its culmination in the tenth century in the person of Al-Hallaj, to whom we shall return later on. Yahya ibn Mu’adh’s saying, “Death is beautiful because it joined the lover with the beloved,” was echoed in numerous sayings which describe death as a bridge which brings the lover to his final goal, and the Sufis never could find enough beautiful words, uh, to speak about the happiness that awaits them.
Even in Ghazali’s Ikhya, in the Book on Death, which is otherwise rather gloomy, although it ends on a positive note, there is a story about Abraham. When the angel of death came and wanted to take his soul, Abraham refused and said, “No, that is no beloved who takes away my life.” And the angel of death said, “Have you ever seen a lover who does not want to join the beloved?”
And Abraham says, “Take my soul and bring it to him.” This expression of longing was one aspect which the Sufis introduced in the whole topic of death and immortality and eternal life. There is, however, another aspect to it as well.
In a very early time, a word of the Prophet was quoted, which became one of the cornerstones of mystical philosophy and mystical worldview. This is the Hadith, “An-nāsu niyāmun wa idhā mātū ntabahū.” “People are asleep, and when they die, they awake.”
This seems almost like taking over the idea of Indian Maya, that life is really only a dream without intrinsic value. But, uh, the early Sufis up to the thirteenth century interpreted it differently. This life may be a dream, but still what one sees in the dream one will find the interpretation in the morning time of eternity, as they say, and it always reminds me of the beautiful German church hymn, Morgenglanz der Ewigkeit, Morning Life of E– Light of Eternity.
Something, what we see here only dimly and dreamlike, will appear to us in full glory and will be explained to us in the other world, in the full light of the divine presence. In later times, however, we have to say that this very Hadith of the Prophet was interpreted somewhat differently. It was at a time when the Muslim power shrank, when there was very little hope in the political, uh, social, and also religious fields.
And so for the Sufis of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, especially in India, the saying that people are asleep and when they wake up, that when they die they wake up was a consolation. This is just a dream, a nightmare. We needn’t care for that.
One day we’ll have a better lot. That is an understandable shift of emphasis, but as I’ve said, in the early works, the positive aspect of this Hadith is always, uh, emphasized. And someone who has emphasized this positive aspect of the Hadith and of death and eternal life, particularly is the poet who, to my feeling, ha– is in himself a whole encyclopedia of mystical thought, of poetical thought, and of an immense burning love of God, and to a certain extent also of the world.
This is Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi. Born twelve hundred and seven in northern Afghanistan. He migrated with his family under the pressure of the Mongols, uh, to Konya in central Anatolia, where he lived and taught,
(cough)
illuminated by the love of a mystic, Shams-e Tabriz, the Sun of Tabriz, and he became the greatest master of mystical poetry, both lyrical and epical. And his Masnavi, his mystical couplets, are considered to be inferior only to the Quran, or rather, hast Quran ba zabane Pahl- Pahlavi. It is the Quran in Persian language.
Maulana Rumi is one of those amazing mystical thinkers who are able, uh, to put together in their poetry the whole world. There is nothing too small, nothing too insignificant for him that he could not see an example in it. And when the Quran admonishes people to see the ayat, the signs of God, fil-afaq wa fi anfusikum, in the horizon, that means in the world and in yourself, then Rumi, the prime example of someone who was able to see these signs.
It was always common with the poets from very early times in Islam onward to compare resurrection to spring. The Quran itself speaks of the miracle of resurrection by comparing it against the unbelieving Meccans, uh, to the resurrection of the grass from the seemingly dead earth when the spring rains come. And, uh, thus, the poets could easily see in every moment of spring a proof for the eternal resurrection of human beings.
We have this topic, as I said, from early times onward. We have it in wonderful Persian verses, not only by Hafiz or Saadi, but long before them in the verses of the great Ismaili poet Nasir of Khusraw, who always admonishes his compatriots in northern Iran and Afghanistan to look at nature, how at the time when the vernal equinoxes come, the Earth is clad in green paradisiacal robes, just as God in His justice—there is a wordplay between the equinox and the justice—will put on silken dresses, green silken dresses, on those who believe and are faithful. Nasir Khusraw is only one in the long range of, uh, poets who have used these images.
Maulana Rumi is perhaps the one who is most eloquent when speaking that. And no one who has ever seen a spring day in Konya will, uh, forget the experience how out of a dusty, dry place, all of a sudden the green, the fragrance appears as if indeed spring were pa-paradise. The thunder seems to be the trumpet of Israfil, who calls for resurrection.
The breeze brings the dresses from paradise to the trees, and those trees who were naked during winter and waited in beautiful patience, as it is said in the Quran, Sabrun Jamil, they will receive the robe of honor of the roses. All this is a tangible and visible sign of paradise. But paradise, of course, will be eternal.
And here, as Goethe would say, “Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.” It is a color, the reflection in multicolorous forms, which gives us an idea of the happiness and the glory that a- awaits those who are patients in paradise. But it is, in the first moment, perhaps a little bit surprising to find in Rumi’s poetry also verses in which he describes, uh, the terrors of the Day of Judgment in very, very clear and grand images.
And he has never failed to express, uh, the, uh, uh, horrors of, uh, death, but also the hopes at death. And he is, as far as I can see, the only poet who describes man’s wandering into the next world, uh, to a big cortege where the human being goes accompanied from his good actions, which appear in the shape of women, Mu’minatun, Muslimatun, Qanitatun, and so on. All the Quranic expressions for the pious women are used in Order to tell how the believer will be brought by his good actions to the dangerous bridge and how they will help him to cross the bridge.
The idea of the woman that meets the believer is be- known from the Zoroastrian concept of the daena. And Maulana has also dwelt on another aspect of death, namely that death is a mirror. Just as Ghazali wrote his whole ‹Iḥya’ Ulum al-Din› in its forty chapters, in which he teaches the human being all the duties by which he can approach God and by which he can become more and more faithful, and then finally meet God without too much fear.
Thus, Maulana Rumi sees that death is a mirror who shows the human being’s faith according to h- his actions, either beautiful like a Turk or ugly like an Abyssinian. And when his predecessors, when his predecessors had claimed, such as Sanai and Attar, that a human being, by means of his actions, can even be transformed into an animal, a pig or a dog, if these qualities are prevalent in him, then Rumi softened that and brings only the image of the mirror. And when he speaks of the garments of paradise, the green silk and the white robes which are pro- uh, promised to the believers, uh, then for him, ha- it has still another meaning.
He says, “Dress in the material which you yourself have spun. Drink the fruit and the juice which you yourself have planted.” When a human being acts according to the Quranic prescriptions and to all the good intentions, then he or she, as it were, spins and weaves h-himself the garment for paradise, an idea which is also known from the Indian tradition, where actions can be compared to the garments that are woven around a person.
Maulana Rumi emphasizes this very much, and, uh, he always tells us that the greatest duty of man in the love of God is to perfect his innate qualities and act as well as possible. For him, death is just a wonderful moment when this dress of the body which he has worn for so many years will be exchanged by the colorless, uh, dress of, For eternity. If death is a man, let him come close to me, that I can take him tightly to my breast.
I’ll take from him his soul, pure, colorless. He’ll take from me a colored frock. That’s all.
And Rumi is the one who describes the happiness of the arrival on the other shore in unforgettable words. The day I’ve died, my pall is moving on, but do not think my heart is still on earth. Don’t weep and pity me.
“Oh, woe, how a- awful.” You fall in devil’s snare. Woe, that is awful.
Don’t cry, “Woe, parted!” at my burial. For me, this is the time of joyful meeting. Don’t say “Farewell!”
when I’m put in the grave. A curtain is it for eternal bliss. You saw descending.
Now look at the rising. Is setting dangerous for sun and moon? To you, it looks like setting, but it’s rising.
The coffin seems a jail, yet it means freedom. Which seed fell in the earth that did not grow there? Why do you doubt the fate of human seed?
He is hopeful. For him, death is the beginning of a new life. It is the beginning of the life in the presence of the divine beloved.
And then he, in his tenderest verses, he describes his feelings at death’s with the word, attraction, “A child that dies in mother’s bosom, that’s how I am, my friend. For in the bosom of his mercy and kindness I shall die.” It is a hope which lies behind all his expressions when he speaks, and even when he describes the horrors of judgment in very strong images.
He never went so far, as did many of his compatriots, and particularly the later poets, who criticized sharply paradise and hell, and particularly the whole eschatological instrumentarium as it was known from the Quran and elaborated by many, many popular preachers. Shortly after Mawlana had died in seven- twelve seventy-three, his compatriot, the Turkish poet Yunus Emre, describes his feelings about the huris and the castles in very low words, and hur and kusur become, for the later poems, almost something negative. The word kusur, castles, is immediately brought together with the equally sounding kusur, mistakes.
To look at houris and castles is really a great mistake of the soul. What shall one do with houris who are already a couple of thousand years old? They are of no use, after all.
But Yunus Emre has also criticized the eschatological imagery in his great Turkish poem, “Ya ilâhi ger suâl etsen bana,” “O Lord, if you should ask me one day,” “I’ll tell you this as my answer.” And then he goes on to tell God that He, being omniscient, doesn’t need scales to weigh man’s dirty sins. That’s much beneath His dignity.
And He doesn’t need, uh, books to read out of them. He doesn’t need a, a bridge which is thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword. Bridges should be good so that one can pass them.
And so this is the idea that Yunus Emre, and following him, many of the Bektashi poets of Turkey in the fifteenth and sixteenth century have voiced, all these things have no meaning. The only thing that is worth seeking is the face of the divine beloved. And still in 19th century India, Mirza Ghalib, the greatest Urdu poet of, uh, Indo-Pakistan, has written the beautiful verse that the paradise for, of normal people is for those who have lost themselves, nothing but a dried up bouquet in the niche of forgetfulness.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of the unnecessary interest in paradise. It’s just like a withered piece of roses, which is much too small for those who really love and want to transgress paradise. But we may ask what happens then if the believers are not interested in the houris and in the castles.
They want only to see the face of their divine beloved, who will smile at them, as it is said, Wa Rabbuka dahik, “and your Lord is smiling.” And, uh, what will be the end? Is there an end to this seeking?
Many of the, uh, Sufis have s- believed and have hoped, as human beings often do, that the end of our life and after death will be the return in the pre-eternal home, just like the drop loses itself in the ocean and becomes again one with the immense ocean from which it once came to become a raindrop in a cloud and fall down again. Is this the very end? Or is Attar right, the great Persian poet, who, uh, tells in his Ushtur-Nama, the story of a Turkish puppet player who plays the wonder- most wonderful pieces behind seven curtains, and after each curtain, there are new secrets and mysteries.
And the man who follows him through the seven curtains sees at the end, full of horror, that the puppet player takes all
(clears throat)
the puppets, break them, and throw them back in the box of unity. Is this the end? The box of unity where there is no
(sighs)
distinguishing me, where there is only the divine being, and the human beings have no feeling, no love, nothing anymore. Is this the highest bliss?
(sighs)
The poets and the mystics have pondered this question
(sighs)
year after year, century after century.
(sighs)
And we may return once more to Rumi, who has always answers to our question. Many of you know his famous poem from the Masnavi, where he describes the movement through the different stages of life, which ends finally in God, as
(speaking Persian)
, “I died as a mineral and became a plant. I died as a plant and became an animal. When I died as an animal, I was a human being.
And when I die as a human being, I become an angel. And even from the angelic presence, I have to go farther. And then comes a line which is not translated by the first tran- German translator of this verse, namely by Rückert.
And we, be- we go farther because not being calls with organ tones, we belong to Him, and to Him do we return to the Quranic, uh, phrase, «inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un». Now, what is this not being? Does that not sound like a negative end?
One has to see in Rumi’s work what Adam not being means. It is, as it is in the many mystics, a description of the divine essence, the God who cannot be seen, the Deus absconditus whom we can never reach and whom we can describe only as Dionysius Areopagita has shown in negative terms as the seers of the Upanishads have done, neti neti. It is the desert of the Godhead.
It is something which is beyond not only our understanding, but even our grasping in love. It– And this seems for Rumi to be the real end.
But before one can reach this stage, one has to transgress various stages, as we saw, whether we call it from mineral o- via plant to human beings, or whether we see it under different images. The idea that life and the life that leads to immortality is a series of deaths is very beautifully expressed in the Sufi saying, “Mutu qabla an tamutu,” die before ye die. It has been expressed in mysticism and from there in poetry in the famous, uh, story of the moth and the candle.
The moth who sees the candle, feels the candle’s heat, and finally immolates itself in the candle to become one with the fire, and no use is found from it again. It is this idea of the moth and the candle disappearing forever, as it seems, and yet being united with something higher, the flame, that has permeated Sufi poetry. And this idea was first expressed in the Islamic literatures by Al-Hallaj, the martyr-mystic who was executed in 922 because of alleged heresy, but in reality for political reasons.
It was he who went through the streets of Baghdad and asked people to kill him. Uqtuluni ya thiqati inna fi qatli hayati. Kill me, O my trustworthy friends, because in my being killed, there is my life.
He found that, uh, the divine being is separated from the human being by its pre-eternity, and there is nothing more important for the human being to return to its originator, to the time when he was as he was before he was. And yet, this has to be done in steps, in series of voluntary sacrifices. With every small sacrifice that the human being takes upon himself, he guarantees a development to higher and higher echelons, and that is not only true for the wo- life on earth, but also for the life in eternity.
And it is this point when Muhammad Iqbal takes his lead. Iqbal, to my feeling, certainly the most interesting and fascinating thinker of the 20th century Muslim world, and not only a thinker whose six lectures on the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam are one of the most, uh, thought-provoking books written by a Muslim thinker in this century, but also a poet in Urdu and in Persian who has described his ideals in ever so many verses, taking his lead, at least from 1915 onward, for by Maulana Rumi. Iqbal was born in 1877 in the northern Punjab.
He died in 1938 after studying in England and in Germany. In Iqbal’s ideas about immortality and eternal life, we find a fascinating combination of his own Islamic background, his deep interest in Sufism, and of European thought. Iqbal began in his youthful days as an admirer of Ibn Arabi and, uh, of his school, which is called the Unity of Being, Wahdat al-Wujud.
He then turned to Rumi and discovered in Rumi, not the philosopher, but the lover who has, uh, in- and as his greatest master, dynamism, the dynamism of love. And the story which I just, uh, read, the story of the continuing development of the human soul through the different layers of creation, has impressed him deeply. He has pondered the secret of life and death in all of his works, especially in his great work, the Javid Nama, which very typically takes up the idea of the Mi’raj, the heavenly journey, which was once done by the Prophet and which formed a model for the mystical experiences of the great mystics of Islam.
Iqbal follows this idea and makes us meet the great thinkers and poets of the world in the different heavenly spheres. One of those whom he meets beyond the spheres is the German philosopher Nietzsche. Iqbal was, uh, strongly influenced by Nietzsche, but he was also critical a-about him.
And the very fact that he sees Nietzsche beyond the spheres of the planets before he enters into the realms of paradise, where those who have been killed for God are, uh, eternally dwelling, uh, shows the interest he had in Nietzsche’s idea. For him, the idea of an eternal return of the same was impossible. That was against the constant development of life, and therefore, poor Nietzsche is seen flying around in eternity and all in eternity repeating only one single verse, which certainly is not a very enjoyable position.
But, uh, on the other hand, Iqbal has, uh, been influenced, perhaps unwittingly, by one word of Nietzsche which takes– which, uh, precedes his ideas. As I said, I don’t know if he ever, ever read it, but it exactly expresses his idea. Namely, Nietzsche has spoken from the standpoint of immortality, that immortality can be something absolutely stale, something that is utterly monotonous and has no promise in itself.
It is exactly the idea which the Muslim mystics had felt, what shall they do with the houris and with the castles? What shall they do in a paradise where there is really no challenge, and where there is a constant repetition of the same happiness, even though every moment the happiness may appear afresh? Nietzsche says, uh, about such a feeling of immortality, as we know is from instance from classical antiquity, that people who experience that are tot für Unsterblichkeit.
He did not want something that was dead for sheer immortality. And so he developed his ideals of the human being based on the Quran and on Maulana Rumi, and teaches his compatriots to strengthen their individuality to such an extent by incorporating all the possible power in them, the spiritual power, that the corporeal death is only a small shock which one can survive, and then begins the journey into God. Unto that moment, as Attar has also said, the journey goes to God, but then the journey into the infinite abysses of the divinity begin.
And Iqbal is, with these ideas, very close to the con– his contemporaries among the German philosophers. On the one hand, he loved Goethe, whose work he had read when he was a student, and Goethe’s idea that when this body and this existence is no longer able to enable, to give me the possibility for further development, then nature has to, uh, see for another form in which my personality can grow. A s- a sentence Goethe once uttered toward Eckermann.
This sentence certainly influenced Iqbal. We know that he read the works of Rudolf Eucken. He was aware of Lotze and a bit of Scholz, who all spoke of the immortality which is to be transformed into real life.
For a life which goes on and in which the human soul, or whatever we may call it, can develop infinitely. Friedrich von Hügel has some similar ideas. But the greatest similarity with Iqbal’s thought in the modern European scholarship and theology comes from a man who is known to us Orientalists, as one of the leading scholars in the field of Islamology.
This is the Swedish bishop, Tor Andrae, to whom we owe some excellent books on the Prophet Muhammad. Tor Andrae has also written a book called Die letzten Dinge, which appeared in German in nineteen forty. And in this book, he makes exactly the point Iqbal makes, namely that if eternal life means to be real life, then it has to have its ups and downs.
It has to have some pain, of course, of a much more refined form than the pain we feel here. In short, it should be something similar to our life here on Earth, only without the burden of our bodily existence. This is exactly what Iqbal says when he, in his, uh, six lectures, states the fact that the individual, the believer, has to become so strong that after the bodily death, he has to continue growing in the intense presence of God.
And in this connection, he has coined the phrase, “Heaven is no holiday.” It is a constant growing, a growing without diminishing, as he says at the very end of the Javidnameh where he finds himself in the presence of God. The believer, so he holds, is like a lion for whom death is only a lowly prey.
It is, uh, the believer who, after, when we use Rumi’s term, spinning his heavenly garments by his own actions, is able to overcome death. Death is only one of the numerous stages in the development of the human being. are taken out of the serial time, the time that came into existence by the very act of creation, and returning in the divine eternal now, something we cannot imagine.
Man will grow infinitely until, as Goethe would say, “wir anschauen ew’ger Liebe,” wir verschweben, wir verschwinden”, until in contemplating eternal love, we disappear and disintegrate. This is the kind of growth with which Iqbal and with him Tor Andrae and the modern thinkers have advocated against a boring paradise with all kinds of enjoyments, but in which a spiritual growth is– seems not to be possible. How that shall be, that of course, None of us know, and we can only say with Maulana Rumi, “Close here your mouth and open it on that side so that your hymns may sound in where no place.”
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[00:57:27] INTRODUCER:
I would only like to express the thanks and congratulations of all of us to, uh, Professor Schimmel, who has made the meaning of a rather enigmatic, uh, title for her, uh, talk very clear to us now. Thank you very much.
(applause)