Table Of ContentMUHAMMAD IQBAL
Taking Issue
&
Allah’s Answer
Translated from the Urdu by Mustansir Dalvi
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
Taking Issue (Shikwa)
Allah’s Answer (Jawaab-e-Shikwa)
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
TAKING ISSUE & ALLAH’S ANSWER
Muhammad Iqbal ‘Allama’ (1877–1938) is best remembered in India for ‘Saare
jahaan se acchha’, recited to this day as an alternate anthem. A pre-eminent poet
of India in the early twentieth century, he eulogized the land and its peoples with
his mellifluous verse. He published several collections, including Baang-e-
Daraa (1924), Javed-Naama (1932) and Baal-e-Jibreel (1935). In his later years
he became the voice of Islam in India, advocating its causes through his
writings, particularly The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930),
his poetry and public speeches. In Pakistan today, he is regarded and cherished
as a founding father.
Poet, translator and columnist Mustansir Dalvi teaches architecture in Mumbai.
His poems have been published in The Brown Critique, Poiesis, Poetry India
and the anthology Mind Mutations. In 2010 he collaborated with French and
Indian poets translating contemporary poetry in Marathi, English and French. He
is currently putting together his first collection of poems, Brouhahas of Cocks.
fondly remembered
Ibrahim Abdur-rahim Dalvi
uncle, translator, life-artist
Introduction
Hai ajab majmooa-e-izdaad, Ai Iqbal tu
Raunaq-e-hangaama-e-mehfil bhi hai, tanhaa bhi hai
O Iqbal, you really are something else!
You can be the life of the party,
yet be alone all the while.
‘Aashiq-e-Harjaai’ (The Philanderer)
I
It is a hundred years since Muhammad Iqbal first recited Shikwa (Taking Issue)
at a gathering of the Anjuman-e-Himayat-e-Islam in Lahore in 1909. Through
the tumultuous century that succeeded this event, the poem and its response,
Jawaab-e-Shikwa (Allah’s Answer, 1913), have assumed a strange afterlife in
the subcontinent.
Although his poetry is appreciated on both sides of the border, in India and in
Pakistan, Iqbal is viewed through different lenses. In Pakistan, Iqbal is
immortalized as a founding father. In veneration, his titles precede his name.
Iqbal’s legacy is more interesting in India. His poem of 1904, ‘Taraanaa-e-
Hindi’ (Song of India), is an anthem to this day. His early poems still inspire
patriotic nationalism and communal amity. However, his subsequent inclination
beyond Indian nationhood to a pan-Islamic global identification has been seen as
problematic for its divisiveness.
Shikwa marks the shift that reaffirms Iqbal’s Muslim identity and asserts his
affiliation to the ummat, or the Islamic community of the world, and for that very
reason remains a deeply conflicted text that emphasizes a fraternity through
difference. Ever since their first unveiling, Shikwa and Jawaab have been
appropriated to forward various agendas through recitation, repetition and
selective quotation. Those who claim Iqbal as their own, both in India and in
Pakistan, have found different ways of defining their contemporary relevance.
II
For Indians today, Iqbal is best known as the composer of ‘Saare jahaan se
acchha’ (from ‘Taraanaa-e-Hindi’), which extols wataniyat, or love for the
homeland, where all its denizens are bulbulein, or songbirds, in this
garden/country. His early poems ‘made him the darling of the Indian people’.1
Iqbal wrote of freedom from all distinctions and oppressions: religion, caste and
class. His words evoked the syncretic impulses that remain at the heart of India’s
diversity. ‘Bacche Ki Dua’ (A Child’s Prayer) was ubiquitous in classrooms in
India even in his time:2
Ho mere dum se yunhi mere watan ki zeenat
Jis tarah phool se hoti hai chaman ke zeenat
Let me bring glory to my land
with every breath, like blossoms
that are the glory of the meadow.
Being Indian, and of India, inspired several of Iqbal’s poems. He wrote of the
land and its geography in poems like ‘Himalaya’ and ‘Taraanaa-e-Hindi’; its
great seers and deities in ‘Nanak’ and ‘Ram’ (whom he called Imam-e-Hind, or
Prophet of India); and its poets in ‘Mirza Ghalib’ and ‘Dagh’. Iqbal even
translated the Gayatri mantra from the Sanskrit into Urdu verse as ‘Aaftaab’
(The Sun). In ‘Nayaa Shivala’ (New Temple), Iqbal deifies his homeland. Using
a vocabulary more Hindi than Persian, his views are syncretic of Hindu and
Muslim thought:
Patthar ki mooraton mein samjha hai tu Khudaa hai
Khaak-e-watan ka mujhko har zarra devataa hai
You assume God exists only
in icons of stone, every speck
of earth that is my land
is Divinity itself.
His poems found easy acceptability with their images of reconciliation and
mutual respect. National leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore
praised his verse.3 Then, in 1905, Iqbal left for Europe for a three-year sojourn.
Between 1905 and 1908, Iqbal travelled extensively and studied philosophy,
law and metaphysics in different parts of Europe. His years outside India
brought about a profound change in his perception of territorial nationalism. He
was closer to the world-changing events of his time; he observed the rising
influence of Western materialism and the corrosion of Islamic power bases. He
visited the former sites of Islamic dominance in Europe and felt a great nostalgia
for this loss. Iqbal’s writings changed: his gaze stretched beyond nationhood to a
larger universe of the fraternal Islam of the ummat and the millat (the
community of the faithful). This internationalism was quite removed from the
earlier intensity, fervour and patriotism of being an Indian. Iqbal now assumed
the mantle of an alienated Muslim for whom, in the words of Mohammed Ali,
Muslims for ‘the past thirteen centuries had been “a nation without a country”’.4
Upon returning to India, Iqbal wrote Shikwa and, later, Jawaab-e-Shikwa. In the
rift between Iqbal’s years as a poet of India and his later Islamist leanings, lie
these poems. For Indians, then, Iqbal is a poet with a past.
III
In Pakistan, Shikwa is the avant-garde to a brave new world of Muslim self-
determination. It is a blueprint on which the future state—not even articulated
when these poems were written— could base both its actions and abstractions.
Muhammad Iqbal himself is invoked variously, the most common being the
appellation of Allama, or scholar. He is also Sir Muhammad Iqbal—he received
a knighthood from the British government in 1922 in recognition of his poetry.
He is Shayar-e-Mashriq (Poet of the Orient), Hakeem-ul-Ummat (Doctor of the
Community)5 and Mufakhir-e-Pakistan, or Philosopher of Pakistan, on the basis
of his writings and speeches from 1909 onward until his death in 1938.
Iqbal is regarded as a pillar of the new state of Pakistan that came into being
in 1947. His life and work have been analysed and scrutinized constantly by
literary critics and religious ideologues alike, in print, in talk shows, on Internet
forums and on blogs, where determined attempts are made to cull certainties and
universalities from his writings. Shikwa and Jawaab are no longer mere poems
but manifestos, and the abstractions inherent in his poetic turn of phrase are
heightened to the point of dogma. For Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal is the voice of
the future—his poems its harbinger:
Astr-e-nau raat hai, dhundlaa sa sitaaraa tu hai
Tomorrow is still in darkness,
and you are the faint new star.
—Jawaab-e-Shikwa
It would be worthwhile, then, to place these poems in the context in which
they were written, and be conscious not to attribute meanings in the light of later
events. I have kept this in mind as the guiding spirit of this translation.6
IV
What are fundamentally paeans of alienation have been aestheticized through the
years, through incanted recitation, or tarannum, which shifts the emphasis from
the content to the musicality of the words and the rhyme. The politics that drive
the mussaddas7 get subsumed in the presentation of the poems as a musical
performance: for example, by the Brothers Sabri, by Egypt’s diva Umm
Kulthum (in Arabic, as ‘Hadeeth-al-Rouh’), and especially in the interpretation
by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali, set in the Hindustani classical tradition. In
most performances, the lengthy poems are restricted to certain ‘greatest hits’; the
couplets chosen often reflect the political affiliations of the performer. There is
little doubt that the popularity of these poems is primarily due to Iqbal’s skills as
a wordsmith. The misras, or couplets, are resonant and mellifluous, the turn of
phrase sometimes spectacular; but these are primarily outpourings of anguish at
the loss of an established world order, keenly felt by a subject population at the
peak of Western imperial colonization. The use of the poems today as objects of
beauty tends to obscure this.
The aestheticizing impulse is evident in some translations too, as rhyme and
metre are stressed upon to match the Urdu format of the mussaddas, to maintain
the form of the couplets, as it were. What Iqbal is saying, his anger and
Description:When Muhammad Iqbal first recited Shikwa (Taking Issue) in 1909, his audience was enraged by his effrontery. Iqbal, in his lament, took issue with Allah directly, audaciously implicating Him for the sorry state of Muslims worldwide and ruing the lost glory of Islam. In recompense, Iqbal composed Jaw
