# Iqbal and the Babi-Baha'i Faith

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-22 — 1 clipping.*

---

> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Annemarie Schimmel, Iqbal and the Babi-Baha'i Faith, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> Iqbal* and the Babi-Baha'i Faith
> Annemarie Schimmel
> 
> E      very reader of Iqbal's magnum opus, the Javfdnama (published in Lahore
> 
> epic, Tahirih's song: J/J,1 ~/,
> '  . .,     ,:
> I.
> 1932), has been delighted to read in one of the most prominent places this
> 1/; ( ~ ;
> 
> r_ ~ ~ J ~•iI) rJ,
> But one also wonders why the poet introducJd ~~hirih among the three immor-
> tal spirits whom he meets in the Sphere of Jupiter, that is J:Iallaj, Ghalib, and
> Tahirih Qurratu'l-'Ayn. During his flight through the heavens, which is admin-
> istered by Maulana Rumf, the poet reaches the various spheres in which heaven-
> ly beings abide and discusses with them problems of life and death, of religion
> and politics. It is in the Falak-i mushtari that the poet sees three spirits, called
> by him pakbaz, "those who have given away everything" for their ideals, three
> people in whose breasts a fire is raging that can bum the whole world.
> 
> ~1)✓~~~;:j~
> J /..   /
> 
> ,,, .
> This description certainly applies to J:Iallaj, the martyr-mystic of Baghdad,
> and to Tahirih, but it is difficult to find the reason for also introducing Ghalib,
> the poet of Delhi whose Urdu Divan had become such a treasure for every lover
> of the Urdu language. However, Ghalib appears in this context in connection
> not with his superb poetry but rather with another important theological prob-
> lem, a problem concerning the possible continuation of prophetship after
> 
> * Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) was one of the more influential Muslim thinkers of the first half
> of the twentieth century. He was a scholar taking a degree at Cambridge in 1923, a poet, and a
> philosopher. He wrote in English, Persian, and Urdu.
> 112                       THE BAHA'I FAITH AND ISLAM
> 
> Mul]ammad. Mul]ammad had been called, in the Qur'an, the "Seal of the
> Prophets" (khritam al-nahiyin). About the year 1829, Indian Muslim theologians
> discussed the question of whether or not God can create another Mul]ammad if
> God should create another world. Ghalib's verse written at that occasion states
> that wherever a new world arises, there would be also ral;matan Ii' 1- '6Iamin, a
> prophet sent as "mercy for the Universe" (Qur'an 21:107). This verse consti-
> tutes the focal point of Ghalib's appearance in Iqbal's description of the Sphere
> of Jupiter-that is, he is called as a timid witness of the possibility of a continu-
> ation of revelation; as someone who knows that behind the surface of a poetic
> statement of this kind there may be hidden the borderline of "infidelity," and
> this can be interpreted as pertaining to the appearance of a religious movement
> that is based on the concept of such a "continuation of revelation."
> Iqbal describes the three spirits as wearing tulip-colored garments-for in
> Persian and Turkish poetic imagery the tulip has been regarded as the flower of
> suffering and martyrdom. Thus, both I:Iallaj and Tahirih show the secret of their
> martyrdom in their red garments, which remind the poet of the blood they shed
> as witnesses to the truth or to their unshakable faith; therefore, he sees their
> faces likewise radiating an inner fire, the fire of fearless love. The three noble
> spirits, as he describes them, are in a state of glow and fever from the day of the
> primordial covenant where they imbibed the wine of divine love, and they
> appear to him still intoxicated by their own songs of passion.
> In such words, Iqbal expresses his amazement at their sight. But his mystical
> guide, Maulana Rumi, consoles him and at the same time admonishes him not
> to lose himself completely by gazing at them but rather to be quickened by the
> fiery melodies of their song. And he tells his disciple:
> 
> Have you never seen fearless longing? Then look!
> Have you never seen the power of this wine? Then look!
> Ghalib and I:Iall<ij and the Persian lady
> Have cast excitement into the sanctuary's soul!
> These songs grant firmness to the spirit,
> For their fire comes from the innermost heart of creation.
> 
> That is how Iqbal introduces the three martyrs (or rather two, for Ghalib lived
> happily until he died in Delhi in 1869). Upon this, each of the three sings a ghazal
> that in the case of I:Iallaj is invented by Iqbal, while both Ghalib and Tahirih are
> quoted with original poems-and there is no doubt that Tahirih's famous lines:
> .'     .    I'
> J~JI4/{-; 4/{ Y(V1~)
> 
> ~r~J~(('rJ
> are among the high points of the i6vfdnama.
> lqhd/ and the Bahf-BahG' f Faith                        113
> 
> How did Iqbal become acquainted with Tahirih Qurratu'I-'Ayn, and what is the
> reason for his admiration for the Babi martyr? We have to go back twenty-five
> years to 1907 in Munich when he wrote his dissertation, The Development of
> Metaphysics in Persia. This study was the first of its kind in that it attempted to
> trace the development of Persian thought from the days of Zoroaster through
> Mani and Mazdak into Islamic times and to set forth a picture of the Greek influ-
> ences on Islamic philosophy and the reaction of Persian thinkers to these influ-
> ences, as well as discussing the typically Persian solutions of the problem of the
> relation between God and the world. His material was primarily gathered from
> manuscripts in Great Britain and Berlin, and his then prevailing tendency to a
> more pantheistic worldview can be understood from various formulations, includ-
> ing his praise of Ibn' Arabi. Still deeply under the influence of his British teacher,
> the neo-Hegelian McTaggart, Iqbal explained many phenomena of Islamic
> thought in Hegelian categories. For this reason, he refuted some of the ideas
> expressed in this dissertation in later years when he had turned away from Hegel
> and had become infatuated with the vitalists and when Ibn 'Arabi was no longer
> one of his Oriental guides but rather Rumi, whose original dynamism Iqbal had
> discovered after counting him among the pantheists in his thesis. I:Iallaj, then, in
> 1932 the true hero of the Sphere of Jupiter, appears in the dissertation as represen-
> tative of a "widely pantheistic" Sufism, and his ana' l-~aqq "I am the Creative
> Truth" is seen, in consonance with the judgment of several European scholars, as
> an Islamic counterpart of Vedanta speculation (new edition, p. 89).
> But there are also germs of ideas in the dissertation, which were later to grow
> into new, typically Iqbalian thought structures. The emphasis Iqbal laid on JfIi's
> description of the insan-i kami/ (perfect human), was to mature into his later
> ideal of the mard-i mo 'min, the true believer whose Self, khudf, has been devel-
> oped so highly that the believer can speak to God without inhibition, similar to
> the Prophet. The dissertation also contains a very interesting, largely positive
> statement about the Isma'f1is, and Iqbal emphasizes that with them, Ahriman is
> "not a malignant creator but breaks up Unity into diversity,"-an idea he was to
> develop in later years into his very idiosyncratic satanology. It is astonishing,
> however, that Suhrawardi Maqtul, the martyr of Aleppo, who was introduced by
> Iqbal for the first time to Western readers, does not appear in his later work, not
> even among the martyrs in the Sphere of Jupiter, as much as some of his ideas
> are dimly reflected in some of Iqbal's concepts (God as light, et alia).
> After the general survey from Zoroaster to Mulla ~adra comes the surprising
> last paragraphs of the dissertation, which shall be examined here. Iqbal says:
> 
> All the various lines of Persian thought once more find a synthesis in that
> great religious movement of modern Persia-Babism Baha'ism, which
> began as a Shf' ah sect, with Mirza' Ali MuJ:iammad Bab of Shiraz and
> became less and less Islamic in character with the progress of orthodox
> 114                        THE BAHA ' i FAITH A N D ISLAM
> 
> persecutions, The origin of the philosophy of this wonderful sect must be
> sought in the Shf' ah sect of the Shaykhfs, the founder of which, Shaykh
> A~mad, was an enthusiastic student of Mulla ~dra's philosophy on which he
> had written several commentaries, (187)
> 
> After a short historical survey of the beginnings of the Babf movement, Iqbal
> tries to interpret the philosophy underlying this, in his words, "wonderful" sect.
> He writes:
> 
> The young Persian seer (that is, the Bab), looks upon reality as an essence
> which brooks no distinction of substance and attribute, The first bounty or
> self-expansion of the Ultimate Essence, he says, is Existence, Existence is
> "the known"; "the known" is the essence of "knowledge," "knowledge" is
> "will," and "will" is "love," Thus from Mulla $adra's identity of the Known
> and the Knower, he passes to his conception of the Real as Will and Love,
> This Primal Love, which he regards as the essence of the Real , is the cause
> of the manifestation of the Universe which is nothing more than the self-
> expansion of Love,
> 
> One will easily find here the connection between Babf thought and the tradi-
> tional $Uff idea that is expressed in a famous ~adfth qudsf in which God says,
> "kuntu kanzan malsJJJiyyan" (I was a hidden treasure [and wanted to be known,
> therefore I created the world,]) The use of the word love Cishq) for the innermost
> essence of the divine, the first Cause of creation, can be traced back to I:lallaj, for
> whom this dynamic principle of Love was indeed the very essence of Divine
> Life, as Louis Massignon has shown convincingly, However, Iqbal 's statement
> about Love in Babf philosophy leads to his own position in later years: in the
> introduction to his first Persian mathnawf, the Asrar-i khudf, published in 1915,
> he explains his frequent use of the word 'ishq-"the word is used in a very wide
> sense and means the desire to asssimilate, to absorb, Its highest form is the cre-
> ation of values and ideals and the endeavour to realize them ," Love becomes for
> Iqbal the true essence of life: it is both "the breath of Gabriel and the heart of
> Mu~ammad Mu~tafa," as he sings in his great Urdu ode on the Mosque of
> Cordova, written in 1933, Love in this sense is that power which with its whole
> existence "destroys what is against love," and must be united with power, a for-
> mulation by Paul Tillich to which Iqbal would certainly subscribe,
> Iqbal then continues his survey of Babf philosophy:
> 
> The word "creation," with him (i,e" the Bab) does not mean creation out of
> nothing; since, as the Shaykhfs maintain, the word "creator" is not peculiarly
> applicable to God alone, The Quranic verse, that "God is the best of creators"
> (Qur 'an 23: 14) implies that there are other self-manifesting beings like God,
> Iqh6! and the Bdhf-BahG' f Faith                       115
> 
> This last sentence looks quite shocking at first sight, but its use is not con-
> fined to Iqbal's introduction to the Babf doctrine. Rather, a few years after com-
> pleting his dissertation and having radically changed his philosophical stance,
> the poet-philosopher writes in the introduction of the Asrdr-i khudf (xviii) that
> the quranic phrase, Alldhu ahsanu ' l-khGliqfn (God is the best of creators) "indi-
> cates the possibility of other creators than God." That means, he uses here the
> position of the Shaykhf-Babf thinkers to point to his favorite idea in those years,
> that is, that humans too can be creators in their own right-an idea most clearly
> defined in the famous poem in the Paydm-i mashriq (1923) when humanity
> angrily calls to God, claiming that God had created the clay, the desert, and the
> dark of night, while human beings created from God's raw material the goblet,
> the gardens, and, to overcome the darkness, the lamp.
> In his historical appreciation of Babf philosophy, Iqbal then continues:
> 
> After the execution of 'Alf Mu~ammad Bab, Baha'u'lIah, one of his prin-
> cipal disciples who were collectively called "the First Unity" took up the
> mission, and proclaimed himself the originator of the new dispensation, the
> absent Imam whose manifestation the Bab had foretold. He freed the doc-
> trine of his master from its literalistic mysticism, and presented it in a more
> perfected and systematized form. The Absolute Reality, according to him, is
> not a person; it is an eternal living Essence, to which we apply the epithets
> Truth and Love only because they are the highest conceptions known to us.
> The Living Essence manifests itself through the Universe with the object of
> creating in itself atoms or centres of consciousness which, as Dr. McTaggart
> would say, constitute a further determination of the Hegelian Absolute.
> 
> Iqbal's allusion to his teacher McTaggart is meaningful in our context, for in
> one of his articles, Iqbal was later to compare McTaggart to I:Iallaj, the brave
> defender of the Truth who experienced an extension of normal human con-
> sciousness. One may also think of Iqbal's idea concerning the relation between
> God and the creatures, which, though worded differently, seems to contain a
> similar image: the world is conceived as an Ego, and everything created is noth-
> ing but an Ego, all comprised in the comprehensive Divine Ego (Enver,
> "Metaphysics of Iqbal" 72). The similarity perhaps becomes clearer when we
> continue reading Iqbal 's account of Babf thought:
> 
> In each of these undifferentiated, simple centres of consciousness, there is
> hidden a ray of the Absolute Light itself, and the perfection of the spirit con-
> sists in gradually actualizing by contact with the individualizing princi-
> ple-matter, its emotional and intellectual possibilities and thus discovering
> its own deep being-the ray of eternal Love which is concealed by its union
> with consciousness. The essence of man, therefore, is not reason or
> 116                      THE BAHA'i FAITH AND ISLAM
> 
> consciousness; it is this ray of Love-the source of all impulse to noble and
> unselfish action, which constitutes the real man,
> 
> In this paragraph, we read almost a description of Iqbal's own later position,
> namely the very great emphasis on Love as the moving principle of life, It
> reminds us of his idea that khudf, the true Self, can develop only thanks to the
> power of Love-that Love which teaches the Self to grow until it reaches its
> final goal of proximity to the Greatest Self To wit, he sang in his second
> Persian Divan, the Zahur-i 'ajam (1927):
> 
> Only Love can be called a "real Muslim," because
> it sees the One and advances toward the One,
> while reason has still bound the "infidels'" girdle? (Part 2, no, 13)
> 
> Iqbal sees, in some allusion to Mulla Sadra, which is not very clear to me, an
> "influence of the corporeality of Imagination":
> 
> Reason ... according to Mulla Sadra, is not a necessary condition of immor-
> tality... .
> 
> But, according to the Baha'I teachings as Iqbal interprets them:
> 
> ... in all forms of life there is an immortal spiritual part, the ray of Eternal
> Love, which has no necessary connection with self-consiousness or reason,
> and survives after the death of the body.
> 
> Here again, we can see some parallels to Iqbal's teaching as he had expounded
> it, especially in his "Six Lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in
> Islam" (1930), namely: the Self that is powerful enough to survive the shock of
> corporeal death (and that happens, as we can easily gather from his poetic utter-
> ances about the same topic, when the Self has been strengthened by Love) will
> continue to live and to develop into higher and higher forms of consciousness.
> Iqbal, in this respect, seems to agree fully with Baha'u'llah whose way of salva-
> tion, as contrasted to that taught by Buddha, is described by Iqbal as follows:
> 
> Salvation ... to Baha'u'llah lies in the discovery of the essence of love
> which is hidden in the atoms of consciousness themselves.
> 
> And as much as the Buddha and Baha'u'llah differ in their attitude toward sal-
> vation, yet, as Iqbal continues:
> 
> ... both ... agree that after death thoughts and characters of man remain,
> subject to other forces of a similar character, in the spiritual worlds waiting
> Iqbal and the Bah/-BaM' r Faith                        117
> 
> for another opportunity to find a suitable physical accompaniment in order to
> continue the process of discovery (Baha'u'llah) or destruction (Buddha). To
> Baha'u'llah, the conception of Love is higher than the conception of Will. ...
> 
> However, after some digre ss ion into Schopenhauer 's thought, Iqbal
> states-perhaps with some regret-that Baha' u' llah, contrary to Schopenhauer
> who conceives Reality as Will,
> 
> does not explain the principle according to which the self-manifestation of
> the eternal Love is realized in the Universe.
> 
> That is how Iqbal's analysis in the last chapter of his dissertation ends-an
> analysis which is based, as he mentions in a footnote, on Myron Phelps's book
> on 'Abbas Effendi, particularly the chapter "Philosophy and Psychology." But
> whatever his sources may have been, it is impossible not to be struck by some
> basic similarities between his later philosophy and the central ideas which he
> postulates as the essence of Baha'ism, especially the concept of Love as the
> central motif of life.
> But the thesis shows no awareness of the role of Tahirih Qurratu'l- 'Ayn's mar-
> tyrdom. How did he become interested in her fate? And where did he find her
> poem, which he included in his iav£dnama? There were, of course, a number of
> books dealing with Babism and with martyrs of the faith, and Iqbal was probably
> acquainted with E.G. Browne's studies of this topic. But the poetry of Qurratu'l-
> 'Ayn was difficult to find. However, there is a clue. Martha Root, in her book
> Tahirih the Pure, Iran's Greatest Woman , tells that in 1930 an ardent Baha'f in
> Karachi, Mr. Isfandiar Bakhtiari, copied the most famous poems of Tahirih and
> had them printed in an edition of one thousand copies, which were distributed to
> distinguished people in India. This was soon followed by a second edition. There
> is no doubt that Iqbal received one of these copies (although I have not checked in
> his library), and touched by the mellifluous poetry, he introduced Tahirih's most
> beautiful song through his own work to a wider readership. Interestingly, accord-
> ing to Martha Root, one year after the publication of the iav£dnama, that is in
> 1933, Hidayat Hosain published an article "A Female Martyr of the Babf Faith" in
> the proceedings of the Da'ira-yi ma'ari/i Istamiyya, Lahore, a publication dedi-
> cated to the Ni~am of Hyderabad. We can, therefore, conclude that the public
> interested in Persian poetry in Lahore and other cultural centers of India was prob-
> ably well enough acquainted with the work of Tahirih to recognize her poem in
> Iqbal's epic, and not to mistake it as Iqbal's own verse.
> But Tahirih's beautiful ghazaf is not the only occasion when she is heard
> speaking in the Jav£dnama. The three noble spirits discuss important theological
> problems. J:lallaj tells Iqbal (who has assumed during his heavenly journey the
> name of Zindarud) that his sin was that he witnessed, and gave witness, not only
> 118                       THE BAHA'i FAITH AND ISLAM
> 
> of God's love but also of his power; and even more, that he had tried to bring
> "resurrection to spiritually dead" people, At the end of his monologue, he warns
> Iqbal-whom he sees almost as his spiritual disciple-to be aware that one has
> to pay for such daring undertaking with one's life. l:Iallaj's so-called sin was the
> attempt to lead people to a spiritual resurrection. In the verse immediately fol-
> lowing l:Iallaj's last word, Tahirih takes up the thread and continues his thought:
> 
> Out of the sin of the obsessed servant
> A new universe emerges,
> Unlimited longing tears the veils,
> and takes away old age from the vision.
> 
> One immediately understands here the allusion to Maulana Rumf's "Song of
> the Reed," in which the flute's tunes "tear our veils," which separate humankind
> from God and which bar humanity's understanding of the divine source of life.
> 
> ).,1)'
> ~
> / 0
> (,ft 4 )~~  t ~J/1
> I
> Tahirih continues in Iqbal's rendering:
> 
> Finally he takes his lot from gallows and rope
> and does not return alive from the street of the Friend.
> 
> This clearly points to the l:Iallaj-motif, for "gallows and rope" is the standard
> formula when Persianate poets allude to the secret of l:Iallaj's death at the gal-
> lows suffered at the hands of the unfeeling mull as because he dared to divulge
> the secret of loving union. Likewise, the formula that the true lover does not
> return alive from the street of his beloved is commonplace in the mystical tradi-
> tion of Iran and the Subcontinent, and occurs also in Ghalib, who made clever
> use of the inherited images. In the case of Tahirih, the two lines perfectly
> express the secret of her suffering and death for the sake of Truth. Tahirih then
> continues, as Iqbal has it:
> 
> See his manifestation in city and desert
> Lest you think that he has passed away from the world.
> He is hidden in the innermost core of his age-
> How could he find room in this seclusion?
> 
> The true lover, who, through his death, gives witness not only of his divinely
> inspired passion but also of the power of longing love itself, is found every-
> where: in the city, the dwelling place of sober intellectuals; and in the desert,
> where demented lovers like Majnun have their home. Such longing, and the
> Iqbal and the Babf-Baha' f Faith                       119
> 
> people who embody it, can never disappear from this world; in fact, they are
> there, in the midst of the present age.
> Iqbal has proved with these lines, which express Tahirih's ideals very well,
> that he still cherished the memory of the martyr-poet of Iran and understood her
> brave attitude. The whole symbolism of the passage put into her mouth express-
> es her ardent desire to die for the glory of eternal love.
> It should be kept in mind that Iqbal, often accused of not alloting women any
> room in his ideology of the mard-i ma'min and of restricting a woman's role
> exclusively to that of an obedient wife and mother, has shown here, that he was
> not that narrow-minded. The fact that he introduces Tahirih into the Jupiter
> Sphere (as he introduces Princess Sharafu'n-Nisa in Paradise) shows that for him
> everyone was admirable in whom he witnessed the glow of true love; that he,
> following the traditional Sufi outlook, admired the woman who was so filled
> with divine love that she ventured to go out on the difficult path toward her
> Beloved, that path, which leads inevitably to martyrdom: Tahirih is here, like the
> heroines of the Sindhf-Panjabf folktales, a true mard, a true (a lib al-maula, will-
> ing to leave everything in this world behind and sacrifice herself for the sake of
> union and love, of witnessing what she had experienced as being the truth.
> The scene in the Javfdnama seems to prove that Iqbal, as much as he changed
> his philosophical outlook during the years that followed his stay in Europe (after
> the completion of his dissertation), had maintained his admiration for at least one
> aspect of Babism-Baha'ism, this "wonderful"-as he calls it-religious develop-
> ment, which may have even influenced some of his central ideas, particularly the
> idea of the absolute predominance of divine Love in human development. And
> we know the problem of whether there can be any revelation after Mu~ammad,
> the Seal of the Prophets, had occupied his mind for quite a while. That is proved
> by the way he introduces Ghalib's relevant verse in the context of the Sphere of
> Jupiter, but it is also known from some pieces of his correspondence, and it is
> here, in connection with the belief in a continuing revelation, that Tahirih had to
> sacrifice herself, following, as it were, the example of l:Iallaj.
> It seems appropriate to close this paper with the very end of Iqbal's disserta-
> tion, which-written in 1907-gains a strange relevance in the light of the pre-
> sent situation in Iran:
> 
> Pure speculation and dreamy mysticism undergo a powerful check in Babism
> which, unmindful of persecution, synthesizes all the inherited philosophical
> and religious tendencies, and rouses the spirit to a consciousness of the stern
> reality of things. Though extremely cosmopolitan and hence quite unpatriotic
> in character, it has yet a great influence over the Persian mind. The unmystic
> character and the practical tone of Babism may have been a remote cause of
> the progress of recent political reform in Persia.
>
> — *Iqbal and the Babi-Baha'i Faith (Used by permission of the curator)*