Anyone who is familiar with Iqbal’s work will agree with me that if one did not know that these words were written by Kierkegaard then they would certainly say that these words were uttered by Iqbal. One again, I am impressed by the genius of the Danish Sage.
Perhaps it is not the case that the meaning of life is to be derived by reconciling all the ideas in one’s head but rather the meaning of life is to be derived from constant struggle with oneself. These are two visions of life, neither of these is ‘correct’ and neither of these is ‘wrong.’ Different people are meant to follow different paths. I have tried reconciliation for the longest time until I realized that is not meant to be. Some things and some people are not meant to be at rest. With these words, Jahandost will end his self-imposed exile.
Vishwamitra: What if nothing matters? What if nothing has meaning?
The Indian Sage: All is destined to oblivion.
Vishwamitra: They why bother?
The Indian Sage: Why not bother?
Vishwamitra: In the end it amounts to nothing.
The Indian Sage: You are forgetting here and now. You are looking at eternity in both directions but you are forgetting here and now.
Vishwamitra: Here and now – less than a drop of water in the immense vastness of time.
The Indian Sage: Less than a drop but have you thought that lessing the misery of single human being is worth more than eternity.
Vishwamitra: As people we have one another against an impersonal universe.
Today is Iqbal Day, the birth anniversary of the great Indian poet and philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal, who has been described as the greatest Muslim thinker for the last five hundred years. Here is an extract from Payam-i-Mashriq (Message from the East)
A stranger to your own identity,
You seek new paths to the stars in the sky.
Open your eyes to yourself like a seed
So that you come out of the earth a tree.
One of the readers asked for the meaning of Jahandost so I thought I should have it as a separate post so that it is more likely that everyone gets a chance to see it. The word Jahandost is from Farsi or Persian and is a concatenation of two words: Jahan means the universe and dost means friend. Hence Jahandost is the friend of the universe. An equivalent word in the Hindi language is Vishvamitra who is considered to be one of the greatest sages of ancient India and one of the authors of Rigveda. In Allama Muhammad Iqbal (also known as Iqbal Lahori) book Javed Nama Jahandost is one of the persons that he meet in his journey.
Here is an interesting fact related to Allama Iqbal, when the All India Iqbal Birth Centenary Committee was form in 1973 its Vice-Chairman was Inder Kumar Gujral who would later become the Prime Minister of India. This also shows that one must rise above our narrow communal worldviews to appreciate people like Iqbal and Tagore.
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