by Shadab Zeest Hashmi at 3 Quarks Daily: “Aik Shaam,” “An Evening (By the River Neckar)” is Iqbal’s ode to silence. A short lyric poem, it describes a rare personal moment in the vast corpus of a poet who is known by such hefty honorifics as “Allama” (the “learned one”), the “national” poet, “poet-philosopher,” or “Poet of the East.” This poem is an instance where we find a poet of great stature revealing his vulnerability, seeking pause, perhaps from the overwhelming disquiet of confronting the political tensions of his times as a scholar visiting Europe, a colonized subject of the Raj in a climate of rising awareness, perhaps negotiating intense homesickness in beautiful Heidelberg, or as many suggest, being lovelorn (as an already married man) for Emma Wegenast, the German tutor who was instrumental in guiding him through a remarkable turning point in his life by introducing him to Goethe’s poetry.
Literary correspondence between Iqbal and Emma Wegenast offers clues to their attachment. Though Iqbal’s biographers are better qualified to discuss their relationship and surmise what they will from it, Emma’s role in inspiring Iqbal to gain insights into Goethe’s works is significant to anyone interested in understanding Iqbal’s poetry. Before returning to a brief annotation on the poem, here are some thoughts on how the study of Goethe’s poetry, plays and philosophy left a deep impression on Iqbal, as reflected in his masterworks following his stay in Germany.
Iqbal’s poetry, valued for its exceptional originality in both the idiom he coined and the range of topics he stretched Urdu poetics into containing— is an important example of what is classified as “World Literature.” This, in no small measure, is due to the strong influence of Goethe (who was the first to come up with the term “Weltliteratur” or “World Literature”) but also Iqbal’s inclination to dissect, balance and appreciate the radically diverse, syncretic traditions of his own South Asian culture many years prior to encountering Goethe’s work. The book (besides Faust) that made a lasting impact on Iqbal’s psyche was Goethe’s West-ostlicher Divan or West-Eastern Divan. Iqbal was to compose “Payam e Mashriq,” a great work of his own, in response to Goethe and Rumi, that other sage Iqbal held in the highest regard.
Rumi, Goethe and Iqbal, each from a different time and place, have much in common. Each of them was identified as a visionary of sorts at an early age, each was rigorously conversant with divergent traditions, in search of harmony, each became a cultural icon. The most remarkable similarity is that each of these poets countered the tectonic shifts of their times (including violence and oppression) using intellectual discourse but also the arms and armor of an unusual nature: mysticism. Violent tensions— Mongol invaders for Rumi, Napoleonic wars for Goethe, and Western colonialism for Iqbal— seem to have shaped not only their minds but their spirits and their craft as poets.
rominent scholars of Iqbal and/or Goethe, such as Annemarie Schimmel, Katharina Mommsen, M. Ikram Chaghatai and Martin Bidney have delved into Goethe’s deep knowledge and love of Islam, tracking his spiritual journey from his poem “Mahomet Gesang” in praise of the Prophet Muhammad at age 23, to later an unfinished play based on the Prophet’s life, to West-ostlicher Divan, his final work, a book of Sufi poetry. According to Martin Bidney, “Given the provincialism narrowing the views of many prospective readers, Goethe probably did not improve sales of the collection by coyly acknowledging, at age 68, that the book’s author did not wish to deny the imputation that he was himself a Muslim.”
Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan and Faust illuminated several key themes which Iqbal used in integrating and refining his thinking about the “East” and the “West,” such as tradition, devotional sentiment, modernity, faith, universal values, art, and the spirit of innovation.
