A New World Begins with New Thought
Iqbal’s تخلیق — Takhlīq (Creation), from Zarb-e Kalīm
بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ
Bismi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm.
In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.
Iqbal begins with the making of a world and ends with the possibility of companions. Between these two moments, he asks what a human being must become in order to bring something new into life. Fresh thought awakens possibility; resolve gives it strength; each breath becomes an opportunity to form a life that can endure. By the final couplet, the poet senses that others may arise to share this work.
Takhlīq, “Creation,” is an Urdu poem in the “Literature and Fine Arts” section of Zarb-e Kalīm. Its five couplets appear below in their original order, with transliteration, a fresh English rendering, and commentary. [1] I read its movement as spiritual renewal becoming creative responsibility: a person’s inward life acquires the depth and direction through which a new human world can emerge.
The beginning of a new world
جہانِ تازہ کی افکارِ تازہ سے ہے نمود
کہ سنگ و خشت سے ہوتے نہیں جہاں پیدا
Afkār is the plural of fikr: thoughts or ideas. Numūd suggests appearing or becoming manifest. Iqbal places tāzah, “fresh,” beside both thought and world. Their renewal belongs together. The relationships, purposes, and ways of living that make a human world take shape through the thought that animates them.
The following couplets give this thought an inward source and a practical demand. An idea must acquire enough conviction to govern conduct. In the first lecture of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal connects human initiative and the development of inward capacities with participation in the possibilities of the universe. He invokes Qur’an 13:11 to join changed human conditions to inward change. [2]
My mind goes to education. A school needs rooms, books, and places to work. It also needs a living understanding of the child, worthy purposes, and adults whose decisions give those purposes form. The opening couplet invites a question that reaches into daily practice: what kind of human world are our classrooms bringing into being?
A stream becomes a sea
خودی میں ڈوبنے والوں کے عزم و ہمت نے
اس آبجو سے کیے بحرِ بے کراں پیدا
Khudī names the developing personal self: the centre of consciousness, choice, love, responsibility, and action. Its growth involves the discipline through which a person becomes more fully capable of answering to God. In Asrār-e Khudī, Iqbal describes the self’s education through obedience, mastery of oneself, and divine vicegerency. Nearness to God gives individuality greater strength and fullness. [3]
“Plunging into selfhood” is therefore an image of discovering the depths and responsibilities of one’s own being. The scale changes: an ābjū, a stream, becomes a baḥr-e be-karāñ, a shoreless sea. A closely related poem in Bāl-e Jibrīl calls khudī itself a shoreless sea and reproaches those who mistake it for a stream. [4] That parallel helps us hear how much possibility an apparently small personal life may hold.
ʿAzm means firm resolve: a decision held steadily enough to shape action. Himmat means courage and aspiring energy. It also carries a spiritual resonance through Arabic himma, the aspiration that directs a seeker’s inward powers towards a high aim. Ibn ʿArabī’s letter to Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī associates elevated himma with seeking realized knowledge of God. [5] This illuminates a shared vocabulary; it does not make the couplet a statement of Ibn ʿArabī’s whole teaching. Iqbal’s pairing gives aspiration the steadiness of resolve.
The self’s growth also has an ethical measure. Iqbal writes: “The principle of the ego-sustaining deed is respect for the ego in myself as well as in others.” [6] In education, an adult’s growing judgment should help a child acquire judgment of their own. The strength of one person can become a condition for another person’s growth.
An everlasting life in every breath
وہی زمانے کی گردش پہ غالب آتا ہے
جو ہر نفَس سے کرے عمرِ جاوداں پیدا
Here نفَس is nafas, “breath,” distinct from nafs, “self” or “soul.” Gardish evokes turning and changing circumstances. Iqbal brings the movement of an age into relation with the intimate passage of a single breath. A person’s inward purpose shapes how they meet what time brings.
ʿUmr-e jāvidāñ means everlasting life. The phrase reaches into Iqbal’s distinctive account of personal immortality. In the fourth lecture of The Reconstruction, he presents the self’s capacity to endure as something it must develop through its deeds. [6] Each passing moment therefore has a bearing on what the person is becoming and on the self’s future beyond death.
A Sufi reader may also hear a concern with presence: how do I inhabit this breath before God? The verse leaves that concern within its image, without prescribing a particular practice. I think of keeping a costly promise, restraining a humiliating word, or attending carefully to someone who needs us. Such moments form the one who acts and touch the life of the one who receives the act. The briefest encounter can carry a lasting responsibility.
The cost of losing selfhood
خودی کی موت سے مشرق کی سر زمینوں میں
ہوا نہ کوئی خدائی کا رازداں پیدا
The word khudī returns under the sign of death. Read beside the stream becoming a sea, this death suggests a loss of inward vitality, judgment, courage, and creative responsibility. Iqbal addresses the lands of the East, so his grief concerns the life of societies as well as the condition of persons.
Rāzdāñ means one who knows a secret and, by extension, a confidant: someone admitted into intimacy. Khudāʾī can mean divinity or divine sovereignty; it can also mean God’s world, creation, and the manifestations of divine power. [7] The English here foregrounds creation, while the Urdu retains the resonance of intimacy with the Divine. I read the phrase as pointing towards someone awake to the mysteries of God’s creative order.
Such understanding asks something of the person who receives it. In the final lecture of The Reconstruction, Iqbal describes contact with ultimate reality as a transformation that finds historical expression through creative action. [2] Inward awakening acquires a task in the world.
The “death of selfhood” also needs to be distinguished from the varied Sufi meanings of fanāʾ, often translated as annihilation. Al-Hujwīrī gives several accounts; in one, ignorance gives way to knowledge, heedlessness to remembrance, and blameworthy qualities to worthy ones. [8] This helps us distinguish the spiritual overcoming of selfishness from the loss of responsibility and inward life lamented here.
The scent of companionship
ہوائے دشت سے بوئے رفاقت آتی ہے
عجب نہیں ہے کہ ہوں میرے ہم عناں پیدا
After the severity of the fourth couplet, something reaches the poet from the open country. Dasht means wilderness or desert; here I hear an image of apparent barrenness and solitude. Bū, scent, announces a presence before that presence becomes visible. Iqbal senses the possibility of companions before he can point to their arrival.
Rafāqat means companionship, fellowship, friendship, or accompanying someone. It is related to rafīq, a companion. [7] Its spiritual significance grows from the quality and purpose of that companionship. Qur’an 4:69 places those who obey God and the Messenger in the company of prophets, truthful people, martyrs, and the righteous, and praises them as companions. [9] Companionship belongs here to the fulfilment of a God-directed life.
The Sufi background becomes clearer through ṣuḥbah, keeping company, familiar in Persian and Urdu as ṣuḥbat or suhbat. Al-Hujwīrī’s Kashf al-Maḥjūb treats companionship as a discipline undertaken for God’s sake. Its obligations include sincere counsel, concern for the companion’s welfare, and freedom from envy and dishonesty. [8] A companion’s example can strengthen our resolve; honest counsel can expose our self-deception; our responsibilities to one another train patience and fidelity.
There is also an ethical resonance in the shared Arabic root of rafīq and rifq, gentleness. The Prophetic teaching in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2593 commends gentleness and associates it with divine kindness. [10] Rafāqat still means companionship, but this related vocabulary invites attention to the care with which companions accompany one another.
I therefore hear spiritual fellowship in this line, while leaving the word’s breadth intact. The poem does not specify a formal spiritual station or a teacher–disciple relationship. Ham-ʿināñ gives the fellowship its more precise image. ʿInān means a rein; the compound evokes fellow riders and can mean a companion, peer, or equal. [7] Iqbal hopes for people able to share his direction and keep pace with his purpose. Their developed selfhood can sustain a common work.
A reader familiar with the story of Joseph may also hear a resonance with Jacob recognizing Joseph’s scent before their reunion, in Qur’an 12:94. [9] This remains a possible echo; the poem does not establish an explicit allusion. In either reading, the scent carries hope into a place that seemed empty.
Paidā, “born,” “arisen,” or “brought into being,” closes the second line of every couplet. Worlds arise, seas arise, everlasting life arises; a knower of mysteries fails to arise; then companions may arise. The poem’s hope for a new world becomes a hope for the people capable of creating it together.
Use in Akhlāq or Character
This poem is useful when we are preparing to build something: a school, a community, a piece of work, or a more purposeful life. It asks us to attend to the thought behind the undertaking and to the person we are becoming as we carry it. A worthy purpose needs inward discipline, courage, and a willingness to answer for our actions.
For a teacher, the questions become personal. What understanding of the child gives life to my choices? How am I strengthening my own judgment and helping children develop theirs? How do my words and decisions honour the dignity of those entrusted to me? Each ordinary encounter gives these questions a practical form.
The final couplet adds another responsibility: the care of companionship. Who helps me remain truthful about my work? Whose growth am I willing to support through patient attention and honest counsel? In the light of rafāqat, shared purpose carries obligations of kindness, fidelity, and responsibility before God.
Iqbal’s desert wind invites us to notice fellowship while it is still taking shape. Someone asks a serious question. Another person accepts a difficult responsibility. A colleague brings care and courage to work we share. These may be signs of the companions with whom a fresh thought can become a living world.
Sources and textual notes
[1] Muḥammad Iqbāl, Takhlīq, Zarb-e Kalīm, “Literature and Fine Arts.” The Urdu follows the text on Rekhta, with selective pronunciation marks. The English rendering is fresh for this post; the fourth couplet foregrounds the sense of divine creation within khudāʾī. Ñ marks a nasal vowel in the transliteration. The final line retains hai, present in the Urdu source.
[2] Muḥammad Iqbāl, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, lecture I, “Knowledge and Religious Experience,” and lecture VII, “Is Religion Possible?” These discussions connect inward development and religious experience with creative action.
[3] Muḥammad Iqbāl, The Secrets of the Self (Asrār-i Khudī), translated by Reynold A. Nicholson (1920), section IX and Iqbal’s explanation reproduced in the introduction. These supply the account of the self’s education and its development through nearness to God.
[4] Muḥammad Iqbāl, Bāl-e Jibrīl, the poem beginning “Khudī vuh baḥr hai jis kā koʾī kinārah nahīñ,” reproduced by Iqbal Academy Pakistan. Its sea-and-stream imagery supplies a close parallel.
[5] Ibn ʿArabī, “A Letter to Imam al-Razi,” translated by Mohammed Rustom, published by the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. The letter’s use of himma illuminates the Sufi background of spiritual aspiration; it is offered as a comparison, not evidence of a direct borrowing in this couplet.
[6] Muḥammad Iqbāl, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, lecture IV, “The Human Ego—His Freedom and Immortality.” This is the source of the quotation on respect for oneself and others and of the discussion of personal immortality.
[7] Lexical references: Rekhta Dictionary, khudāʾī; Rekhta’s Urdu dictionary entry for rafāqat, including Platts; and Rekhta Dictionary entries for ʿinān and ham-ʿināñ.
[8] ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-Maḥjūb, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson (1911): “Discourse on Subsistence (baqā) and Annihilation (fanā),” especially pp. 242–243; and chapter XXIII, “Concerning Companionship, together with its Rules and Principles,” pp. 334–366. These provide classical Sufi context rather than proof of Iqbal’s specific sources.
[9] Qur’an 4:69, on the company of prophets, truthful people, martyrs, and the righteous; and 12:94, on Jacob recognizing Joseph’s scent. These are interpretive resonances; neither verse is explicitly quoted in the poem.
[10] Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2593, “The Virtue of Gentleness,” on rifq. Gentleness and companionship are related within the Arabic root family but remain distinct meanings.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for choosing to comment.