Love as the Warp and Weft of Creation: The Theological Aesthetics of Muhammad Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore

3.1 Iqbal: A Universe in Perpetual Becoming

Let us turn now, then, to how Iqbal and Tagore elaborate the divine “call” that is the transcendental template for all human “responses.” Iqbal develops his conception of creatio continua precisely in terms of the transhistorical “call” that, the Qur’ān affirms, God uttered to all things to bring them into being: “[He is] the Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a thing, He only says to it, “Be!” and it is” (Q2:117).^[7] In an Urdu poem, Iqbal writes that the universe is vibrantly unfinished (na tamām), for the creative fiat “Be!” (kun) still courses through its fibers.^[8] Iqbal vividly limns this cosmic dynamism in another (and one of his best-known) Urdu poems, Masjid-i Qurtaba (Mosque of Cordoba),^[9] which is strikingly redolent of the mystical cosmogony of the Andalusian Sufi and philosopher Ibn ‘Arabī (d.1240). Iqbal affirms here that the rhythm of day and night is the silken thread (tār-i ḥarīr) with which the divine essence (ẕāt) weaves the cloak of its attributes (qabā-yi sifāt), evoking Ibn ‘Arabī’s conception of the universe as the interplay of the divine names which are never, in truth, separated from their ontological ground (the dhāt or the non-delimited divine essence).^[10]

Indeed, the succession of day and night is described in the Qur’ān as one of the signs (āyāt) of God (Q2:164; Q10:6), and Iqbal presents it here as the lamentation (fughāṇ) of eternity’s own musical instrument (sāz-i azal). Through this creative cry, God “sounds” His hidden possibilities or mumkināt, i.e. those possible existents which have no independent reality but are, in Ibn ‘Arabī’s idiom, exhaled into being by the breath of divine mercy (nafas al-raḥmān).^[11] Elsewhere, alluding to the Hadith of the Hidden Treasure,^[12] Iqbal refers to the breast (sīna) of God as “writhing” in the pain of solitude (dard-i yakī) and the creation of the world as the satisfaction of this primordial yearning.^[13] God loved to be known, and the cosmos as the “cloak” of God’s attributes is the fruit of that love.

Iqbal develops this motif of the infinite-finite entanglement in his Reconstruction, wherein he creatively negotiates certain Qur’ānic imageries, Western intellectual traditions, and discoveries of contemporary science. Drawing on Q55:29, Iqbal affirms that the divine reality continually reveals itself in ever-new splendours, such that “every moment in the life of Reality is original, giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable.”^[14] Summarizing the Ashʿarite^[15] notion of occasionalism, according to which the world is composed of indivisible parts or atoms (jawāhir) which are ceaselessly brought into being, Iqbal cites Q35:1, which affirms that God adds to creation what God wills.^[16] He describes the Ashʿarite theory as a more faithful cosmological corollary of the Qur’ānic spirit than the Aristotelian notion of a static universe,^[17] for, in his words, “the Universe, according to the Qur’an, is liable to increase. It is a growing Universe and not an already completed product which left the hand of its Maker ages ago […].”^[18]

To further buttress what Iqbal calls this “essentially Islamic idea” of a dynamic universe,^[19] Iqbal deploys the conception of temporality developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941).^[20] Like Bergson, Iqbal differentiates between the temporal modalities of “serial time” and “pure duration” (the Bergsonian la durée).^[21] Serial time is the time that we habitually represent through spatial categories (using, for instance, the construct of a time-line) and divide into the isolated segments of past, present, and future. However, for both Bergson and Iqbal, there is true time which exists beyond or “behind” our quotidian, spatialized representation of time – here, in pure duration, events cannot be frozen or divided into spatial–conceptual solidity. Rather, events wholly interpenetrate each other and are thus marked by a ceaseless, on-going variation – in pure duration, or true time, we experience change not as the linear unfolding of neatly discrete states, but as the indivisible multiplicity of “continuous creation.”^[22] Because God exists “in” pure duration, each moment of the divine self-disclosure is utterly unique, and thus, in Iqbal’s rendering of Q2:255, God is “‘untouched by weariness’ and unseizable by ‘slumber or sleep’.”^[23] Indeed, Iqbal affirms that whilst the creative drive of the human is directed towards the “not-yet” (in creating, we seek after things as yet unrealized, and may either succeed or fail in our endeavours),^[24] God’s continuous creative activity is perfectly actualized. Without the attenuation of His “wholeness,” God unfailingly expresses the “infinite creative possibilities of His being.”^[25]

The world thus continually pulsates with new divine disclosures, and Iqbal further underscores this infinite-finite entanglement by affirming that although the world is not coterminous with God, it is neither straightforwardly separable from God. The divine-world relation cannot be understood in terms of the relation of two spatially discrete entities, for God is not a “thing” that can stand over and against the world in the “empty receptacle of an infinite space.”^[26] On Iqbal’s account, then, God is both transcendent to and immanent within creation, such that although the world remains “distinct” from God, it is never “isolated” from Him.^[27] Indeed, what the world is is directly related to who God is – Iqbal thus describes God as the “Great I Am,” and insofar as the world is the “self-revelation of the Great I Am,” all created entities partake of selfhood according to their distinctive mode of being.^[28] Each created thing in the universe is, in other words, a distinct individual or khudī (self).^[29] In this hierarchy of created beings, the human being most resoundingly articulates the “I am” of individual selfhood; thus, human beings most closely reflect the divine, in whose creative life they alone can consciously and freely participate.^[30] Humanity thus comes to represent for Iqbal the telos of life’s evolving narrative, or the meaning (ma’nī) of the divine sign (āyat) that is the universe.^[31]

Indeed, the human being most fully shares in the divine creativity by contributing to, perfecting, and re-imagining the world’s forms and possibilities. Iqbal thus addresses God, establishing a synergistic relation between the divine and the human modes of making:

you created night and I made the lamp [tu shab āfridī, chiragh āfrīdam], you created clay and I made the cup, you created deserts and mountains and forests, I created orchards, gardens and groves […]^[32]

As the associate (anbāz) of God,^[33] the human being bears the creative ability to go on from, and perfect, the divine craft – the lamp befits the darkness of the night, and the cup is fashioned from the raw matter of clay. There is thus, or should be, a cosmic correspondence between the divine and human creativity – we fulfil our human “I am” when our creative pursuits are rooted not in our subjectivist desires but are harmoniously transparent to, and reflective of, the divine will.^[34] Indeed, in Iqbal’s Persian masnavī or narrative epic, the Jāvīdnāma (Book of Eternity), which is framed as a journey of heavenly ascension (mi’rāj), the human being’s capacity for proper creative action is explicitly cast as a sharing or participation in the divine. The voice of the divine beauty (nidā-yi jamāl)^[35], which resounds in the final scene, clarifies for Zindarūd, who is the Jāvīdnāma’s pilgrim narrator, the meaning of existence and creativity (and suggests a conflation of the two, where to be is to create). We are told that to be is to take one’s share (naṣīb) of the beauty of the divine essence, and in later describing the failing of the one who cannot create, this voice affirms that such a person has not taken his share (naṣīb) of the divine beauty.^[36]

Crucially, Iqbal anchors this notion of the unique creative power of the human being to two key Qur’ānic motifs – the granting of the divine trust (‘amāna) to human beings alone, and the elaboration of the human being as the vicegerent (khalīfa) of God. These dual human possibilities are, for Iqbal, coterminous – the divinely bestowed trust is precisely the bestowal of a creative personality, which, when properly enacted, renders the human being khalīfa. The individual who realizes the trust of vicegerency (or, to reflect Iqbal’s poetic idiom, has appropriately taken their share of the divine beauty) becomes both in speech (guftār) and in action (kirdār) the very proof (burhān) of God.^[37] The vicegerent, we are told, infuses the created order with new purpose and vitality, and awakens the spiritually dead to new life.^[38] Just as God reveals Himself anew in every instant, the nature (fiṭrat) of the vicegerent is full of creative possibilities.^[39] In keeping with the classical Islamic formulations, the paradigm of this self-realized and God-centred individual is, for Iqbal, the Prophet Muhammad himself, in whom human perfections reached their consummate expression.

3.2 Tagore: The Streaming Song of the Infinite

Having elaborated Iqbal’s conception of a dynamic cosmos, and the integral role of the human being in sustaining and perfecting that dynamism, let us turn now to Tagore’s metaphysical vision. Notably, Iqbal’s depiction of time as the “silken thread” with which God weaves His robe of manifestation finds a striking parallel in Tagore’s assertion that the world is the “medium of finitude which the infinite Being sets before him for…his self-expression.”^[40] This created “medium” corresponds to the world of spatiotemporal boundedness – the world that, in Iqbalian terms, is the raiment of divine attributes. Just as, for Iqbal, the thread of finitude perpetually unravels new divine glories, for Tagore too, God goes on displaying His wondrous qualities (āścarya guṇ) in an unending sequence of transformations (aśeṣ paribartan-paramparāẏ).^[41] In developing this cosmic picture of creatio continua, Tagore intertwines a range of premodern Hindu scriptural and theological idioms (drawn principally from the Bhagavad-gītā and the Upaniṣads). The leitmotif of Tagore’s cosmology is that the world is joyously sung into being, where this creative expression is not a one-time outburst of the divine but continually resounds through the cosmos.

For Tagore, this world-generating sonic impulse is the sacred syllable Oṃ, which is understood within some Hindu cosmologies as the primordial divine sound.^[42] The meaning of Oṃ, Tagore states, is God’s cosmic “Yes” to the world, by which God utters and sustains all things in being.^[43] This Oṃ, or this divine call, possesses a capaciousness that reflects its transcendent origin: the Oṃ enfolds all things because God too encompasses all seemingly opposed qualities within His being. Re-configuring some paradoxical verses from the Īśa Upaniṣad, Tagore writes that God moves and yet is still, He is distant and yet near, He is within yet also without – thus, “He does not leave out anyone – that is why He is verily Om.”^[44] In qualifying the divine with the Upanishadic formula of śāntaṃ śivam advaitam (peace, bliss, and non-duality), Tagore notes that God’s peace (śānta) does not imply a blank stasis – instead, stillness and movement harmoniously co-inhere in Him. Similarly, God’s non-duality does not erase all distinctions, but rather integrates oneness and difference – all individual beings find their ultimate unity in Him.^[45]

This metaphysical idiom of sacred sound is most vividly embodied in Tagore’s descriptions of the world as the “song” or “music” of the divine. The world is woven on the warp and weft of divine melodies, each of which reveals the sacred harmony of the finite and the infinite. Unlike other modes of art in which the final artwork attains its own existence (for instance, when a painting is completed, it subsists independently of the painter), the streams of song that emanate from the singer can never be separated from their source.^[46] So, just as the singer’s song reveals something of her-self (because it flows organically from her-self), the cosmic song that is the finite world constitutes the intimate self-expression of the infinite. This world-song is perpetually renewed with each divine exhalation, re-sounding the divine glory in ever-fresh notes:

The universe is not a mere echo, reverberating from sky to sky, like a homeless wanderer – the echo of an old song sung once for all in the dim beginning of things and then left orphaned. Every moment it comes from the heart of the master, it is breathed in his breath.^[47]

Crucially, the theological backdrop of Tagore’s rendering of creation as God’s vibrant song is the Hindu idiom of līlā. A complex Sanskrit term enfolding meanings such as “play,” “sport,” “charm,” “beauty,” and others, līlā refers across a number of Hindu theologies to the idea that God is a free artist who creates and upholds the world through an abundant outpouring of the divine bliss (ānanda).^[48] In such contexts, God’s creative act is not, in other words, necessitated by any external constraint or compulsion, for this would imply a lack or privation in the divine reality. Tagore echoes this horizon of līlā, affirming that “God’s creation has not its source in any necessity; it comes from his fullness of joy; it is his love that creates, therefore in creation is his own revealment.”^[49]

Indeed, Tagore often marvels at the mystery that the divine, who is eternal bliss (ānanda), should seek to enter into a loving sport (līlā) with the finite, voluntarily giving Himself to the world for the non-necessitated joy of His self-expression. For both Iqbal and Tagore, it is ultimately with the appearance of human beings in the world, who are capable of entering into free and creative relations with the divine, that the telos of God’s creative act is realized. Just as Iqbal construes human creativity as a participation in God’s “life, power, and freedom,”^[50] so too for Tagore does the human being “share” in something of the “Eternal Person.”^[51] Whilst the animal is bound to the limits of its biological needs, human beings have undergone a “second birth,”^[52] whereby they attend not only to the physical but also to the spiritual, namely, to the “more-than” dimension of reality. One aspect of this heightened self-consciousness and freedom is the ability of human beings to question what ought to be the case – animals experience the conflict between what is and what is desired, whereas in humans, the conflict is between “what is desired and what should be desired.”^[53] As Tagore puts it, we can value honesty not because it is the “best policy” but because, in its desirability for its own sake, it subverts all policies.^[54]

This trans-utilitarian sensibility positions us more firmly in orientation to others and endows us with a uniquely human capacity for moral illumination. Echoing Iqbal’s notion of the “I am” articulated by each self (khudī), Tagore writes that the animal’s expression of “I am” is tantamount to “smoke,” or the amorphous hue of a “blind feeling,” but in the human person, consciousness shines forth like a “fire,” radiating all that surrounds it.^[55] Tagore often refers to this inner abundance as the human “surplus”^[56] – human beings possess an excessive freedom and creativity, which sets before us directions of individual and collective expression that transcend the logic of self-preservation. This freedom, Tagore affirms, is a divine gift, and it is this free spirit that can truly “claim kinship with God,”^[57] by reflecting the non-necessitated, creative līlā of the divine.

However, if the divine līlā is not straightforwardly necessitated, it is not arbitrary or capricious either – the created order fittingly expresses the character of the God who is infinite bliss. Indeed, it is only in and through the finite, Tagore asserts, that the infinite is disclosed, and the finite too finds its true import in the infinite. There is thus a cosmic harmony (sāmañjasya) or “fittingness” between the finite and the infinite – each is mutually expressive, and illuminative, of the other.^[58] This motif of alignment or appropriacy is carried over into Tagore’s reflections on human creativity – our creative surplus is only truly itself when it harmonizes with divine truth. In Tagore’s words,

we create not only art and social organizations, but our inner nature and outer surroundings, the truth of which depends upon their harmony with the laws of the universal mind. Of course, our creations are mere variations upon God’s great theme of the universe. When we produce discords, they either have to end in a harmony or in silence.^[59]

We encountered this theme of true human creativity as a response to or going on from, the divine creativity in Iqbal too. Crucially, both thinkers often develop their understandings of true creativity against their broader critiques of the mechanistic and utilitarian logic of imperial modernity. Shankha Ghosh, in his Bengali work Nirmāṇ Ᾱr Sṛṣṭi, foregrounds the distinction Tagore made between construction (nirmāṇ) and creation (sṛṣṭi), where the former is an instrumental means to an end, and the latter is the delight of self-expression for its own sake.^[60] The instrumentalist logic of construction (nirmāṇ) was, for Tagore, on full display in the physical structures and undergirding principles of industrial capitalism – regarding the “unwieldy” edifices of the modern day, he asserts pointedly: “the very fact that they are ugly shows that they are in discordance with the whole creation…[if] your commerce lacks the dignity of grace it is untrue.”^[61] For Iqbal, too, while the West was dynamic (in contrast to what he saw as the enfeebled Muslim world), this motion was ruinous inasmuch as it was bereft of a spiritual grounding and destination. Echoing Tagore’s distinction between construction and creation, Fazlur Rahman notes that for Iqbal, “the West was inventive, but not creative.”^[62]

4.1 Iqbal: Finding Rest in Restlessness

So far, we have seen that both Iqbal and Tagore, drawing on distinctive scriptural sources and conceptual foundations, colourfully paint a cosmic picture of creatio continua. In this unfolding tapestry, the world is at all moments revealing the divine reality anew, and God’s self-expression is thus the ontological root of all finite being. Further, as we saw, Iqbal and Tagore place the human being at the summit of the cosmic order, for she alone can fully participate in, and reflect, the divine creativity. Crucially, for both figures, the means by which the human being perfects her creative potential and comes to dwell in true relation with God is love – and it is to this radical and revelatory power of love in both theological visions that we now turn.

In the quote which closed the previous section, Fazlur Rahman goes on to say that the West, according to Iqbal, was not creative in the particular sense of ‘ishq, a crucial term in Iqbal’s oeuvre which Annemarie Schimmel translates as “creative love.”^[63] ‘Ishq holds pride of place in certain Sufi poetic universes, broadly denoting the yearning seeker’s passionate love for their beloved (either human or divine, or left tantalizingly ambiguous). As Joseph Lumbard observes, ‘ishq came to be a central motif for the most important figures of Persian Sufism, such as Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār (d.1221) and Jālāl al-dīn Rūmī (d.1273),^[64] the latter featuring repeatedly across Iqbal’s work in terms of both thematic convergences and as a literary persona (Rūmī is Zindarūd’s guide through the heavenly spheres in the Jāvīdnāma). In Iqbal’s worldview, while ‘ishq, as “creative love” (elsewhere denoted by such terms as justujū [seeking], arzū [longing/desire], and sūz [burning]) takes on a specific meaning in relation to the human yearning for the divine, it in fact flows through the heart of creation itself.

As Iqbal affirms in his Asrār-i Khudī (Secrets of the Self), life emerges out of, and is everywhere sustained by, the onward “pull” of desire. Not only are human selves burnished by the flame of love, “the nature of every thing is faithful to desire (ārzū),”^[65] where desire denotes the movement of things towards their self-realization. Indeed, in his Reconstruction, Iqbal speaks of telos as a fundamental reality of the universe, not in the sense of a predetermined goal towards which the world is ineluctably moving, but the elemental directionality or inner “reach” of things to freely realize the possibilities latent within their nature. This purposive orientation embeds an organic teleology within the cosmic order – the universe is in constant change, but it is not “wholly arbitrary, undirected, chaotic and unforeseeable,”^[66] for it belongs to all things to seek their appropriate ends/teloi in order to become more fully themselves.

In the case of the human being, Iqbal notes, the true end/telos is the divine. Here, Iqbal draws out the implications of the Hadith, “qualify yourselves with the attributes of God” (takhalluq bi akhlāq Allāh),^[67] discerning in these words the ethical and spiritual blueprint by which one’s selfhood (khudī) is perfected. To cultivate in ourselves the divine qualities is to become more truly ourselves; this “qualifying” thus represents a type of imitation that, for Iqbal, strengthens rather than attenuates human character (in contrast to the mimesis in certain types of art that Iqbal criticizes). Human love stands for Iqbal as the attribute most fully imitating God, who “first” loved to be known, or longed to unravel the plenitude of His being. Like the medieval theologian al-Ghazālī (d.1111), who affirmed that the human being becomes like or resembles the one it loves, and that to take on the divine qualities is to grow closer to God, for Iqbal too, ‘ishq bears an “assimilative”^[68] dimension, through which the self envisions certain ideals which it strives to embody, and is in this process brought closer both to its object of desire and to itself. Sketching this dialectic of self-realization and similitude to the divine, Iqbal asserts that “the greater his [man’s] distance from God, the less his individuality. He who comes nearest to God is the completest person.”^[69]

This “completest person” arrives, in Iqbal’s anthropology, at the spiritual summit of khilāfa (vicegerency) – as Iqbal puts it, the khalīfa “is the completest Ego, the goal of humanity.”^[70] The khalīfa is thus the paragon of ‘ishq – ‘ishq enables one to truly strengthen one’s self (khudī), and where this fortification is fulfilled, one vibrantly embodies the human telos of vicegerency. In further elaborating the nature of vicegerency, Iqbal asserts that the vicegerent is the secret of the Qur’ānic verse “Glory to Him who transported his servant by night” (Q17:1).^[71] This verse, of course, alludes to the famous night journey (mi’rāj) of the Prophet wherein, in Iqbal’s words, the Prophet beheld the divine essence without a veil (bī parda).^[72] So, if ‘ishq is a fire with which one fortifies one’s self, it is also a light in the human heart by which one sees the divine in an imitation of the Prophetic ascension.

Thus, related to the distinctions between the linear modality of spatialized time (and what Iqbal calls the “efficient self” that locates itself therein) and the indivisible wholeness of pure duration (and the “appreciative self” that momentarily touches its holistic depths) is a further distinction that Iqbal draws between two forms of knowing: thought and intuition. Like Bergson, Iqbal identifies thought or intellect as the process of analytical reasoning which knows things externally, or “grasps Reality piecemeal,” and intuition as that which enters into the pulsating flow of reality and thus “grasps It [Reality] in its wholeness.”^[73] Iqbal frames this holistic insight in terms of what the Qur’ān designates as “fu’ad or Qalb, i.e. heart,”^[74] in keeping with the Sufi tradition, which affirms that the heart is, above all, a locus of spiritual insight rather than a fleeting aggregate of feelings or sentiments. That the devotional heart alone (and not the disengaged intellect) can ascend to the heights of spiritual unveiling is often situated by Sufis against the revelatory backdrops of Muhammad’s own hearing and seeing God: the Qur’ān itself was revealed not to the mind of the Prophet but to his heart (qalb) (Q2:97) and during his ascension, the Prophet witnessed the highest truth with his heart (fu’ād) (Q53:11).^[75]

Iqbal thus entreats God in the Jāvīdnāma to grant him the frenzy of impassioned love, and to be shown the road to inward ecstasy (jaẓb andarūnī).^[76] The habitat of this ecstasy is the “heart (qalb) that never sleeps” (a reference to the Hadith in which Muhammad affirms that his eyes sleep but his heart does not).^[77] Lovers yearn for the rapture of the direct vision (naẓar) of God; thus, Rūmī in the Jāvīdnāma declares:

Love in the soul is like sight in the eye […]

lovers yield themselves up to God, [they] give interpretative reason as an offering.

Are you a lover?

Proceed from direction to directionlessness [in the sense of ‘dimensionless-ness’].^[78]

Love grasps reality with the vividness of intuitive knowing and re-orients the self from the linearity of discursive reasoning to the transdimensionality of visionary perception.

What of the character of the longed-for vision of God – do we here settle down in a final apprehending of the divine? Well, at the climax of the Jāvīdnāma, the “resting” in the vision of the Friend (dīdār-ī dust)^[79] that Iqbal describes as the telos of the lover brings, paradoxically, no final stasis at all – we are told that to see God is “to wax [or to increase, even overflow] ever without waning” (afzūdan bī kāstan).^[80] The lover’s sight waxes or swells eternally when its “object” is the divine countenance, as they are made expansively receptive to ever-new unveilings. Wandering into the inexhaustible depths of the infinite, the paradoxical summit of ‘ishq is thus a ceaseless movement, for the process of receiving what does not end is itself endless.

4.2 Tagore: Re-turning to the Divine with the Offering of Love

Love is, then, for Iqbal, the radiant light of insight that can never finally be extinguished. The revelatory flame of ‘ishq enables the human being to become fully and truly her-self, by transfiguring her heart into an intimate witness and reflective mirror of the divine. For Tagore too, love is the silken thread of the divine-human entanglement: the surplus of the human being draws her into free, loving relationality with the divine which, in spiralling circuits of mutuality, represents both the fulfilment of the divine bliss and the individual’s realization of her innermost truth. In creatively reworking classical Vedāntic notions that the individual self (ātman) is metaphysically non-dual (advaita) with the divine reality (brahman),^[81] and that this transcendental self abides in all things, Tagore affirms that whilst one’s immediate, self-reflexive apprehension of oneself as an individual renders one’s selfhood “real,” this selfhood is only “true” insofar as it is realized in others. As Tagore puts it, “it is my own soul which I must realize in others…if my soul were singularly mine, then it could not be true; [yet] if it were not intimately mine, it would not be real.”^[82] The self (ātman) that is present in all things is not a featureless abstraction – hence it must be “intimately mine” – nor is it bounded by one’s own person – hence it cannot be “singularly mine.”

Human beings are thus only truly themselves in and through their interrelationships with others – and this is, Tagore affirms, the very “definition of love.”^[83] To see the ātman in all things, and all things in the ātman, is to respond to the ceaselessly articulated “love-call”^[84] of the world, which asks the inner self, “friend, have you seen me? Do you love me? – not as one who provides you with foods and fruits, not as one whose laws you have found out, but as one who is personal, individual?”^[85] – as one, in other words with whom we can relate in love. For Tagore, it is precisely in and through this circuit of love that we find, as well as make, a home in the world which becomes “completely our own,”^[86] not as an object which we might possess or master, but as a gift which we might receive into ourselves through our loving communion with it. Limning this love that makes the world luminously real, Tagore declares, “when my heart did not kiss you in love, O world, your light missed its full splendour.”^[87]

It is, therefore, only in the realization of the “Thou art” that the truth of the “I am” is revealed,^[88] as the individual “I” passes beyond its parochial finitude in and through love to realize something of the infinite. As Tagore affirms, advaitam, or the “infinite One,” is also anandam, or the “infinite Love.”^[89] The Sanskrit term ānanda, which we encountered above, carries the meaning of bliss, a resonance that Tagore explicitly invokes: “through such freedom [i.e. the freedom of joyous love] we come into touch with the Reality that is an end in itself and therefore is bliss.”^[90] The human being feels this “touch” of the infinite most fully in the freedom of love, when they are drawn out of their self-referential confinement to become more than themselves. As Tagore highlights, this “more” is not mere mathematical extension – true union with the other is not in the crude amassing of power in numbers but rather in the immediate, relational concentering of perfect consciousness, love, and joy.^[91] To know the other truly is not to know more about them in a kind of propositional apprehending, but it is to know the other in and through the symbiotic textures of love.

Tagore thus gives the example of a newborn infant whose freedom of selfhood is perfected not in “its fuller consciousness of its mother, but in its intense consciousness of its mother in love.”^[92] The newborn child does not know more about its mother in a straightforwardly descriptive mode (“the infant…does not know its mother’s name, or who or what she is”^[93]), but knows its mother truly in the immediacy of loving relation – and it is through this “intensive” love for its mother that the child first experiences the “freedom of personality.”^[94] The love between mother and child, in other words, upholds the freedom and selfhood of both persons precisely because it binds them in joyous relation.

Tagore’s elaboration of the relationship between mother and child analogously highlights a crucial facet of the divine-human līlā of love – only by being born as a separate being can the child re-turn to its mother in love. So too has God gifted us each an irreducible “I,” without which we could not enjoy the modality of relationship: the play of love needs two distinct players. Tagore thus articulates the paradoxical fullness attained in and through renunciation (tyāg),^[95] instantiated by the baby who “renounces” the shelter of the womb for the freedom of loving relation. Just as the child attains its mother when it leaves her womb, so too, when we are “parted” from God in God’s world-generating līlā, we become “free to see [His] face.”^[96] In short, God’s spontaneous delight is in engaging us freely in the play of love, and it is in and through our own free re-turnings to God that this līlā is fulfilled: “if His bliss had not been manifested in me then I would never have existed.”^[97]

Echoing Iqbal’s exhortation to qualify oneself with the divine qualities, Tagore affirms that we must resemble or become like the One with whom we seek union (tar matan hote hobe) by freely giving ourselves in love to the divine.^[98] Our love thus has the character of a self-offering – God must wait for our will to attune itself with His own, for in the domain of love, where we meet God as collaborators, there can be no compulsion. In the “second birth” that marks the human being’s appearance on the stage of God’s vibrant līlā, God is Himself “awakened” to the joy of spiritual partnership, just as we too are called on to “awaken” our dormant love and realize that the divine bliss utterly enfolds us.^[99]

5.1 Iqbal: The Poetic as Inheritor of the Prophetic

We have traced, then, the theological routes by which Iqbal and Tagore render a) the world as God’s dynamic domain of self-disclosure; b) the human being as creative associate or “partner” with God; and c) love as the existential force that binds the human and the divine in an intimate entanglement. In this final section, we turn to the theological aesthetics of both figures. As we will see, for both of our poets, it is supremely the artist who has “awakened” to the call of divine truth and has sought to respond in kind by mirroring the creative love that is the warp and weft of the cosmos.

Across his writings, Iqbal articulates this sacramental function of artistic creation by setting forth a quite radical parallelism between poetry and prophecy. If, as we saw earlier, to be humanly creative at all is to partake of, or share in, the divine creativity, the poetic vocation more specifically represents for Iqbal an “inheriting” of the function of prophecy. In his poem Sham’a aur Shā’ir (The Candle and the Poet), the idiom of taking a part or share appears in Iqbal’s affirmation (voiced here through the candle) that poetry (shā’irī) is a part (juzv) of prophecy (paygambarī).^[100] Elsewhere, in the Jāvīdnāma, Rūmī declares that if poetry strives towards the upbuilding of human persons (ādam-garī), it becomes the heir of prophecy (wāris-i paygambarī).^[101] In what sense might poetry be said to partake of prophecy?

As noted above, the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension denotes for Iqbal the intuitive immediacy and witnessing that is characteristic of ‘ishq, in which the Prophet experiences, as the Hadith affirms, his own time (waqt) with God. The Prophet transcended in this mystical “moment” the veil of serial time, which Zindarūd too casts off during his own journey to the heavens. What is central, however, to Iqbal’s notion of prophecy is that the prophet (here referring to prophethood more generally) does not remain frozen in this transcendental moment – he returns from the depths of this mystical encounter to “insert himself into the sweep of [serial] time…[and] to create a fresh world of ideals.”^[102] The prophet’s return, in other words, is fundamentally “creative,”^[103] instantiating new possibilities for human life. Although the prophet has “tasted” the unreality of spatialized time, he does not seek to institute a rupture from the flow of history; his mystical experience “overflows[s] its boundaries,”^[104] “spilling” over into the concrete socio-moral conditions of humanity.

Notably, Iqbal presents this prophetic ascension as simultaneously a descent into the prophet’s “infinite depths,” from which he emerges with renewed vigour “to destroy the old, and to disclose the new directions of life.”^[105] More specifically, Iqbal draws on the Qur’ānic vocabulary of waḥī (inspiration) to articulate the nature of prophetic activity as a “contact” with the root of the prophet’s own being.^[106] Iqbal notes that the Qur’ān presents waḥī as a universal quality of life – indeed, waḥī is used both for the verbal revelation given to the prophets (e.g. Q4:163) and for the “general” inspiration imparted to creation (the inspiration by which, for instance, bees build their hives (Q16:68)). Waḥī thus denotes a teleology or directionality specific to the nature of its recipient, enabling, to use Iqbal’s examples, the plant to grow freely and the human being to receive light from the inward depths of life.^[107] This divine blow of inspiration sets things on the path for which they were made; the new ideals that the prophet thus instantiates are not disruptive but restorative. Iqbal’s understanding of prophetic activity dovetails with his notion of the purposive character of the universe itself, which goes on unfolding new forms that are never arbitrary but always organic to, and reflective of, their creative ground.

In the same way that the prophet’s return is creative, enacting new directions for human life, art too, Iqbal insists, must infuse the self with vitality and (truthful) purpose. Indeed, Iqbal repeatedly denounces art that denudes the self of its inner potential and integrity. He writes, for instance, that art that saps our “dormant will-force” and blinds us to the world around us is simply “decay and death”^[108] – the stultifying obverse of the prophet’s invigoration of human life. Just as the prophet’s intuitive experience of reality instantiates what is new, so too must the artist, Iqbal urges, eschew the servitude to, or imitation of, nature (fiṭrat kī ghulāmī) for such a mechanistic mimesis turns the artist away from the truth within his own being.^[109]

The artist must not, in other words, merely replicate what is before him; he, like the prophet who energetically directs life to newer ends, creates what ought to be, and this horizon of re-evaluation can only be intuited within the artist’s self. This notion of art as the elucidation of the “normative,” or a revelation of the depths of one’s being, does not mean the artist abjures the outer world – in fact, it is precisely in this con-centred inwardness that the artist comes to see the world in its true fullness. Thus, Iqbal quotes the words of the German philosopher Fichte, “he [the artist] sees all Nature full, large and abundant as opposed to him who sees all things thinner, smaller and emptier than they actually are.”^[110] Like the prophet who penetrates the veil of serial time to disclose the hidden potencies of created life, we might say that the artist too “somehow has to turn away from the world before turning to it in more depth.”^[111]

True art, for Iqbal, thus embodies a deeper mode of seeing – indeed, Iqbal frequently speaks of the “sight” or “heart” of the poet as endowed with a distinctive witnessing role, much like the Prophet’s own “heart” that beheld the divine reality. In his poem Funūn-i Laṭīfa (Fine Arts), Iqbal declares that the sight (naẓar) which cannot behold the inner truth (haqīqat) of things is no sight at all.^[112] Elsewhere, in a lexical interplay of the words sīna (breast; figuratively: heart) and “Sinai,” Iqbal writes that the theophanic disclosure on Mount Sinai occurs at each moment in the poet’s heart. Indeed, his heart becomes another Sinai: the heart (sīna) of the poet overflows with unveilings (tajallī) of beauty; from his Sinai arise beauty’s rays (anvār-i husn).^[113]

The vitality of true poetry thus flows forth from the poet’s own creative love, such that the artistic encounter represents not a flat discursive “transaction” but a participatory means by which the poet imparts something of his own heart or “burning” to others. The poet’s entire nature (fiṭrat), Iqbal affirms, is desire (justujū), and he ignites the fire of longing (arzū) in others.^[114] The candle in Iqbal’s Sham’a aur Shā’ir thus declares that whilst it burns because of the requirements of its nature, the poet burns to make others burn with him.^[115] Elsewhere, Iqbal employs the Sufi terminology of meaning (maʻnī) and form (ṣūrat) to criticize that art that devitalizes the self – devoid of inner meaning (maʻnī), such art does not “fill” or sustain us with, Iqbal affirms, the sacred nourishment of Zamzam water.^[116] Significantly, the vision of God is also described by Iqbal as reviving the lifeless self (“to see Him is to rise from the body’s tomb”),^[117] effecting, as we saw, an endless “filling” of the human gaze. Beholding God and “tasting” true art similarly re-inspirit the individual, and this symmetry reinforces the co-creative relationship between the human and the divine.

Iqbal further connects the divine and the human creativity in his Masjid-i Qurtaba, which begins, as explored above, with an account of God’s passionate “weaving” of day and night for His self-expression, and goes on to describe the architect’s own love-suffused art. Iqbal describes the mosque as a tangible token of the immortal force of love (‘ishq), to which it owes its being (wujūd).^[118] The mosque’s majesty (jalāl) and beauty (jamāl) give concrete evidence (dalīl) of the person of God (mard-i khudā), vibrantly displaying the ardour of his days and nights.^[119] The hand of this artist is the very hand of God,^[120] pulsating with the creative vitality that is the throbbing telos of human (and divine) selfhood. Tying together the architect’s creativity with the poet’s own art, Iqbal asserts that the mosque occasions the presence of hearts (diloṅ kā ḥuẓūr) while the poet inspires the opening of hearts (diloṅ kī kushūd).^[121] These distinct artforms thus mirror and fulfil one another, emanating from, and embodying, the fervour of creative love.

5.2 Tagore: The Dialectic of Appearance and Reality

Elsewhere, Iqbal reiterates the revelatory vocation of the artist by noting that the true poem, nourished in the radiance of ‘ishq, becomes a witness (guvāhī) to the Truth (ḥaqq).^[122] In a vivid echo of this idiom of “bearing witness,” Tagore describes the artistic impulse in humans as the “ceaseless longing of the human heart to make the Person manifest in its own creations.”^[123] In its inexhaustible creative surplus, Tagore writes, the human personality bears the paradox that it is always fundamentally “more than itself,” and thus “erupts” in a boundless stream of creative expression, sending forth its myriad answers to the divine.^[124] Indeed, Tagore affirms that we cannot help revealing something of our personal surplus even in our instrumentalist engagements with the world. In these quotidian interactions, however, creative self-expression is not our primary goal, and we thus settle into certain monotonous “grooves.”^[125] The world is itself dulled for us under this cloak of utility – like the passenger on the train who is aware of the outside world but for whom the immediate carriage is more “real,” we typically only see the things that we need to see. Much of our world thus “passes by us, [like] a caravan of shadows.”^[126] In art, however, we disavow the imperative of necessity and freely rejoice in the abundance of the created world, reflecting the God who “takes joy in productions that are unnecessary to him.”^[127] Through her creative offerings, the artist thus utters to the world, “Yes, I have seen you, I have loved and known you…not that I have taken you and used your laws for my own purposes of power…[but] I see you, where you are what I am.”^[128]

Crucially for Tagore, as we saw above, our creative offerings to God are meant not only to respond to “the call of the Real,”^[129] but also to correspond to the ideals of beauty and truth which find their eternal synthesis in the divine. Like the “unwieldy” buildings which lack the grace of beauty, our creative acts, when unattuned to the harmony of the whole, emanate only a discordant “noise.” Tagore discerns such a “jerky shriek” in certain trends of modern realism which, he asserts, have renounced “appearance” and beauty as a deceptive veneer, and pursue, with an almost scientific rigor, the proclaimed “truth” of things, or the way things are independent of a human personality.^[130] The delight of entering into the artist’s world and knowing what the world means to them has thus given way to a kind of descriptive tedium, in which all modes of personal involvement are spurned as sentimentalism. What this art reveals is a hostility towards the world of appearance – that world which, as Tagore repeatedly affirms, has its luminous reality for us.^[131] This is the world, our world, in which the beauty of the rose is true not as an arid fact but as a personal invitation or calling.

This understanding of appearance is crucial to Tagore’s notion of art as deeply interrelated with the divine māyā, where this relationship instantiates the paradox that appearance and reality are not sharply opposed but are intimately, and ineffably, interwoven. Māyā is a polyvalent Sanskrit term which, depending on its philosophical and scriptural context, can mean “illusion/appearance,” “extraordinary/supernatural power,” “attachment,” “compassion,” and so on. Although we cannot here explore the complex resonances of this term, let us turn briefly to its use in a paradigmatic Hindu scriptural text, the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa,^[132] an important source of Vaiṣṇava theology and devotion. In the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, māyā refers primarily to the “multi-purpose energy, potency, or power of God,”^[133] and, in contrast to its negative valence in Advaita Vedānta (where it often refers to the world as a phenomenal illusion), is often used in a positive sense to denote the creative force by which Kṛṣṇa (Krishna) creates the manifold universes and draws embodied selves towards him to experience the joy of devotional love (bhakti).

In Book 10 of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, which narrates various episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s loving sport (līlā), we are introduced to the purest form of this bhakti, where Kṛṣṇa’s māyā facilitates the spontaneous intimacy between Kṛṣṇa and his loved ones by, crucially, enabling them to “forget” that Kṛṣṇa is God. For instance, in one such narrative, Kṛṣṇa is playing with his friends who complain to Kṛṣṇa’s mother, Yaśodā, that Kṛṣṇa has eaten mud. Kṛṣṇa asserts that these accusations are false and urges Yaśodā to look into his mouth herself. Yaśodā does so, and beholds therein the entire cosmic manifestation, and comes to know (and venerate) her son as, in truth, the supreme originator, sustainer, and telos of the world. She even beholds herself sitting with Kṛṣṇa, and suspects that her worldly life is an illusion.

Witnessing his mother’s deep contemplative absorption, Kṛṣṇa, through his māyā, causes her to forget all that she has seen, and she once again relates to him in the tenderness of maternal love. A curious relationship is demonstrated here between appearance and reality: as Gopal Gupta points out, on the one hand, one might suggest that Yaśodā “finally encounters “real reality” for the few moments that she beholds the universal form in her son’s mouth, and then lives the remainder of her life in the illusion that she is Kṛṣṇa’s mother.”^[134] The Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, however, takes the opposite standpoint, and affirms that Yaśodā’s “māyā-influenced perception that Kṛṣṇa is her son” is in fact “the pinnacle of reality,”^[135] since it enables sincere and spontaneous love between Kṛṣṇa and his mother. Indeed, Yaśodā’s motherhood is never regarded in the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa as rooted in mere illusion; on the contrary, Yaśodā is repeatedly granted an exalted status as one of the emblematic devotees of Kṛṣṇa.

Reflecting this scriptural backdrop of māyā as an elusive, but ultimately truthful, divine “craft,” Tagore affirms that the “world as an art is the play of the Supreme Person reveling in image making.”^[136] The “image making” that God delights in is precisely the unfolding of māyā, which simultaneously conceals and reveals the divine in ever-shifting “patterns of appearance, the incessant flow of change, that ever is and is not.”^[137] That God weaves this tapestry of His māyā for the joy of the human-divine “sport” of love is made clear in Tagore’s reflections on beauty. Beauty, Tagore notes, comes upon us gently and quietly, with no lordly commands but only a soft calling – we can choose to respond to the invitation that streams forth from the flowing waters or the beaming sunlight, or we can blithely turn away.^[138] Much like Kṛṣṇa effaces Yaśodā’s memory of his “real” divine form so that she might once again delight in the spontaneity of maternal love, so too does God unfurl this vast and variegated display of beauty (saundarjer je bipul bicitra āyojan) so that we might freely and joyously turn in love to Him.^[139]

This māyā or shimmering appearance that God unfolds in creation, whose beauty and ever-changing forms resist cognitive capture, evinces something of the nature of art. As Tagore asserts,

art is maya, it has no other explanation but that it seems to be what it is…it never tries to conceal its evasiveness, it mocks even its own definition and plays the game of hide-and-seek through its constant flight in changes.^[140]

Where the world of appearance has been shattered in forms of modern art – that world which elicits the response of our entire personality and which is thus no illusory distraction from truth – such art no longer sends forth subtle evocations and does not delightfully “mock” its own fixity in the manner of the divine māyā. Instead, this art, in its concern for descriptive closure, subsists in a “firm self-reliance…[calling] out: Ho there! Behold me, here am I.”^[141] This is unlike the art which, for Tagore, truly “speaks”^[142] – that art which possesses not the strident solidity of a commanding voice but the subtle sonority of God’s own beauty, quietly calling us to the depths of being that it both conceals and reveals.