CHAPTER THREE

HIS INTERPRETATION OF THE ESSENTIALS OF FAITH

I believe in God, and in His Angels and in His Books and in Hts Messengers and in the Last Day, and in the Predestination, that good and evil both come from God.

a) I BELIEVE IN Goo . . . AND IN His ANGELS ... Since the theology proper has already been discussed in Chapter Il, the chapter starts with the Angels. The belief in Angels belongs to the essentials of Musli rn creed ( d. Süra II 285). t) Angels are frequent! y mentioned in the Qur'an, a wh ole Süra ( 3 5 i being called after them. They are conceived as sub­ tle, luminous bodies, and depicted in their different occupations: sorne of them carrying the Divine Throne, a pair of them accompanying every human being and noting down his deeds, Munkar and Nakir questioning the dead in the tomb, Gabriel conveying the Divine Mes­ sage to the prophets. They never cease glorifying God, each of them performing a special movement of prayer. Sorne of them, though not mentioned by name in the Qur'an, are of great importance in theolo­ gy, popular piety and mysticism, like cAzrii"ïl, the horrible angel of death, or Isriifïl who blows the Trumpet at Doomsday, and numerous other angelic beings, often called by strange and difficult names de­ rived from Syriac and Hebrew roots have intruded upon folklore and even the field of sheer magic. How firmly the belief in angels is rooted in Muslim theology and piety can be guessed f.i. from the sharp attacks of Indian Muslims against the interpretation of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan according to whom angels and jinns are only faculties of the human sou!. 2)

1) Cf. art. Mala'ika in the El. W. Eickmann, Die Angelologie und Damonulogie des Korans. 2) Baljon, Sir Say;·id, p. 93. That had been maintained also by early philosophcrs in Islam. An attack on this idea of the Indian reformer in the Mucaf!im ai-QuYJim (Sindhi commentary of the first ;uz0 , Hyderabad, 1947) (cf. Schimmel, 5indhi lranslationJ ... of the QuYJiin). I BELIEVE IN GOD ..• AND IN HIS ANGELS. . • 203

For the Muslim the existence of guardian angels watching over every human being is unquestionable, and thus Iqbal writes to a friend who went on pilgrimage:

God Almighty may make your journey blessed and the mercy of His angels may be your companion! (M I 228). That is, as far as I can see, the only time that he mentions angels in his letters; and in his philosophical prose-writing, they are of no importance. One should expect in the work of a scholar who bad been interested in the philosophy of Avicenna and especially of Suh­ rawardî Maqtül a reflection of the angelology which is so character­ istic of these Persian thinkers and is, indeed, of Persian origin. Corbin, 3) who bas analyzed the Suhrawardian and Avicennian angelology bas shown that the Angel is seen by these thinkers as the ''heavenly counterpart of a pair or a syzygy made up of a fallen, or an angel appointed to govem a body, and of an angel retaining his abode in heaven", th at angels are the celestial self of man. This idea, however, important as it may be in Persian thought, is exactly con­ trary to Iqbal's picture of the angelic world which can be reconstructed from his poems. Eager to go back behind the Persian influences in Islam, he relies directly and completely on the Qur"anic descriptions of the angels, and his leitmotif is the scene in which God ordered the angels to bow before Adam who bad just been created (Su ra 7/11). That shows that man is higher than angels, a concept which was well­ known to Islamic mysticism rather early and is fully developed in cAttar's manfiq uf-!air; 4 ) this idea is not restricted to Islamic mystics but can be found in Christian and Jewish interpretations of the Scrip­ ture as weil. Man is higher than angels because he has the faculty of loving and longing, because he-to use the Chassidic expression-" is the going one, whereas the angel is static, and through his movement he vouchsafes the movement which renews the world." 5) Although angels are holy in their constant occupation with worship and ado­ ration, they are not endowed with free will, and therefore, in Iqbalian thought

3) H. Corbin, Avicenna and the visionary recital, p. 21; the same, L'imagination créatrice chez Ibn Arabi, p. 270; A.. Bausani, Persia religiosa. 4) Ritter, Meer, p. 624. §) Buber, Der gro{je Maggid, p. XXXVIII.