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Once on the red planet, Iqbal will meet a Martian sage who will reveal the secrets of fate and feminism to him
Excursion to the city of Marghadin, fate according to Iqbal
If for one fate your heart is bleeding, well, ask God to order another destiny! It is lawful that you ask for another destiny, since the destinies of God are endless. The Earthlings have lost the currency of personality, they have not understood the subtle point of “fate” well. It is subtlety that is encoded in a sentence: “If you turn yourself, it too will turn”!
Become earth: it will make you a gift to the wind; becomes stone, it will throw you on the glass. Are you dew? Your fate is to fall. Are you a sea? Your destiny is to stay forever. Every moment you create Lat and Manat and then expect from them constancy, or inconstant? As long as disharmony with yourself is your faith, the world of your thoughts will be prison to you. To work without profit … destiny! To be rich without effort … destiny! But if this is the essence of religion, or unsuspecting men, the needy becomes even more needy by accepting it!
Woe to that religion that makes you fall asleep and then keeps you in deep sleep! Is this religion or magic? Is it religion or a grain of opium?
Arriving on Mars, Iqbal will know one of the local scholars, who will tell him the story of his own people, rewarded by God for not having succumbed to the temptations of the diabolical Farzmarz. Reward for the Martians was a place where everything belongs to God and is therefore freely available to everyone, there is no war or money, and people can dedicate themselves exclusively to raising their spirits. Precisely to this essay (perhaps al Khidr but several elements are missing to say it with certainty), Iqbal gives the task of showing destiny and its peculiarities.
Unlike other great religions, in fact, Islam claims that Allah is omniscient and that everything we have done (both in the past, in the present and in the future) is already inscribed in a great book known only by Him; this statement could suggest a form of predestination, but it is not so. Islam, in fact, is not immobile like, for example, Hinduism (most likely one of the faiths implied by Iqbal for some of its characteristics) but believes that everyone can write their own destiny, simply “Allah already knows”.
This difference seems a subtlety, but it is something that radically changes the vision and ideas of each believer, no longer condemned to a mere obedience to the divine laws, but free to choose his own destiny for himself. It is no coincidence that one of the most well-known verses of the Book is this: “Verily, Allah does not change the reality of a people, until it changes in its depths“; when the weak understand that they are the strong, everything will turn around and there will be nothing left to stop it.
Story of the girl of Mars who claimed to be a prophetess
His face was shining, but not of the light of the spirit, which he was unable to express; his words were devoid of ardor, his eyes devoid of the dew of tears, unaware of the joy of desire! His chest no longer knew the boiling of youth, his mirror was blind and no longer received the colorful images of the world. Unaware of love and love rituals, he was a sparrow who despises the real love hawk!
That subtle sage told us: “This girl is not a Martian; simple, free, without complexes, Farzmarz stole her from Europe, made her expert in the business of Prophecy and threw her down here in this world! She said:” I came down from heaven , my invitation is the invitation of recent times. “It speaks of the situation of man and woman, it manifests the secrets of the body very openly. I will now tell you in the language of the Earthlings what it says is the destiny of life in this last era!
In the latter passage Iqbal’s “not exactly positive” attitude towards feminism and feminists is manifested, portraying them as women “who are unaware of love and the rites of love “. I will not dwell too much on this point since an underlying chronological and cultural problem is evident, in some ways very similar to what happened recently to the film “Gone with the wind”. For those who have not followed, this film has been temporarily blocked on many sites for its racist content, only to be re-proposed but with a brief introduction that “contextualises” it, the same thing is necessary to do with the great Pakistani poet.
In fact, Muhammad Iqbal lived between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, a historical period which, for the first time ever, saw the “western” woman emancipate, giving way to groups such as, for example, suffragettes. In an Indian society such as that of the Poet, this event must have seemed the umpteenth way of subverting the Eastern order by the European powers, thus going an ever stronger diffidence towards this movement, preventing it from making a fair and sensible judgment. In fact, it seems absurd that in a book in which even the Devil will be given elements of goodness, this is not done for the woman who is, indeed, almost identified as demonic.
The idea that there is more hatred towards Europe than women, is then confirmed by the book “The Harem and the West” by Fatema Mernissi, in which it is evident how, throughout the Islamic world but, even more precisely in North India, women were granted far more rights than the West was granted; it is no coincidence that in countries like Azerbaijan, Turkey or Pakistan women were able to vote earlier than in Switzerland. Obviously Iqbal’s vision was still more that of a “woman home and church”, however, being unfortunately a thought still present even in our country, it would be stupid to blame him, even if, just to fully understand the message, to it must be added premises.
Tomorrow a new episode with exceptional protagonists including: Hallaj, Mirza Ghalib and Shaytan in person. Follow us on our facebook page, Spotify, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, or on our Telegram channel. Ogni like, condivisione o supporto è ben accetto e ci aiuta a dedicarci sempre di più alla nostra passione: raccontare il Medio Oriente.
