Postcolonial Bergson by Souleymane Bachir Diagne;

Author:Souleymane Bachir Diagne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)

3

BERGSON, IQBAL, AND THE CONCEPT OF IJTIHAD

In a 1931 letter to Sir William Rosenstein, Muhammad Iqbal narrates a trip to Paris, along with another Indian friend, to see Bergson. Iqbal recounts that although Bergson was ill and not receiving visitors, he made an exception and spent two full hours with his guests. Iqbal writes that their conversation included discussion of Berkeley’s philosophy, among other subjects. Louis Massignon, whom Iqbal also visited in 1932 during the same trip, relates the Indian poet’s Parisian encounters:

Iqbal knew Bergson previously, and despite a terrible English translation (repudiated by Bergson) had come to feel a “Semitic” spiritual affinity for Bergson, so ended up coming to Paris to converse with him. But he also wanted to talk to me about Hallaj. He wrote me on 2/18/1932 from Lahore: “I am sending you a copy of (my) latest work ‘Javid Nama’ which I hope will interest you, especially the part relating Hallaj and Nietzsche.… I have allowed the former to explain himself, and as to the latter I have tried to show how a Muslim Mystic would look at him. The book is a kind of Divine Comedy of Islam. It is a pity I was not able to meet you in London. I am now thinking of making a tour to Spanish Morocco and if possible to French Morocco. This will give me an opportunity to meet you in Paris.” In fact I saw him at my home on November 1st, 1932.1

It is difficult to say exactly what Massignon intends by “ ‘Semitic’ spiritual affinity”—but it ran very deep, whatever it was. To understand this, and to understand to what point Iqbal thought as a Bergsonian, we must first remember that Bergson was widely translated after the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907 and its immense success. In particular, his work appeared in England after 1911. Muhammad Iqbal had himself defended his philosophy thesis, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, at Cambridge in 1907. He set himself the task of producing his philosophy of the “reconstruction” of Islamic thought, first in poetry, starting in 1915; this was the publication date of his long metaphysical poem written in Persian, The Secrets of the Self. At that time, he was already familiar with Bergsonian categories.

It seems likely that, by speaking of a “Semitic” affinity, Massignon wanted to symbolize what this meeting between Bergson and the Muslim Indian represented. Especially at the present moment, it is well worth coming back to that symbol in order to emphasize the value of the dialogue in which the philosopher—attracted to Catholicism, almost to the point of conversion, but at the same time remaining true to his Jewish faith—inspired the Muslim Indian in his project of rethinking Quranic cosmology in order to give a new meaning to the juridico-theological concept of ijtihad, usually translated as “effort of interpretation”—a concept that we can agree is necessary for our contemporary era.

We will focus first on the figure of Muhammad Iqbal: in particular, on his status

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.