IMAGE OF EAGLE IN ALLAMA IQBALS POETRY

IMAGE OF “EAGLE” IN IQBAL’S POETRY

Iqbal is the best articulated Muslim response to modernity that the Islamic world has produced in the twentieth century. His response has the following dimensions:

A creative engagement with the conceptual paradigm of modernism at a sophisticated philosophical level through his prose writings, mainly his “” which present his basic philosophic insights.
His which is the best embodiment of poetically mediated thought, squarely in the traditional continuity of Islamic literature and perhaps the finest contemplative or inspired poetry in the modern times.

“Eagle” is a potent and powerful symbol applied in an aptly unique style and prolific fashion by Iqbal in his poetry. He is keen to select the eagle because of its courage, great strength, self-reliance and superb aerial skills. The eagle does not attempt to live of the efforts of others. It flies high and seems to have no concern to build its nest in wild and mountainous country. It is guardian of liberty, courageous protector of its young ones and fearlessly combats any threat to their safety. It lives an austere life and subsists on live prey.

Eagles try to surprise and overwhelm their prey on the ground due to their immense sharp-sightedness. Iqbal’s Shaheen stands for the self-respect, struggle and endurance, prestige and perseverance, self-control and self-reliance. In Shaheen, he envisages the desired attributes of a devoted Muslim or Momin. Therefore when he asks the youth to become a Shaheen, he means the inculcation of these lofty ideals in their person. He is invariably an advocate of the cultivation of strength and deprecates weakness. The following verses demonstrate his views in this connection:

“Weakness is a highway robber which destroys life, Her real form has not been recognized…Mildness and compassion are sometimes the veils across her face. It takes the heart out of an individual who could have been strong”

He expected the youth to look forward and high. Whenever he wanted to convey the message of action, he presented the examples of heroes of Islam like Tariq and Sultan Tipu as they were courageious and brave like Shaheen.

Firstly, we notice that Iqbal’s eagle is a construct of his imagination. It would be a mistake to analyse Iqbal’s descriptions of the eagle with a view to determining how accurate they are from an ornithological standpoint. Second, the words shahin, uqab, baz and shahbaz are often used as various names for the “eagle”. Iqbal seems to be using these words interchangeably. The interchangeable use makes sense because it enables Iqbal to borrow traits from the several members of the same family and produce a composite, but unified, portrait that will serve his purpose of poetry.

The two points can be illustrated by ...

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The two points can be illustrated by means of the following examples from Bal-i-Jibril. Iqbal says that the fiercely proud eagle disdains to eat dead prey and eats only the prey it itself has caught live. One might object that this description fits the hawk but not the eagle. In another place, Iqbal says that the eagle is above making nests. This statement, too, is not correct, but it makes good sense in the place where it is made and is in fact defensible. He says:

I am secluded from the earth
Crumbs or granules are of no worth
My nature is that of hermit
For me the lonesome wild is fit

Iqbal uses the eagle to mark philosophical aspects, offer observations on various perspectives of life and motivate his audience to action. To this end he invests his eagle with certain character traits for which it would be futile to look for exact correspondences in the animal kingdom. The eagle we are dealing with is the Iqbalian eagle, and it is in terms of the qualities, role, and function Iqbal assigns to the eagle in various contexts that we should view his descriptions of the bird.

Iqbal wants Muslims to stop living a life of indolence and accept the challenges of life. Using the garden and the desert as metaphors respectively, for easy and tough life, he tells Muslims to quit the garden, reminding them that they have the power to fly like “the mountain eagle”. The Muslims are, by origin, eagles, but their eyes no longer have the piercing look of an eagle. Iqbal is addressing those who advise Muslims to renounce the world:

This world of clay and water is game to the believer.

Are you saying to the falcon, “Let go of your game?”
I have failed to solve this difficult problem:
Why does the eagle shun the skies?
Pity the eagle that does not act like one,
And whose claws never caused hurt to a bird,
An eagle that is nestbound, abject, crestfallen,
And does not flap its wings in the blue space!

In Iqbal’s view, in fact, the Muslims have acquired the ways of the vulture, the kargas, with which Iqbal often contrasts the shahin, signifies, in Iqbal’s poetry, not so much greed or rapacity, as it would in English, but baseness of stock, lowness of ambition, and parasitic attitudes. Iqbal tells them to go back to their roots and become eagles again in Bal-i-Jibril, where Iqbal, alluding to Muslims, remarks that they have been corrupted by their association with ravens, and Zabar-i-Ajam which is similar. “You are the eagle of Muhammad,” says Iqbal, addressing the Muslim, “and angels and houris are your prey”.

In “The Philosopher,” Iqbal points out the limitations of philosophical thought. For all its achievements, philosophy has not yielded definitive and reliable guidance on issues of fundamental importance to man. The philosopher is the vulture that flies around in space like an eagle, but unlike the eagle, fails to catch live prey. In Payami Mashriq, “The wings of a nightingale are of one kind, those of an eagle of another”; and in a slightly different context, in Javid Namah, the truly religious are contrasted with the shallow and unscrupulous pretenders to religiosity.

What distinguishes the eagle from the other birds is its sharp vision, its ability to soar into the air and rule the skies, its swift movement, its daring nature and love of freedom. Cultivation of aquiline traits is therefore a requisite for success in life as Iqbal quotes in Bal-i Jibril:

If you are bareheaded, develop high resolve,
For here the crown is only for the eagle’s head.

Slavery turns an eagle into a bat, and life denying art has a similar effect. Certain kinds of poetry, turn a free man eagle into a slave, pheasant. Freedom, on the other hand, would transform a nightingale into an eagle. In another poem, Iqbal makes an Arab vegetarian poet say the following on the gift of roast partridge a friend had sent him:

Alas! A hundred times alas that you did not become an eagle!
“...The crime of weakness merits instant death.”

The last line is also a neat summation of Iqbal’s understanding of the workings of history.

Iqbal criticizes the teaching institutions of the Muslim world. The teachers, for one thing, have failed to provide the vision and drive the Muslim youth need in order to perform their role with distinction in the world: in Bal-i Jibril, the teachers “are teaching the eaglets how to play with and roll in dust”. Quite naturally, 1qbal sees himself in the role of reminding the eagles-Muslims of their roots and their potentialities:

Those who had been prey for long now have a new vision,
For I have divulged the ways of the falcon.

Occasionally it seems that Iqbal has mentioned the eagle in a negative context. In one poem, for example, God addresses the angels, commanding them to rouse the poor and servile nations of the world to revolt against their rich and powerful but oppressive overlords, saying:

Heat up the slaves’ blood with ardent conviction:
Set the lowly sparrow against the eagle.

But this does not necessarily put the eagle in a bad light. Iqbal here uses the sparrow and the eagle as simple metaphors, without necessarily implying any judgement as to their relative worth, just as in Bal-i-Jibril he speaks of the eagle and the pigeon as different but related manifestations of the allencompassing current of life. In the poem “Conquest of Nature”, Iblis (Satan) asks Adam to choose a life of action over a life of idle peace. Agitation under the net he tells Adam,to turn even a dove into an eagle, and he exhorts Adam to spread the wings of an eagle and spill the “blood of pheasants”. Again, the eagle here does not stand condemned; a life of action symbolized by the eagle is being referred to, only the speaker happens to be Iblis.

Iqbal is perhaps the first poet in the Islamic literary tradition to make an elaborate and consistent use of the eagle to symbolize character. The very mention of the world “eagle” in connection with Iqbal’s poetry conjures up a whole set of distinctive physical, moral and behavioural traits with which Iqbal has endowed his eagle. And as far as the literary genre of the ghazal is concerned, Iqbal is certainly the first one to employ it to write about a subject—the eagle—in a way that broadens the narrow channel of the genre, enabling it to accommodate serious philosophical thought and giving it a unity of structure it probably did not have before. The ghazal is, by definition, devoted to the theme of love between man and woman. Although it had occasionally been used before Iqbal to express quasi-philosophical notions, such use had more to do with mood than with thought. The ghazal, that is to say, might reflect a mood, usually sombre and melancholic, another respect in which Iqbal’s ghazal is different, that passed from philosophical seriousness and fanciful musings to weighty thought. Iqbal effectively redefined, at least for his own purposes, the ghazal, using it to treat a variety of serious subjects and his use of the genre to talk about the eagle should be seen in that larger context.

“The Eagle,” highlights the “ascetic” and freedomloving nature of the eagle: “Mine is the boundlessness of the blue sky!” The eagle shuns the pleasurable but enervating life of the garden, preferring the austere but wholesome environment of the desert. The second poem, “Beyond the Stars” is an exhortation to the eagle to discover new worlds by soaring ever higher– “Do not be content with the world of colour and smell: There are other gardens, and other nests, too”. Iqbal’s addressee here is evidently an eagle that has lost its nest and Iqbal consoles it by saying that there are realms yet to be explored and conquered.

“An Eagle’s Advice to Its Young One,” is the most complete portrait of the Iqbalian eagle, and deserves special attention from the readers. “Live in the world like an eagle, and like an eagle die,” says Iqbal in Javaid Nama. An understanding of the eagle motif in Iqbal’s poetry thus becomes essential to understand Iqbal’s thought and message.

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