The New Temple Mohammad Talib introduces this poem by Muhammed Iqbal, which he quoted in his talk to the Oxford SOF Conference in September.
I shall tell the truth, O Brahman, but take it not as an offence:
The idols in your temple have decayed.
You have learnt from these images to bear ill-will towards your own people, and God too has taught his preachers the ways of conflict.
My heart was sick: I turned away both from the temple and the ka'abah, from the sermons of the preacher and from your fairy tales, O Brahman.
To you the divine resides in stone idols: for me, every particle of my country's dust is deity.
Come, let us reconcile those that have turned away from each other, remove all signs of division.
Desolation has reigned for long in the habitation of my heart.
Come let us build a new temple in this land.
Let our shrine be higher than any on the earth, let us raise its spire till it touches the edge of sky, let us awake every morning to sing the sweetest songs, and give all worshippers the wine of love to drink.
There is power, there is peace in the songs of devotees:
The salvation of all dwellers on the Earth is in love.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938) advocated the political and spiritual renewal of Islamic civilisation across the world, but specifically in South Asia.
Iqbal’s poetry and philosophy, written in Urdu and Persian, emphasises the Islamic and spiritual redemption through self-development, moral integrity, and individual freedom. Some of his poems highlighting the theme are The Secrets of the Self (1915), A Message from the East and a series of lectures put together as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934). His poem Naya Shivala (The New Temple) laments that the institutions of religion and their ideas and artefacts have divided people. In his relentless search for the divine, he proposes to build a new temple, but this time not in bricks and mortars but in the heart of the believer.
There is a deliberate non-conformism in this poem.
The poet enjoys such respect across the religious divide and within the heart of institutionalised religion that the reference to Brahaman, ka’abah or temple causes no offence to readers and above all, no one interprets these literally. Iqbal’s notion of love draws upon the poetry and the thoughts of the Sufis, in particular Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi, a persian Sufi sage and poet (1207-1273). The Sufis contrasted love with faith based on knowledge from books, personal experience of the divine with undiscerning acceptance of truth from authorities. * Mohammad Talib is Professor of Anthropology at the, Oxford University Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
Introduced by Mohammed Talib. Poetry translated and included in the Oxford SOF Conference.