Daily Times

Iqbal acknowledged Nietzsche in his short poem “Hakeem Nietzsche” or “Learned Sage Nietzsche” and mentioned him in his celebrated poetic work Payam e Mashriq or “Message of the East” (1923), a response to Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan. About Nietzsche Iqbal sighed, “His heart is that of a believer’s but his brain that of an infidel’s.” For Nietzsche, religion represented the “herd mentality” and needed to be rejected. For Iqbal, religion was the door to explore the mysteries of the universe and man’s place in it, thereby finding salvation. While the thrust of Nietzsche’s thinking is to attack the structure and thought of Christianity, and thereby implicitly the notion of God, Iqbal is moving in the opposite direction.

Although Iqbal had been intellectually engaging with Western philosophers like Goethe, his tone with Nietzsche was different to the one he used for Goethe. Nietzsche’s lack of spirituality for Iqbal casts the German outside the pale. Iqbal is almost cruel in his denunciation of Nietzsche. He accuses Nietzsche of plunging a dagger into the heart of the West and says that his hands were soaked with Christ’s blood. Had Nietzsche been alive, Iqbal wrote, I would have taught him how to be a decent and moral person.

There was another dimension to the relationship between the two philosophers. The charge that Iqbal’s thought was too close to Nietzsche’s for comfort could have accounted for Iqbal’s bitterness towards Nietzsche. It was as if he was somewhat wary of him and was attempting to push him away. Perhaps Iqbal was sensitive to critics suggesting he had borrowed the concept of the Superman to create the concept of the Perfect Man. Iqbal went to great lengths to distinguish his concept of the Perfect Man from that of Nietzsche’s Superman. Iqbal stated emphatically, “I wrote on the Sufi doctrine of the Perfect Man more than twenty years ago, long before I had read or heard anything of Nietzsche.” His Perfect Man could not be perfect without a strong spiritual component.

Still, commentators picked up the similarities. We see this in wide-ranging commentary from the novelist E. M. Forster’s review of Iqbal’s Asrar-e-Khadi, “Secrets of the Self,” in 1920 to Omer Ghazi who in 2018, ignoring the high respect Iqbal enjoys in Pakistan as the national poet, used a scattershot approach to accuse Iqbal of virtually everything under the sun: “his poetry is filled with racism, anti-semitism, jingoism, communal hatred, hyper-nationalism, religious fanaticism, anti-intellectualism and calls for bloodshed.” The title of Ghazi’s article, published in Heartland Analyst, was “Why Allama Iqbal needs to be condemned, not celebrated.” In the long list of items that deserve condemnation, the author claims, “Iqbal later plagiarized his whole idea of Mard-e-Momin [the Perfect Man] from the philosophy of Ubermensch put forth by the same Western Madman decades ago.”

Ironically Nietzsche was long dead when Hitler came to power; his mental collapse began the year Hitler was born in 1889. In any case, Nietzsche’s aversion to the Nazi kind of mentality was well known and is explicit in his work

Forster in his review was less direct, hinting in his typically cultured way, that Iqbal may have taken his concept of the Perfect Man from Nietzsche while acknowledging Iqbal’s “tremendous name among our fellow citizens, the Muslims of India.” “What is so interesting,” Forster writes of Iqbal, “is the connection that he has effected between Nietzsche and the Quran. It is not an arbitrary or fantastic connection; make Nietzsche believe in God, and a bridge can be thrown.”

Forster’s discussion of Iqbal here fits in to his larger pattern of treating Muslims with affection, even with reverence. Whether describing the Mughal emperor Babar or Sir Ross Masood, the grandson of Sir Syed Ahmed, to whom he dedicated one of his most popular novels, A Passage to India, or indeed the lead character in that novel, Dr. Aziz, his affection for Muslims is apparent.

For me, the argument of who first discovered the concept of a Superman or Perfect Man is really a non-argument. It is perhaps the concept and title of Superman that really catches the imagination. Neither Nietzsche’s Superman nor Iqbal’s Perfect Man are original concepts. There is a long list of supermen in Western culture that Nietzsche would have known of, as noted above. As for Iqbal, his concept of the Mard-e-Momin or the Insan-iKamil is a concept deeply embedded in Islamic literature and Iqbal himself refers to Rumi and other mystics who write of the Insan-iKamil. From the very origins of Islam, the Prophet of Islam has been cast in the mold of the Insan-iKamil. Indeed, it has been the ambition of every great Muslim poet to write a tribute to the Prophet in precisely these terms.

Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead was also not entirely original. European philosophers had been arguing for the supremacy of science without which they felt there could be no progress and therefore they needed to put away the idea of God. In effect Marx had already pronounced God dead when he declared religion to be the “opium of the people.” Darwin had posed a secular and godless explanation for evolution and before him Napoleon had indicated he did not believe in a specific God though in a general sense he went along with spirituality. While Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead was not entirely original, what is interesting is his suggestion of taking the blame in his use of “we” for the death of God in his following sentence, “and we have killed him”.… he has “bled to death under our knives.” Indeed Nietzsche describes God, which in this context would also include Jesus Christ, as the “holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned.” This hints at a certain guilty sentimentality for killing off God that has perhaps escaped his critics. While Nietzsche constantly attacks Christianity, his respect for Jesus is clear, as seen in his statement published in The Will to Power, “What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done.”

If my premise is correct that Nietzsche may have consciously or subconsciously borrowed aspects of his Superman from the notion of the Perfect Man through sources like Goethe then it changes the nature of the debate between Iqbal and Nietzsche. Iqbal wants to pull the German closer to Islam; but Nietzsche is not really resisting. He has declared that God is dead but at the same time he is constantly praising Islam and at the center of Islam is the notion of God and the Prophet of Islam; together they form the primary declaration of the Islamic faith.

Iqbal’s treatment of Nietzsche raises some pertinent questions which lie beyond the scope of this article. The first question is: are only faithful and practicing Muslims eligible to become Perfect Man? Nietzsche’s own concept of the Superman had no such restrictions. Why did Iqbal fail to see the yearning for Islam in Nietzsche? Was it a methodological failure or mere human petulance?

Nietzsche’s Legacy

It is Nietzsche’s misfortune that in a profound sense his reputation was compromised by the admiration Hitler and the Nazis had for him. Ironically Nietzsche was long dead when Hitler came to power; his mental collapse began the year Hitler was born in 1889. In any case, Nietzsche’s aversion to the Nazi kind of mentality was well known and is explicit in his work. Nietzsche’s philosophic position was diametrically opposed to the rigid certainties of the Nazis. Nietzsche’s ideas, like “the will to power,” make abundantly clear he rejects “certainties” and “absolutes” while emphasizing his ideas were merely “interpretations.” As he lay stricken in bed in a state of mental collapse it was his sister who successfully projected him as a Nazi sympathizer by distorting his image. Hitler even visited the museum she ran in her brother’s name and photographs were taken of the occasion. By attending her funeral Hitler consolidated the status of her brother as a German icon in the Nazi era; it also forever damned Nietzsche in the eyes of those who loathed Hitler. It was difficult to reconcile the man on the mountain in Thus Spake Zarathustra who had gathered love and wisdom to share with humanity with the vile philosophy of hatred and violence promoted by the evil ideology of the Nazis.

In spite of Hitler and the Nazis embracing it enthusiastically, the concept of the Superman, as we have seen, is not that of hard-eyed and chiseled-jawed muscular young men in jackboots searching for members of the minority, but one of self-fulfillment and betterment. Decades after Nietzsche’s death, it was the word-Superman-that to the arrogant Nazis seemed to fit like a glove in their demented dreams of world conquest and racial superiority.

The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, and author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity