Muslim Democracy

The Democracy of Europe – overshadowed by socialistic agitation and anarchical fear – originated mainly in the economic regeneration of European societies. Nietzsche, however, abhors this ‘rule of the herd’ and, hopeless of the plebeian, he bases all higher culture on the cultivation and growth of an Aristocracy of Supermen. But is the plebeian so absolutely hopeless? The Democracy of Islam did not grow out of the extension of economic opportunity, it is a spiritual principle based on the assumption that every human being is a centre of latent power, the possibilities of which can be developed by cultivating a certain type of character. Out of the plebeian material Islam has formed men of the noblest type of life and power. Is not, then, the Democracy of early Islam an experimental refutation of the ideas of Nietzsche?

Nietzsche and Jalaluddin Rumi

Comparisons, they say, are odious. I want, however, to draw your attention to a literary comparison which is exceedingly instructive and cannot be regarded as odious. Nietzsche and Maulana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi stand at the opposite poles of thought; but in the history of thought it is the points of contact and departure which constitute centres of special interest. In spite of the enormous intellectual distance that lies between them these two great poet-philosophers seem to be in perfect agreement with regard to the practical bearing of their thought on life. Nietzsche saw the decadence of the human type around ihim, disclosed the subtle forces that have been working for it, and finally attempts to adumbrate the type of life adequate to the task of our planet, “Not how man is preserved, but how man is surpassed,” was the keynote of Nietzsche’s thought. The superb Rumi—born to the Moslem world at a time when enervating modes of life and thought, and an outwardly beautiful but inwardly devitalising literature had almost completely sucked up the blood of Moslem Asia and paved the way for an easy victory for the Tartar—was not less keenly alive than Nietzsche to the poverty of life, incompetence, inadequacy and decay of the body social, of which he formed a part and parcel.

Here are two interesting comments on the German thinker Nietzsche by Allama Iqbal that were first published in New Era (Lucknow) in 1917.

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What you seek is seeking you -Rumi