 Special
thanks to Iqbal Academy Pakistan
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Search the Republic of Rumi
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| Charles
Baudelaire
Only the wealthiest citizens were
entitled to vote in most European “democracies”
in the early nineteenth century. In 1848, France extended
the right to males from all segments of the French society,
including the workers. This disgusted the young French
aristocrat Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who was going
to note in his journal:
There is no form
of rational and assured government save an aristocracy.
A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally
absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements.
There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest,
the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create.
The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are
born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what
they call professions.
In 1857, he published his anthology,
Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil),
and wrote in the prefatory poem, “Hypocrite reader!
My mirror, my twin!” The general public was outraged
but the elite – social as well as intellectual –
came out to patronize their child.
Poets and artists had usually upheld
faith – Homer, Rumi, Shakespeare, Goethe and others.
Some, like Hafez, Mir Taqi Mir of Delhi and the British
Shelley, had celebrated unbelief but only to protest against
the hypocrisy of the self-righteous. Why did Baudelaire
and his elitist followers openly proclaim hypocrisy to
be their literary ideal? Iqbal seems to have answered
this indirectly in his private notebook, Stray Reflections,
in 1910:
The imperial ambitions
of the various nations of Europe indicate that the Westerners
are tired of Democracy. The reaction against Democracy
in England and France is a very significant phenomenon.
But in order to grasp the meaning of this phenomenon the
student of political sciences should not content himself
merely with the investigation and discovery of the purely
historical causes which have brought it about; he must
go deeper and search the psychological causes of this
reaction.
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The
Worldview of Iqbal
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