Prologue in Heaven

See also Chapter 65, 'De ja Vu' in The Republic of Rumi: a Novel of Reality

‘The Prologue in Heaven’ in Javid Nama (1932) offers a parable where the Sky taunts the Earth for being lightless on the Day of Creation, and a heavenly voice consoles the Earth by predicting the future greatness of the human being.

The parable allows itself to be interpreted with reference to three different periods in Time:

1. at its face value, the incident occurs when the Universe was first created, long before the appearance of the human being;
2. symbolically, the conflict repeated itself soon after the creation of the human being, when the Devil refused to bow down before Adam for reasons very similar to those stated by the Sky in the parable;
3. in modern times, scientific evidence challenged the classical perception of the earth as the centre of the universe, and reassigned that position to the Sun instead; the perception of the human being as a special creation also came under attack.

Hence the parable depicts a recurring conflict in history (“The flame of Abu Lahab has been contending against the lamp of Prophet Muhammad, from the beginning of eternity up to this date,” Iqbal says in a poem titled ‘Evolution’ in The Call of the Marching Bell).

Obviously, the conflict is whether human beings are mere objects – as contended by the Sky, the Devil and the modern science – or whether they have a transcendent element. It is remarkable that while transcendence is usually symbolized by the Sky, it becomes associated with the earth in the parable told by Iqbal. The Sky, on the contrary, becomes a denier of this transcendence.

Interestingly, this is mirrored in several other passages in the works of Iqbal, such as the parable of the Sheikh and the Brahmin (see Chapter 15 in A Novel of Reality) and such Urdu verses in The Blow of Moses (1936), as: “This wisdom of the Realm of the Angels, and all the knowledge about the Dimensionless Realm, is nothing if it has no cure for the suffering of the Kabah.”