Iqbāl’s Community of Exiles, Up on Jupiter

Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), who influenced generations of writers, thinkers, and politicians within and beyond South Asia, transmuted the Prophet Muḥammad’s heavenly journey into a versified epic: the Jāved-nāmah . I focus on Jupiter, one station of this journey, to illustrate how the Jāved-nāmah ’s defiant congeries of literary genres envisions a community of dissent and resistance. I argue that Iqbāl’s curated collection of certain legendary figures as rebels in exile provides an archetypal model for a cosmopolitanism that is sorely needed today: a broadly conceived, multigenerational community whose deep roots in dialogue (and the dialogic poetic tradition of the ġhazal) and multipositionality (embodied by the figure of the harjāʾī ) allow it to transcend superficial political and religious divisions.