Eqbal Ahmad on the power of repetition: Muhammad lqbal, the Sufi poetry tradition and bird song as alchemy

Over the last twenty years, Chomsky has repeated himself a lot, something he doesn't quite do in linguistics. But he is teaching many people. I have yet not learned from him this powerful thing-namely, that truth has to be repeated. It doesn't become stale just because it has been told once. So keep repeating it. Don't bother about who has listened, who has not listened. He knows that the media and the other institutions of power are so powerful that telling the truth once is not enough. You've got to keep repeating different facts, prove the same point. If you will forgive me for saying it-Chomsky probably wouldn't like this expression, given how secular a man he is-his power of repetition almost resembles a Sufi chant. Sufis have a rule. They discover a principle, and that principle is repeated. The difference is that theirs was a spiritual principle, and his is a secular one. Theirs was for salvation; his is for liberation. The power of repetition is just extraordinary.

So I have pointed out to people how I read that in Morocco to repeat a story was not considered bad but rather more like resonance. In the West we are taught that repetition is bad, even a sign of idiocy. I had this discussion with Professor - in Australia - so many of them that I've conferred with. Michael Corballis. He claimed that only humans have syntax that has a recursive structure - a kind of hierarchical vortex of sub-texts. I argued that actually we humans project our linear sense of time on reality without realizing that bird songs are also recursive, only the repetition is a nonlinear infinite resonance. In other words to truly understand bird song is to also understand Sufi mantra chanting or Indian Japa meditation (internal word repetition).

As far as I recall I had Eqbal Ahmad as a professor at Hampshire College. I would need to check my notes stored away - letters or what not - to reconfirm this truth. I didn't realize he was a "famous" leftist activist at the time.

https://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/hampshire/mah007.html#ser5

They have his research notes - I'm trying to remember the text book we used for his class - it was an excellent critique of the World Bank and IMF.

Talk about the Sufi tradition in the subcontinent. The mystical tradition in Islam is known as Sufism.1 Those who follow that tradition are known as Sufism.8 The word comes from suf, which means "wool." These people originally wore very simple, coarse, woven woolen clothing-hence "Sufi," those who wear coarse clothing. I should say that there is a misconception arising out of Orientalist literature on Islam in India that the people of India converted in large numbers to Islam as a result of coercion: "Islam is spread by the sword." This is an incorrect impression. The spread of Islam in the subcontinent is the work of the Sufis, who preached by their example. By and large, they were not proselytizers. They were people who went and lived in the community, Hindu and Muslim, and served it. They lived by service and by setting an example of treating people equally without discrimination. Since India was divided so rigidly by caste, they appealed particularly to the untouchables,  the lowest Hindu caste. The Sufis offered social mobility, as well as dignity and equality to the poor. You find in the subcontinent a great deal of Sufi worship. Nearly every part of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh has a shrine. My village had one. Typically members of both communities, Hindus and Muslims, will celebrate the birth or the death anniversary of that particular saint whose shrine it is. What are your views on religion? I am very harshly secular. But let's be clear about what "secular" means to me, and ought to mean generally to everybody else. In its original meaning, it doesn't mean that you are irreligious or that you are opposed to religion. Secular to me means that the laws of the state, the laws of society, will not be enacted in accordance with some divine injunction; they will be enacted in response to the needs of society

So this is NEWS to me.

 When you are seeing signs of the divine or living out spiritually, morally, the life of a Muslim or a Hindu as you understand the spirit of your religion, that's ruhaniyat. I think I am Muslim in the sense that I am not at all concerned with form. I am much more concerned with spirit. Spirit means certain things to me. The universal in Islamic civilization is important to me. The emphasis on developing the internal resources of persons is important. The emphasis on a higher morality is very important. The sources of these values for me are
both secular and religious. They are simultaneously Islamic and philosophically learned from studying secular Islamic and secular Western literature. There are several Iqbal couplets that I'd like to discuss with you. Let's take one of his famous ones: "Love plunged into Nimrod's fire without hesitation. Meanwhile, reason is on the rooftop, just contemplating the scene. 9Here Iqhal is saying something very powerful about love versus intellect. This is Sufi thought, Islamic mystical thought. It's also true, by the way, of Christian, Jewish, and Hindu mysticism. All mysticisms have some common features. In Islamic mystical thought, there are pairings. There is a continuous dialectical interplay of opposites-not just one, but a whole set of them. Zahir and hatin. That which is apparent and that which is hidden. Visible versus invisible. Good versus evil. Ishq, love, versus aql, reason. The conception is that there is a continuous interplay of these opposing realities, the reality of love and the reality of reason, within the human being. The reality of the visible, perceived, versus the unperceived, the felt. Human personality attains its greatness as it learns, as it trains itself, to resolve these contradictions within itself. In Sufi thought, love, always takes precedence over reason. lqbal is saying here that love jumped into the fire of Nimrod to oppose him without a sense of danger, without fear, while reason is still watching from the sidelines. The couplet means that there are certain situations in which love must overcome reason and logic. The pattern and contrast are classic. One of the things that struck me when I lived in India was how people who would he technically described as illiterate would recite poems by Iqbal or Mir Taqi Mir or Mirza Ghalib or Faiz with considerable skill.

So for the past several days I got to enjoy the beautiful repetition of the Veery songbird - a neotropical bird that flew across the world and is considered one of the most beautiful songs on the planet. It sang its multiphonics as a downward spiral - outside my tent - in the morning.

Though still fairly common, the species has declined by 30 percent since 1966.

Then I correctly identified one of the Flycatcher nests as the rare Yellow-bellied Flycatcher! I had never heard of it before....Will this have the song?

 https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Yellow-bellied_Flycatcher/sounds

I will double check to be sure but I'm 90% sure it's a Yellow-bellied. I have also the other Flycatchers I think - Willow and Alder Flycatchers.

The Conference of the Birds - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds

The Conference of the Birds or Speech of the Birds is a celebrated literary masterpiece of Persian literature by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, commonly known as ...

 

We now know that bird song helps plants take in the nutrients from the morning dew - the condensation - as the bird higher harmonics resonate the plant stomata to open up to suck in the water nutrients.

 

That is also the secret of alchemy - as depicted in the Western alchemy tradition also. A book called Mutus Liber.

 

 

In the recent SFQ newsletter qigong master Chunyi Lin emphasized the secret of mantra japa repetition is from the power of the collective spiritual unconscious - the history of that stored up energy from thousands of years of people doing the same mantra. That is true although there is a deeper and simpler explanation.

Even the bird songs are proven now to prefer the natural harmonics as complementary opposites. Even Mosquitoes are proven to use the Perfect Fifth interval for their mating call! Even the frogs rely on "antiphonal" communication between the males and the females. Even whales "lower" their mating songs to better attract the females. Clearly the voice as jing life force energy is found throughout nature - as Chickadees doing "frequency matching" to the lowest male - to better attract the females.

The secret of alchemy is that the subharmonics of the natural number frequencies have a STRONGER amplitude increase. This is why OM from the heart resonates from the ultrasound frequencies.