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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Pantheism is generally defined as “all is God and God is all (I) but it can therotically assume two different forms. First, it is said that the finite and temporal world is nothing in front of God, and it is swallowad up by the sole absolute Reality of God, or in the second instance, God is considered as dissolved in the world, poetically sung or scientifically demonstrated as a Whole, in which an immanent Life-Energy acts. In both cases, however, what most sharply distinguishes pantheism from non-pantheism (or theism) is the fact that God is always considered by pantheists as something impersonal; pantheists generally affirm the superiority of their view on theistic “inferior” forms of religion pointing out that (a) calling God a “person” restricts and diminishes His greatness, as it necessarily implies a body and a limitation, (b) pantheistic piety is not a feeling of devotion of an Ego to a Thou, but rather the sensation of being a part belonging to a Whole, a wave in the immense sea of Being.
1. Hasting's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, IX, 609.
2. R. Otto. Das Hellige, Munchen, 1947. XXVIII ed. p. 142 and 213
3. i.e. the only God really worth serving adoring, and loving, for he is the most artistically working of all. Cf. the Quranic 
and the often reiterated challenges of the Holy Quran to other “Gods” to do what God has been capable of doing.
4. In the following quotations I follow Prof. R.A. Nicholson's translation.
5. The ideal of personality in sufism, 1923, Quoted in Vahid's, syed Abdul Iqbal: His Art and Thought. Lahore II ed. 1948 p. 95–96.Google Scholar
6. Lawa'ih, A treatise on Sufism by Nur-ud-Din Abd-ur-Rahman Jaml…with a translation by E.H. Whinfield and Mirza Muhammad Kazvini…London, 1906 p. 44. The entire treatise of Jaml is imbued with pantheistic ideas, and also in the quoted quatrain it would be difficult to give hagigat the meaning of a personal God. Anyhow Mr. Whinfield's perhaps involuntary translation of idealist, confronted with the original, is very apt to convey to the mind of the reader the difference between pantheistic and theistic conception of hagigat.
7. About this idea of second birth of Personality, see also the words Iqbal attributes to Rumi at the beginning of Javedname.
8. See Nicholson's note III daftar. p. 109. So his famous misra 
could easily be reversed in 
9. It is unnecessary to explain to Muslim readers who Khizr was. I would only like to point out the deeply modern way in which that difficult and obscure passage of the Holy Quran is explained by Rumi. About the infinite progress of man even in the other World sometimes this Quranic verse has also been quoted (LXVI, 8).
The conception that not only in this world but even in the Paradisiacal plane there always remains a Mystery, and then, an element of striving to solve it, is also to a seen in Dante's Divine Comedy (Paradise XXI, 91-96) when S. Pier Damian! answering a difficult question from Dante about predestination and free will says to Him:
Ha-quell'alma nel ciel che piu si schiara
Quel serafin che in Dio piu I'occhio ha fisso alla domanda tua non satisfara
Pero che si s'inoitra nell'abisso
dell'eterno statuto quel che chiedi
che da ogni creata vista e scisso
10. In his Six Lectures Iqbal calls it “serial time”.
11. In some Buddhist texts for instance the human body is described, in powerful imagery but more powerful pessimism as a mass of blood, excrements and bones, trying to eradicate from the feelings of man any slightest trace of admiration for beauty in Nature.
12. The famous Russian philosopher and mystic V.S. Soloviov has some deep considerations on the supreme temptations in his Spiritual Fundamentals of Life (Duhovnyia Osnovy Zhizni, 1884). Italian ed. Bologna 1922. p. 46 ff.Google Scholar
13. Note here again the original way in which God is Introduced as a personal living power who almost Jokes with men and angels like the cat with the mouse.
14. The character of Iblis is described in a very original way in the Masnavi, which in this too is the chief source of Iqbal's ideas on Iblis. Particularly interesting is the story of Iblis and Mu'awiya and the wonderful yet deceitful words put into the mouth of Iblis about his longing for his former state, his nostalgia for Heaven (Masnavi 11, 2617 ff.),
15. Cf. the Quranic assertion 
16. God is even so “cruel” as to act with man in the manner Rumi describes in the words (Masn. III, 4462 ff.) “In the course of events your resolutions and purposes now and then come right and are fulfilled, in order that through hope of that fulfilment your heart may form an intention and that he may once more destroy your Intention. For if He were to keep you wholly unsuccessful, your heart would despair: how would it sow the seed of expectation? And unless it sowed the seed of expectation how from its barrenness would its subjection to the Divine become apparent to it? By their failures the lovers are made aware of their Lord. in success is the guide to Paradise!”
17. See Lectures, Lahore ed., 1930 p. 163.
18. A study of Rumi's attitude towards the problem of free-will would be extremely Interesting but it is rather out of place here. The verses quoted are intended only to show how a personalistic view of Religion could brilliantly solve the problem.
19. About the exterior similitude and real differences between the conceptions of fana and nirvana, see the penetrating and interesting article of the Italian orientalist, M.M. Moreno. Mistica Husulmana -eMistica Indiana. (Muslim and Hindu Mystics) In Annall Lateremensi, X., 1946. Rome.
20. In order to understand what I mean by intensive Time in God a re-reading of Iqbal's wonderful discussion on Time in His Lectures would be necessary. Iqbal, with Bergson, considers appreciative Time, or duree, as a fundamental element of consciousness and personality. Thus, an element of Time is Introduced even into the deepest and innermost receptacles of Personality; moreover, personality means life in real Time, unadulterated by spatial Imaginations. But to exist in real time means to create. Free creation is the living symbol of appreciative Time. So if God creates, there must be present in Him an element of Time. But Iqbal, criticizing Bergson's keeping too sharp a distinction between elan vital and spatialising thought, finds, in the Idea of a teleological plan created by a God-Person a brillian solution to the dilemma between purely Intellectualistlc teleology (denying reality to Time) and chaotic elan vital.
21. For Instance, it is a pity that such an insufficient study, as that of Carra de Vaux in the Encyclopaedia of islam be dedicated to so great and important a personality in islamic thought as Rumi.
22. A very clear definition of ghazal is to be found in the extremely interesting article by H.H. Scheeder in Zaitschrift der Dentschen'Morgenlandischen Geselischaft, on Insanu-l-Kamil (1925, pp. 192 ff.) (Die Islamische Lehre vons vollkommenon menchen, ihra Merkunft und ihre dichterische Gestaltung i.e. the Islamic doctrine on Perfact Man, its origin and its poetical elaboration, pp. 255-61 are dedicated to Rumi).
