Uncanny affinities: a translation of Iqbal's preface to Payam-e Mashriq

Abstract

This essay is an indirect meditation on Benjamin's understanding that the ‘past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption’. By revealing the entanglement of visions of Islam in Goethe, late romanticism in Iqbal, and the elaboration of critiques of modernity across the metropolitan-colonial divide, the translator's preface delineates the shape of postcolonial possibilities embedded in dead futures. Iqbal's Urdu preface to his famous collection of Persian poems Payam-e Mashriq (Message of the East) is rendered definitively into English with a critical apparatus, and an account is given of how his encounter with Goethe made possible experiments with subjectivity in the modality of infinite reflection.