The Devil's Council

Iblees ki Majlis-e-Shura — 'The Devil's Council' — is one of the last great poems Iqbal wrote, composed in 1936 and placed in his final collection, Armughan-e-Hijaz. It is a poem of dark satire, and its method is to let evil speak in its own voice.

The scene is a council of advisers. Iblees — Satan — sits with five of his ministers, and they review the state of the world he has worked to shape. One after another the advisers raise the threats they see to the Satanic order, and one after another Iblees considers, and mostly dismisses, their alarm.

What the poem identifies as the Devil's order is striking. Iblees takes credit for the major systems of the modern West — for the craze of capitalism in the wealthy, for dressing the rule of the few in the borrowed clothes of democracy. The whole apparatus of domination, the poem suggests, is a structure evil is content to maintain, because it keeps human beings asleep.

The advisers worry about communism, about democratic revolt, about the unrest of the age. Iblees waves these aside. Such movements, he argues, are upheavals he can absorb or redirect; they do not threaten his deepest hold on the human soul. Then, near the end, he names what he genuinely fears.

The fear is the awakened believer — a faith that produces upright, self-possessed, justice-demanding human beings who cannot be bought or frightened. Iqbal puts the highest tribute to his own ideal into the mouth of its enemy: the Devil himself testifies that a living faith is the one force that could undo him.

Formally the poem is a sequence of speeches in a flowing dramatic metre, each minister and the Devil given a distinct turn. The satire is cold and controlled, and the device of confession-by-the-enemy gives the poem an unsettling power.

Iblees ki Majlis-e-Shura endures because of that final twist. By having evil itself describe what it is most afraid of, Iqbal turns a poem of critique into a poem of challenge — and tells the reader, by indirection, exactly what kind of person and what kind of faith the world's machinery of domination cannot survive.