4 - Freedom and the Imaginal

The moment of decolonisation witnessed renewed interest in an old idea: the imaginal. What the French scholar of Muslim philosophy and mysticism, Henry Corbin, famously dubbed “the imaginal world” occupied the space between the corporeal and the spiritual, mediating between the two through dreams, images, and forms. While the concept eventually found its way into the thought of Lacan and psychoanalytic parlance through the work of figures like Corbin, its trajectory in the post-colony is less well-known. What should we make of its recovery and study in 1960s Pakistan, for example? This paper explores the concept of the imaginal and the imagination from the “margins” through its exploration and exegesis by the Pakistani intellectual and exile Fazlur Rahman (1919 – 1988). Rahman was at both the centre and the periphery of the post-colonial Pakistani state and deeply invested in questions of freedom and sovereignty, while simultaneously closely aligned with Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship. Placing Rahman’s ideas in historical context, I argue for linking his political thought with his sustained interest in the imaginal, arguing that for Rahman, sovereignty and imagination were intimately connected.