Muhammad Iqbal: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
The impressively learned poet, philosopher, and politician Muhammad Iqbal lived in Lahore at the time when Einstein’s physics shook the scientific establishment and when world wars, revolutionary tyrannies, and movements for independence from the European empires shook the world. As the “Thinker of Pakistan,” he achieved preeminence among Pak intellectuals while ‘thinking Pakistan’—arguing not only for Indian freedom but for a distinct, separate state for Indian Muslims. He held a law degree and a Ph.D. in philosophy, having studied in England (Thomas Arnold introduced him to neo-Hegelian thought) and Germany, where he also read Goethe, Nietzsche, and Heine. His “reconstruction” of Muslim thought shows the influence of the regnant historicism of the philosophers of his time.
“The Qur’an is a book which emphasizes ‘deed’ rather than ‘idea,'” he begins. However, “modern man” is suspicious of religious experience and for their part, Muslims (particularly Sufi Muslims more inclined toward noetic experience than legalism, and therefore more open to philosophy) do not know modern philosophy. He sets his task as an attempt “to reconstruct Muslim religious philosophy with due regard to the philosophical traditions of Islam and the more recent developments in the various domains of human knowledge,” by which he means the correction or supplementation of empirical, Newtonian physics by Einstein. Given this correction, he claims, “the day is not far off when Religion and Science may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies,” harmonies obscured by empiricism, which at best had religion and science operating almost entirely separate tracks.
Iqbal appreciates the difficulties in the process of discovery he undertakes, posing five questions that poetry, religion, and philosophy address:
- “What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live?”
- “Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe?”
- “How are we related to it” [i.e., to the universe’s constitution]?”
- “What place do we occupy in it?”
- “What is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy?”
The answers poetry gives partake of poetry’s character, which is “essentially individual” as well as “figurative, vague, and indefinite.” Religion “in its more advanced forms rises higher than poetry” in that it “moves from individual to society,” while “hold[ing] out the prospect of nothing less than a direct vision of Reality,” a noēsis. The “spirit of philosophy,” for which “there is no such thing as finality,” is “one of free inquiry,” suspicion of “all authority,” and the intention to subject authority to its “purely rational method.” As in Kant, philosophy admits “the incapacity of pure reason to reach the Ultimate Reality,” unlike religion, which operates by faith on the human heart, “unattended by intellect.” Nonetheless, “faith is more than mere feeling,” possessing “something like a cognitive content”; “idea is a vital element in religion.” The conduct it commands cannot leave matters at the permanently zetetic level of philosophic thought. But this should bring pious men not to blind dogmatism but to the understanding that “religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science,” which “may ignore rational metaphysics” as it toils away in its laboratories. Not so, religion, which “can hardly afford to ignore the search for a reconciliation of the oppositions of experience and a justification of the environment in which humanity finds itself.” The rationalization of faith, however, does not mean “the superiority of philosophy over religion,” which “will not submit to the jurisdiction of philosophy except on its own terms.” At the same time, “philosophy cannot give religion an inferior place among its data” because religion “is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action” but “an expression of the whole man.” While philosophy “grasps Reality piecemeal,” religion “grasps it in its wholeness.” “They are in need of reach other for mutual rejuvenation.” Iqbal then quotes “the Prophet himself,” whose “constant prayer” was: “”God! grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things!”—a verse not found in the Qur’an, it is noted.
Of course, Greek philosophy did offer glimpses of reality as a whole. Iqbal rejects Greek philosophy’s hitherto “great cultural force in the history of Islam.” While it “very much broadened the outlook of Muslim thinkers, it, on the whole obscured their vision of the Qur’an.” This was especially true of Socratic philosophy, which brought philosophy down from the heavens, and of Platonism, which rejected sense perception as deceptive. By “read[ing] the Qur’an in the light of Greek thought,” Muslims thinkers overlooked the fact “that the Qur’an was essentially anti-classical.” In overreaction to this, some attempted to find “independent content for religion” in mystical experience, “failing to see that thought and intuition are organically related.” If one restricts philosophic thought to logic, he will end in zeteticism, but “in its deeper movement…thought is capable of reaching an immanent Infinite in whose self-unfolding movement the various finite concepts”—the ‘kinds’ or species that can contradict one another—are “merely moments.” Continuing this Hegelian move, Iqbal adds, “thought is not static; it is dynamic and unfolds its internal infinitude in time like the seed which, from the very beginning, carries within itself the organic unity of the tree as a present fact.” As a result of this falling-away from what Iqbal asserts to be the original insights of Islam, “religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary” for 500 years, while European thought has, again allegedly, taken the earlier Islamic insights and developed them, thereby surpassing the Muslim world in power and influence. No wonder Muslims have been colonized. “It is high time to look at the essentials of Islam.”
To the essentials, then: “The main purpose of the Qur’an is to awaken in man the higher consciousness of his manifold relations with God and the universe.” Like Christianity before it, Islam addresses “the mutual conflict, and at the same time mutual attraction, presented by the two forces of religion and civilization.” Both religions search “for an independent content for spiritual life,” a life that “could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul.” To this quest, Islam adds “the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through”; in practice, this requires “the perpetual endeavor of the ideal to appropriate the real with a view eventually to absorb it, to convert it into itself and illuminate its whole being”—once again, Hegel. Islam “points the way to master [nature] with a view to discover a realistic regulation of life,” and it can do so because “spirit” means the capacity for “creative activity,” man’s capacity to become a “co-worker” with God,” seen initially in “the faculty of naming things,” since “forming concepts of them is capturing them.” In this, the earliest Islamic thinkers were “the founders of modern science,” whose “empirical attitude” “sharpens our insight, and thus prepares us for a more masterful insertion into subtler aspects of human experience,” whereby “our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things…trains us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal.” That is, “the Qur’an opens our eyes to the great fact of change,” of ‘history’ reconceived as the course of events, not simply as a narrative of those events, as the Greeks and other classical Western philosophers had it.
Again like Hegel, Iqbal wants the conquest of nature to be undertaken, in its later stages, “not in the interest of unrighteous desire for domination, but in the nobler interest of a free upward movement of spiritual life,” as a matter of the “heart” as well as of the sense perceptions. The heart is no “mysterious special faculty,” as mystics would have it, in which sensation/sense perception has no part. “Religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion.” “Nor is there anything irreverent in critically examining” religious experience; Muhammad himself tested, questioned, and examined a “psychic Jewish youth,” to see if his claims of spiritual vision were sound. Mysticism does have substantial merits. The “mystic experience” points to an “unanalyzable wholeness” unlike “ordinary rational consciousness,” which “takes…Reality piecemeal,” establishing an “intimate association with a Unique Other Self.” Such an experience “cannot be communicated,” as its states “are more like feeling than thought,” being “untouched by discursive intellect” but nonetheless possessing “a cognitive element” that “seek[s] expression in thought.” And “while religion starts with feeling, it has never, in its history, taken itself as a matter of feeling alone and has constantly striven after metaphysics.” What is more, it has its practical side. The prophets do return to ‘this world.’ They do not effect “a complete break with serial time.” The religious experience uncovers “data” that “cannot be reduced to the data of any other science.” The conflict between religion and the other sciences arises because they bring back different kinds of “data.”
Have we, then, “a test that would reveal” the validity of religious experience, as we do for the other sciences?” Yes: the “intellectual test” and the “pragmatic test.” The intellectual test is “applied by the philosopher,” the pragmatic test “by the prophet.”
Beginning with the intellectual test, Iqbal rejects the proofs for the existence of God offered by the Greek-influenced Scholastics. The cosmological argument—the existence of the universe must have been caused, ultimately by a first cause, infinite regress being impossible—Iqbal rejects on the grounds that to posit a first cause is to negate “the very law of causation on which the whole argument proceeds.” The argument attempts to derive the finite, specific causes that produce specific effects from an infinite first cause, but “the infinite reached by contradicting the finite is a false infinite, which neither explains itself nor the finite which is thus made to stand in opposition to the infinite.” But “the true infinite does not exclude the finite; it embraces the finite without effacing its finitude, and explains and justifies its being.” That is, Hegel is right; we are considering an “unfolding” Reality, one whose dialectic results in synthesis because spirit and matter are aspects of that Reality. The teleological argument—that the structured complexity of the universe, in which all objects move towards ‘ends,’ implying some intelligent being that designs and directs them—fails because it “does no credit to” the “wisdom” of such a designer to say that he “creat[ed] his own difficulties by first creating intractable material,” only to overcome “its resistance by the application of methods alien to its original nature”—order out of chaos, rather in the manner of an sculptor reworking clay—absurdly, clay that he himself created. But “there is really no analogy between the work of the human artificer and the phenomena of Nature.” Nature “constitutes a system of wholly interdependent members; her processes present no analogy to the architect’s work which, depending on a progressive isolation and integration of its material, can offer no resemblance to the evolution of organic wholes in Nature.” Finally, the ontological proof—that everyone can conceive of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and since such a being cannot be confined to the human mind alone, it must exist not only there but in reality—succumbs to Kant’s critique: the concept of a certain amount of money in my pocket doesn’t prove that I have it. “All that the argument proves is that the idea of a perfect being includes the idea of his existence.”
All of these arguments fail because “they look on ‘thought’ as an agency working on things from without.” The problem goes away if we “take thought not as a principle which organizes and integrates its material from the outside, but as a potency which is formative of the very being of its material”—that is, and still again like Hegel, we take thought as immanent to “the original nature of things,” as “their ultimate ground,” constituting “the very essence of their being,” with no dualism. “Thought and being are ultimately one,” and the Qur’an says so, describing reality as “the First and the Last, the Visible and the Invisible.” As experience “unfold[s] itself in time,” it “presents three main levels”: matter, life, and mind/consciousness. Physics deals with matter, “the facts of experience, i.e. sense-experience.” But sense-impressions are filtered from reality through the mind, and the mind now tells us, in Einsteinian physics, along with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, that nature is not an empirical object “situated in a dynamic void,” ruled by the pull of gravity, as Newtonian physics would have it, but “a structure of events”—a historical being—with “the character of a continuous creative flow which thought cuts up into isolated immobilities”—ideas, kinds—out of “whose mutual relations arise the concepts of space and time,” mind and matter. Einstein has shown that Newton’s dualism, of pure materiality opposed to absolute void, is “unworkable.” There is no absolute space because “the object observed is variable; it is relative to the observer; its mass, shape, and size change as the observer’s position and speed change.” This does not imply subjectivism. “The space-time frame does not depend on the observer’s mind; it depends on the point of the material universe to which his body is attached.” Admittedly, Einstein’s theory “deals only with the structure of things, throw[ing] no light on the ultimate nature of things which possess that structure.” It does not prove the existence of God. But it does replace the cyclical movements of Newtonian physics with “the notion of ‘organism,'” the notions of a universe that grows in accordance with its own immanent and creative character. And it shows that the universe “is not a kind of island in an infinite space,” sine “there is no empty space.”
Iqbal distinguishes what he calls the Qur’anic understanding of organicism from Darwinian evolution. Darwin’s “Natural History” still partakes of Newtonianism to the extent that it posits mechanism, not organicism, natural materialism rather than immanence. It posits a nature devoid of spirit. At present, “the various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Naure, and each running away with a piece of its flesh.” Scientists do this because they seek precision, and that is no small benefit. However, “the moment you put the subject of science in the total of human experience it begins to disclose a different character,” and religion demands exactly that placement because it seeks “a complete view of Reality.” “The action of living organisms, initiated and planned in view of an end, is totally different [from] causal action.” Such organisms aren’t billiard balls, moving because an external force compels them. An organism’s behavior cannot be explained “in terms of molecular physics.” “It possesses a career which is unthinkable in the case of a machine,” which is put together by external forces wielded by an external designer or set of designers and runs (when it runs) according to the intention of those ‘externals.’ What is more, as subsequent ‘postmodernists’ will insist, “the application of the mechanistic concepts to life necessitating the view that the intellect itself is a product of evolution, brings science into conflict with its own objective principle of investigation.” Not so, if we reconceive the universe, “not as something static, but as a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow,” even as “my inner life” consists of “an unceasing flux of states” in time.
Following Bergson, who follows Nietzsche in his emphasis of life as immanently creative, Iqbal asserts that our “inner experience” consists of two aspects, “two sides.” The “efficient” self “enters into relation with what we call the world of space”; it is “the practical self of daily life in its dealings with the external order of things which determine our passing states of consciousness and stamp on these states their own spatial feature of mutual isolation.” For the efficient self, time consists of “nothing more than a series of specific and consequently numerable states,” long and short, conceived “along a straight line.” The “appreciative” self, accessible “only in the moments of profound meditation,” sits at “the inner center of experience.” “The unity of the appreciative ego is like the unity of the germ”—the seed—in which “the experiences of its individual ancestors exist, not as a plurality, but as a unity in which every experience permeates the whole.” Being “wholly qualitative,” the appreciative self lives in “a single ‘now,'” an eternal present. God lives this way; the appreciative self is God in us. Iqbal offers an analogy: physical science understands the sensation of the color red as “the rapidity of wave motion the frequency of which is 400 billions per second”—a measurable set of events in sequential time; in contrast, “in the single momentary mental act of perception you hold together a frequency of ave motion which is practically incalculable,” transforming “succession into duration” in a ‘synthesis’ of “all the ‘heres’ and ‘nows'” of the light waves’ motions. “Pure” time “is not a string of separate, reversible instants” but “an organic whole in which the past is not left behind, but is moving along with, and operating in, the present.” As for the present, in terms of duration as perceived by the appreciative self it consists not of the next event, something lying before you, “yet to be traversed,” yet caused by what has gone before. Rather, the future “is given only in the sense that it is present in its nature as an open possibility.” This is the true meaning of the Qur’an’s concept, Taqdir, mistranslated as “destiny.” Taqdir really means “time regarded as prior to the disclosure of its possibilities,” time “freed from the net of causal sequence,” time “as felt and not as thought and calculated.” This kind of time “forms the very essence of things.” “The destiny of a thing then is not an unrelenting fate working from without like a task master; it is the inward reach of a thing, its realizable possibilities which lie within the depths of its nature, and serially actualize themselves without any feeling of external compulsion.” “Every moment in the life of Reality is original, giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable,” a continual process of creative, free activity. Life “constitutes a center of indetermination, and thus falls outside the domain of necessity,” which is why “science cannot comprehend life.” “On the analogy of our conscious experience, then, the universe is a free creative movement.”
In Bergsonian thought, everything is ‘historical.’ “What we call things are events in the continuity of Nature which thought spatializes and thus regards as mutually isolated for purposes of action.” Thought itself “is as much organic as life”; “its real function is to synthesize the elements of experience by employing categories suitable to the various levels which experience presents.” This is Hegelian, except for one crucial point: there is no final synthesis, no ‘end of history.’ As Bergson has it, “the forward rush of the vital impulse in its creative freedom is unilluminated by the light of an immediate or a remote purpose.” Here Iqbal drops off. If “life is only a series of acts of attention,” acts of attention cannot be explained “without reference to a purpose, conscious or unconscious.” Indeed, “ends and purposes form the warp and woof of our conscious experiences,” aiming at “what ought to be.” “Reality is not a blind vital impulse wholly unilluminated by idea. Its nature is through and through teleological.” However, the telos is not predetermined; there is still scope for freedom. “To live is to shape and change ends and purposes and to be governed by them,” as “there is a progressive formation of fresh ends, purposes, and ideal scales of value as the process of life grows and expands.” The purposes of an infant are not those of a child, a child’s not those of an adolescent, and so on, because each change leads to another set of possibilities. The “time-process” of life “brings itself to some sort of a present fulfillment by actively preserving and supplementing the past.” We live in “a growing universe and not an already completed product which left the hand of its maker ages ago.” The Ultimate Reality is “pure duration in which thought, life, and purpose interpenetrate to form an organic unity.” God says “I am.” God is “I am.” “What we call Nature is only a fleeting moment in the life of God,” whose “‘I-amness’ is independent, elemental, absolute.” “Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self.” As the Qur’an has it, Nature is “the habit of Allah.” “Its only limit is internal, i.e. the immanent self which animates and sustains the whole.” Thus, “the knowledge of Nature is the knowledge of God’s behavior” and scientists actually seek “a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego,” “another form of worship.” The phases of God’s life “are wholly determined from within.” “Beneath the appearance of serial duration there is true duration,” “continuous creation” rather than the one-time creation posited by most theologians. “To the Creative Self change cannot mean imperfection,” as “God’s life is self-revelation, not the pursuit of an ideal to be reached. The ‘not-yet’ of man does mean pursuit and may mean failure,” imperfection; “the ‘not-yet of God means unfailing realization of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process,” a “rationally directed creative life.”
This is as far as philosophy, intellectual life, can take us. “The aspiration of religion soars higher than that of philosophy.” The prophetic view, which judges not by seeking causes but by considering the fruits of the life-process, “fully satisfies the intellectual test,” which uncovers “the ultimate ground of all experience” as “a rationally directed creative will which we have found reasons to describe as an ego,” an “Ultimate Ego” to which the Qur’an gives “the proper name of Allah.” Neither infinite in the spatial sense of being inconceivably big, nor “finite in the sense of the space-bound human ego whose body closes him off in reference to other egos,” the Ultimate Ego’s infinity “consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression.” Religion approaches God with respect to His creativity, His knowledge, His omnipotence, and His eternity.
From God’s viewpoint, “there is no creation in the sense of a specific event having a ‘before’ and an ‘after,'” since the universe is not separate from God. God is not holy in the usual theological sense. Our categories of space, time, and matter “are interpretations which thought puts on the free creative energy of God.” The world of matter, for example, “in its real nature,” consists of “one continuous act which thought breaks up into a plurality of mutually exclusive things.” Reality is “essentially spirit,” that is, creativeness. From this Ultimate Ego, “only egos proceed,” only individual things and persons, each an event in “the self-revelation of the ‘Great I am.'” Now, while it is true that “every atom of Divine energy…is an ego,” “there are degrees in the expression of egohood.” Egohood “reaches its perfection in man, which is “why the Qur’an declares the Ultimate Ego to be ‘nearer to man than his own neck-vein.'” Man alone “is capable of consciously participating in the creative life of his Maker.” An ape participates, too, but does not know that he is participating. An ape has no religiosity. It is Man who has been “endowed with the power to imagine a better world, and to mold what is into what it ought to be.” What ought to be is a selection from the many creative possibilities now open to Man in his current state of development.
This leads to a consideration of divine knowledge. Human knowledge, in its usual finitude, is always “discursive”—a “temporal process which moves round a veritable ‘other,’ supposed to exist per se and confronting the knowing ego,” the ‘nature’ that modern science wants to know in order to conquer. God’s knowledge isn’t like that, since to God there is no ‘other.’ “In Him thought and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical.” We humans have no word that can “express the kind of knowledge which is also creative of its object,” if we think of this knowledge as a “single indivisible act of perception which makes God immediately aware of the entire sweep of history, regarded as an order of specific events, in an eternal ‘now.'” Instead, we should understand divine knowledge “as a living creative activity in which the objects that appear to exist in their own right are organically related” to one another in a field of “open possibility,” not as “a fixed order of events with definite outlines.” The theological controversies over predestination miss this “spontaneity of life, which is a fact of actual experience” that theorizing does not lead us to.
The same goes for divine omnipotence. It is not “a blind, capricious power without limits” because it is “intimately related to Divine wisdom,” which reveals divine omnipotence as recurrent, regular, and orderly. “The rationally directed Divine will is good.”
How, then, to explain the existence of evil, experienced in suffering, wrongdoing, pain? Iqbal admits that this question cannot be “finally decided at the present stage of our knowledge of the universe.” We do not “understand the full import of the great cosmic forces which work havoc, and at the same time sustain and amplify life” in “a growing universe.” Morally, this leads neither to optimism nor pessimism but “meliorism.” But we are not entirely without knowledge, here. Iqbal cites the Qur’anic version of the “legend” of Eve and the Serpent, which is not intended as a lesson in history, as it is (he claims) in the Old Testament, but a lesson of “moral or philosophical import.” Indeed, the Qur’an doesn’t mention a serpent at all, naming Satan directly; nor does it say that God formed Eve out of a rib from Adam. As for Adam himself, his initial name is Bashar; ‘Adam’ denotes his capacity as God’s vicegerent on earth. Moreover, “the word Adam is retained and used more as a concept than as the name of a concrete human individual.” The Qur’an has Adam and Eve tasting the fruit of two trees, including the “tree of eternity,” of life. The Qur’an does not have God cursing the earth but on the contrary “declares the earth to be the ‘dwelling place” of man and a “source of profit” to him for the possession of which he ought to be grateful to God.” Thus, the Qur’anic legend “has nothing to do with the first appearance of man on this planet.” Instead, it “indicate[s] man’s rise from a primitive state of instinctive appetite to the conscious possession of a free self, capable of doubt and disobedience,” free of ingrained “moral depravity.” The legend depicts “a kind of waking from the dream of nature with a throb of personal causality in one’s own being.” Adam disobeyed, but this “was also his first act of free choice,” which is why God forgave him for this fulfillment of the nature with which God endowed him. In Islam, then, there is no need for a Redeemer-God, an irrevocable break from Christian teaching. From then on, man was capable of genuine goodness, which is “the self’s free surrender to the moral ideal” in “willing cooperation” with the Supreme Ego and with other human egos. True, man is now capable of genuine evil, as well, but God’s willingness to “take[e] this risk shows His immense faith in man; it is for man now to justify this faith.” Characteristically, Iqbal remarks that good and evil, “though opposites, must fall within the same whole”—exemplifying how “logical judgment separates the elements of a fact only to reveal their interdependence.”
There is more. The Qur’anic legend portrays “man’s desire for knowledge,” his “desire for self-multiplication and power,” and the “conceptual character of human knowledge” (as seen in his assignment, to give names to the other creatures on earth). God did not want Adam to taste the fruit of what Iqbal calls the tree of “occult knowledge” because Adam “sought a short-cut to knowledge.” God wanted man to learn inductively, painstakingly, by “slow accumulation,” not by quick and easy insight. Eden inclined man to take it easy on himself, but “Adam’s insertion into a painful physical environment was not meant as a punishment; it was meant rather to defeat the object of Satan who, as an enemy of man, diplomatically tried to keep him ignorant of the joy of perpetual growth and expansion.” Just as disobedience to God is a moral evil, the errors committed in the course of scientific trials/experiments are necessary steps, intellectual ‘evils,’ on the paths to scientific truth. The editor of this volume elaborates: Such experiential/experimental inductive knowledge is indeed “toilsome and painfully slow, yet this knowledge alone unfolds man’s creative intellectual faculties and makes him the master of his environment and thus God’s true vicegerent on earth.” Unfortunately, too many Muslims have “concentrate[d] on the inner vision,” which “teaches us to leave the arduous ways of conquering Nature and instead to take some easier spiritual ways,” a path that “has done the greatest harm to science.” The same goes for the struggles inherent in the “multiplication of egos,” the increase of the human population which sees many “individualities, each fixing its gaze on the revelation of its own possibilities and seeking its own dominion,” causing the “world-pain which both illuminates and darkens the temporal career of life.” While “at the present stage of the evolution of selfhood…we cannot understand the full import of the discipline which the driving power of pain brings,” we must have “faith in the eventual triumph of goodness,” thanks to God, as “religious doctrine” teaches us.
It is in this attention to right practice that “religious ambition soars higher than the ambition of philosophy.” Religion goes beyond “mere conception” in “seek[ing] a more intimate knowledge of and association with the object of its pursuit.” This requires not so much ratiocination as “the act”—act—of “worship or prayer ending in spiritual illumination.” Prayer has “nothing mystical about it.” It is “a means of spiritual illumination,” a “vital act” whereby “the little island of our personality suddenly discovers its situation in the larger whole of life.” Prayer alone “bring[s] moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture”; on the other hand, “power without vision tends to become destructive and inhuman.” Synthesis, again: “Both must combine for the spiritual expansion of humanity.” And prayer better accomplishes its moral purpose when done congregationally. “The spirit of all true prayer is social,” as even the hermit seeks “the fellowship of God.” “A congregation is an association of men who, animated by the same aspiration, concentrate themselves on a single object and open up their inner selves to the working of a single impulse” while fostering “the sense of social equality.” Most immediately in Iqbal’s time and place, “What a tremendous spiritual revolution will take place, practically in no time, if the proud aristocratic Brahmin of South India is daily made to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Untouchable,” both addressing themselves to “the unity of the all-inclusive Ego, who creates and sustains all egos” in “the essential unity of all mankind.” “The Islamic form of association in prayer, therefore, besides its cognitive value, is further indicative of the aspiration to realize this essential unity of mankind as a fact in life by demolishing all barriers which stand between man and man.”
Much of this has been obscured by the recourse of Muslim thinkers not only to Greek philosophy but also the doctrines and practices of other “creed-communities” Muslims conquered. Notably, Muslims took on the uncompromising dualism of Zoroastrianism, which denies any commonality between Light and Dark, good and evil, while practicing an extreme form of asceticism in response to this metaphysic. “The task of the modern Muslim is, therefore, immense”: to “rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past.” He must begin with what might be considered the fundamental unit of modernity—with the ego, with individuality. In examining his own ego, he will find that his “mental states do not exist in mutual isolation” but rather “exist as phases of a complex whole, called mind.” Unlike the unity of material beings, the mind’s unity has no existence in space; “we cannot say that one of my beliefs is situated on the right or left of my other belief.” The mind isn’t bound by space “in the sense in which the body is space-bound.” The mind experiences time as duration, not as sequence. When the mind thinks logically, or when it desires, or when it feels, these are events within it that no other mind can experience directly, however much it may agree or sympathize.” “God Himself cannot feel, judge, and choose for me when more than one course of action [is] open to me.” And no one else has my memories.
“What is the nature of this ‘I’?” Like all aspects of Reality, the mind is creative. God’s “creative activity” reveals itself to human beings in two ways: in Arabic, Khalq means creation itself, while Amr means direction. “The essential nature of the soul is directive, as it proceeds from the directive energy of God.” Thus, human creativity shares, indeed participates in, purposive Divine creation. It can do so, not because matter is the opposite of mind but because mind and matter, including the body, share in God’s creative energy. It is true that the mind is the aspect of creation that finally consents to the promptings of the body, of emotions, and of forces external to body and mind. This is where the practicality, the active character of religion comes in. “Mind and body become one in action,” not in thought, in ‘theory.’ “The body is accumulated action or habit of the soul,” “undetachable from it.” For example, “When I take up a book from my table, my act is single and indivisible. It is impossible to draw a line of cleavage between the share of the body and that of the mind in this act. Somehow, they must belong to the same system.” That system is Reality, the creation and direction of God, as taught by the Qur’an. “The Ultimate Ego that makes the emergent emerge is immanent in Nature,” and the human ego which is part of Nature, “organizes itself in time, and is formed and disciplined by its own experience,” with “streams of causality flow[ing] into it from Nature and from it to Nature” freely—that is, from within itself. Iqbal cites “the new German psychology,” called Configuration Psychology, which speaks of the Gestalt, whereby there is no Manichean-like break between matter and mind but, instead, the complex phenomenon of life emerges from simple, nonliving chemicals. Similarly, the consent that bespeaks higher-order thought can emerge from the physical thing that is the brain. “The element of guidance and directive control in the ego’s activity clearly shows that the ego is a free personal causality” who “shares in the life and freedom of the Ultimate Ego who, by permitting the emergence of a finite ego, capable of private initiative, has limited this freedom of His own free will” in the form of His commands. “Prayer in Islam,” the conscious seeking of Divine guidance, “is the ego’s escape from mechanism to freedom.” This again ties into the Islamic conception of Kismet.
Admittedly, “a most degrading type of fatalism has prevailed in the world of Islam for centuries.” This only occurred because a wrong-headed set of false Muslims, “the opportunistic Umayyad rulers of Damascus,” pretended to justify their killing of genuine Muslims who had risen up in “popular rebellion” against them at Karbalā. “Thus arose, in spite of open protests by Muslim divines, a morally degrading Fatalism, and the constitutional theory known as the ‘accomplished fact’ in order to support vested interests.” Modern secular philosophers “have furnished a kind of intellectual justification for the finality of the present capitalistic structure of society” along similar, if atheistic, grounds. Iqbal names Hegel and Auguste Comte as instances of such claims, in another instance of his departure from philosophic historicism even as he appropriates its intellectual structure. Nietzsche’s life-philosophy, his vitalism, also historicist and also bearing strong resemblance to Iqbal’s version of Islam, similarly fails insofar as Nietzsche posits eternal recurrence of the same—cyclicality rather than endless creative novelty. On the contrary, “the ego has a beginning in time” and “there is no possibility of return.” “It is with the irreplaceable singleness of his individuality that the finite ego will approach the infinite ego to see for himself the consequences of his past action and to judge the possibilities of his future.” Man will achieve “unceasing reward” consisting “in his gradual growth in self-possession, in uniqueness, and intensity of his activity as an ego,” the more he participates in Divine creativity. “This is the ideal of perfect manhood in Islam.” It consists of ever-increasing intensity of rightly-guided action, which “make[s] the soul grow and save[s] it from corruption.” This intensity includes not only “respect for the ego in myself” but respect for it in others. “Personal immortality, then, is not ours as of right; it is to be achieved by personal effort,” not by God’s grace conceived as a force external to man. “The ego must continue to struggle until he is able to gather himself up, and win his resurrection,” which is “the consummation of a life-process within the ego.” “Man’s present structure, mental as well as physiological,” must not be assumed to be “the last word in biological evolution.”
In the meantime, Iqbal assures his readers that “Heaven and Hell are states, not localities,” “visual representations of an inner fact,” namely, “character.” Hell is “the painful realization of one’s failure as a man,” Heaven “the joy of triumph over the forces of disintegration.” “There is no such thing as eternal damnation in Islam,” so ‘Hell’ is actually beneficial, functioning rather like a this-worldly version of the Roman Catholic’s Purgatory—a “corrective experience, which may make a hardened ego once more sensitive to the living breeze of Divine Grace.” As for the soul-state that is Heaven, “Man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illuminations from an Infinite reality which ‘every moment appears in a new glory'” and every “new situation” offers “further opportunities of creative unfolding” to “a free ego.”
In the final chapters of his book, Iqbal thus turns to a discussion of the way to address these opportunities in this world. While a mystic seeks union with Allah, a prophet seeks to return from his experiences of the divine to social and political life. “The desire to see his religious experience transformed into a living world-force is supreme in the prophet.” But how should the rest of us judge his bona fides? Iqbal advises us “to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.” If you “fix your gaze on some of the ruling concepts of the culture of Islam,” you will “catch a glimpse of the soul that found expression through them.” When mankind existed in its primitive or childlike condition, prophets provided them with “ready-made judgments choices, and ways of action.” Even ancient philosophy operated on the level of “abstract thought which cannot go beyond the systematization of vague religious beliefs and traditions, and gives us no hold on the concrete situations of life”—a rather odd claim, in view of Aristotle’s philosophy, but he is undoubtedly thinking of Platonism, not of the Nicomachean Ethics or the Politics. Once men had matured, however, attaining “reason and the critical faculty,” what Iqbal calls “inductive reason,” such obiter dicta became not only unnecessary but limiting and forms of logic other than deduction, enumerated and described by Aristotle, may be safely discarded. Muhammad “seems to stand between the ancient and the modern world,” speaking of God like an ‘ancient” while “belong[ing] to the modern world” in the “spirit of his revelation,” its inductiveness. “In Islam prophecy reaches its perfection in discovering the need of its own abolition,” which is why Muhammad is the last of the prophets. Islamic prophecy “involves the keen perception that life cannot forever be kept in leading strings; that in order to achieve full self-consciousness, man must finally be thrown back on his own resources.” That is why Islam abolishes priesthood and hereditary kingship. The Qur’an’s “constant appeal to reason and experience,” to “Nature and History as sources of human knowledge,” amount to “different aspects of the same idea of finality.” The end of prophecy signals the beginning of secular enlightenment, albeit a secular enlightenment understood as guided by ever-creating Reality.
“Europe has been rather slow to recognize the Islamic origin of her scientific method.” So were Muslims, who distracted themselves with Greek philosophy for all too long. “The ideal of the Greeks, as [Oswald] Spengler tells us, was proportion, not infinity.” Islam, along with the latest, Einsteinian modern physics, knows otherwise, recognizing “the insufficiency of the static view of the universe,” including the revolving, rotating Newtonian physics of repetitive motion. As for history, its “scientific treatment” offers “a wider experience” of the world, and therefore “a greater maturity of practical reason.” This in turn brings “a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time,” both of which “form the foundation of the Qur’anic teachings”: the unity of human origin and the sense of the reality of time and the concept of Life as a continuous movement in time.” With respect to the origin of human beings, Christianity, “long before Islam, brought the message of equality to mankind,” as Tocqueville remarks. “But Christian Rome did not rise to the full apprehension of the idea of humanity as a single organism.” It retained the monarchic and aristocratic notions of the authority of family ties, blood relations as a title to rule. Its imperialism failed in the face of a backlash against it by peoples it unjustly subordinated (this, glancing at the modern empires that dominated the Muslim nations). As for the relation of time to Life, Ibn Khaldūn’s “chief merit lies in his acute perception of, and systematic expression to, the spirit of cultural movement of which he was a most brilliant product.” In Khaldūn’s writings, “the anti-classical spirit of the Qur’an scores its final victory over Greek thought; for with the Greeks time was either unreal, as in Plato and Zeno, or moved in a circle, as in Heraclitus and the Stoics”—uncreative and purposeless.
Thus, “the world stood in need of a new culture to take the place of the culture of the throne, and the systems of unification that were based on blood-relationship.” Islam provided that culture. This happened because “the world-life intuitively sees its own needs, and at critical moments defines its own direction.” Religious language says “prophetic revelation” but this was “only natural.” “Islam, as a polity,” indeed a regime, “is only a practical means of making” the principle of Tawhid or divine unity (seen in the saying, ‘There is no God but God’)”a living factor in the intellectual and emotional life of mankind,” requiring “loyalty to God, not to thrones.” Further, “since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man’s loyalty to his own ideal nature.” While modern Europe has abandoned the static ‘ideas’ of the ancients for philosophies of experimentation and change without any sound guidance, and while Islam in clinging to “eternal principles” has stagnated, the true teaching of Islam is Ijtihād, which is a mode of legal interpretation that authorizes jurists “to form an independent judgment on a legal question.” In this area, too, Islam has long paralyzed itself by claiming that the laws of the founders of Islam legislated once and for all. With such legalistic rigidity on the one hand, and the “total other-worldliness” of Sufi mysticism on the other, “the Muslim state was thus left in the hands of intellectual mediocrities.” With the 13th-century destruction of Baghdad by the Tartars, “conservative thinkers of Islam focused all their efforts on the one point of preserving a uniform social life for the people by a jealous exclusion of all innovations in the law of Shar‘ia as expounded by the early doctors of Islam.” While this may have been necessary, at least to some extent, in extremis, “in an over-organized society the individual is altogether crushed out of existence.” A “false reverence for past history” stifles “the rearing of self-concentrated individuals” who alone “reveal the depth of life” and “disclose new standards in the light of which we begin to see that our environment is not wholly inviolable and requires revision.” Such false reverence, crucially, “was contrary to the inner impulse of Islam.” This was seen as early as the last years of that century by Ibn Taimīyyah, who wisely asserted “freedom of Ijtihād.” Four centuries later, “the great puritan reformer,” Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb “succeeded in spreading the fire of his restless soul throughout the whole world of Islam.” Wahhābism does rise “in revolt against the finality of the school and vigorously asserts the right of private judgment,” but “its vision of the past is wholly uncritical, and in matters of law it mainly falls back on the traditions of the Prophet.”
Iqbal therefore prefers the form of Ijtihād seen in “the religious and political thought of the Turkish nation,” where the scholar Halim Sabit has grounded Islamic Law “on modern sociological concepts.” Under the rule of Kemal Ataturk, contemporary Turkey upholds statism and nationalism. Politically, “religion has no independent function” in the Kemalist regime. It is confined to civil society. Iqbal cautions that “in Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains, and the nature of an act, however secular in its import, is determined by the attitude of mind with which the agent does it”; “Islam is a single analyzable entity which is one or the other as your point of view varies”—quantum physics being consistent with this. “Islam teaches that the state “is an endeavor to transform” the spiritual ideas of equality, solidarity, and freedom “into space-time forces,” to “realize them in a definite human organization.” The Islamic state is a theocracy in this sense, not in the claim that its ruler or rulers represent God on earth and can shield his or their “despotic will” behind some “supposed infallibility.” That is, the true Islamic state exemplifies not the will to power but the realization of “the spiritual in a human organization.” This means that “the republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also becomes a necessity in view of the new forces that are set free in the world of Islam.” Drawing upon a then-fashionable phrase, Iqbal writes that “Islam is neither Nationalism nor Imperialism but a League of Nations which recognizes artificial boundaries and racial distinctions for facility of reference only, and not for restricting the social horizon of its members.” While “the Turk is on the way to creating new values,” most Muslims countries “are mechanically repeating old values.” Islamic Law is “capable of evolution,” not in the direction of modern liberalism, “a force of disintegration,” nor in the direction of nationalism, which has proven catastrophic in the Great War, but with the Qur’anic direction, the teaching “that life is a process of progressive creation [which] necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.”
“Europe today,” with its nationalism and its capitalism, “is the greatest hindrance in the way of man’s ethical advancement.” “Humanity needs three things today: a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import direction the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis.” These, only Islam can provide, as “spiritual democracy” is its “ultimate aim.” If the initial phase of religion is faithful obedience to the teachings and commands of prophets, if the second phase of religion is “rational understanding” of doctrine and discipline, in the third phase psychology replaces metaphysics and “religion becomes a matter of personal assimilation of life and power,” not by violating religious law “but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness,” “just as it was revealed to the Prophet.” Drowning in its own “ruthless egotism” and “infinite gold-hunger,” which are “bringing him down to nothing but life-weariness,” modern man needs the spiritual awakening Islam offers. He will then be prepared “for participation in the march of history.”
The rival anti-egoist and anti-capitalist internationalism, “modern atheistic socialism,” has “received its philosophical basis from the Hegelians of the left wing,” revolting against God, against “the very source which could have given it strength and purpose.” Like nationalism, it “must draw upon the psychological forces of hate, suspicion, and resentment which tend to impoverish the soul of man and close up his hidden sources of spiritual energy.” Atheism valorizes science, but “the truth is that the religious and scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim”: to reach what is “most real.” So long as neither science nor religion becomes self-absorbed, they are “complementary processes,” each “directed to the purification of experience in their respective spheres.” Once purified, the individual will understand himself not merely as a thinker, not merely as a being, someone who is, but as a being who acts, someone who can. “The final act is not an intellectual act, but a vital act which deepens the whole being of the ego, and sharpens his will with the creative assurance that the world is not something to be merely seen or known through concepts, but something to be made and re-made by continuous action” in full participation with God, who does the same thing around and through Man.
Recent Comments