REASON AND FAITH IN THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF IQBAL

Part 2

AZIZAN BAHARUDDIN

God and Nature

(Continued from the previous Issue)

Iqbal did not subscribe to the mechanistic view of the world, space and time.[1] In this context, it can be seen from the Reconstruction that he found support for his ideas from such thinkers as William James and Whitehead.[2] According to the mechanistic view there is present in experience, an external world which exists in its own right, independently of its appearance to the mind of the individual observer. This conception leads to a materialistic position.[3] He knew that the scientific view of nature as pure materiality was associated with the Newtonian view of space as an absolute void in which all things are situated.

Iqbal was of the opinion that if physics constituted a really coherent knowledge of perceptibly known objects, then the traditional theory of matter must be rejected because it reduced the evidence of the senses, on which alone the physicist and experimenter must rely, to a mere impression of the observer’s mind.[4] He added further that, between nature and the observer of nature, the theory then created a gulf which had to be bridged by the hypothesis of an imperceptible something occupying space like a thing and causing sensation by some kind of impact. Quoting Whitehead, he concluded that the theory reduced one half of nature to a dream and the other half to a mere conjecture’. So physics had found it necessary to criticise its own totally materialistic foundations.[5] Thus although he did not deny the existence of matter, he did deny its substantiality and in this he found support in the realativity theory which broke down not only the objectivity of nature but the view of substance as simple location in space.[6] For him nature was not a static fact situated in a dynamic void, but a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow which thought cuts up into isolated immobilities out of whose relations arise the concepts of space with time.”[7] It is a process of becoming.’ Nature is seen more as an event or series of events than as a thing or things; i.e. “the universe which seems to us to be a collection of things is not a solid stuff occupying a void. It is not a thing but an act.”[8]

Although matter exists, it is not that which is “elementally incapable of evolving the synthesis we call life and mind and needing a transcendental Deity to impregnate it with the sentient and mental”.[9] Iqbal defined matter as “a colony of egos of a low order out of which emerges the ego of a higher order, when their association and interaction reach a certain degree of coordination.”[10]

Iqbal believed therefore that an analysis of conscious experience throws light on the nature of matter, space and time. The point is that just as he wanted to show the continuity between the physical and the spiritual under the common heading of experience, so too via the preceding ideas he wanted to show the continuity between matter and consciousness;. And an important texture of consciousness is its mutability. Iqbal again found support in Bergson who had said:

I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations feelings and volitions, I change, without ceasing.

The ‘I’ is synonymous with consciousness. From Nature to God - Proofs of the existence of God Like Leibniz and McTaggart, Iqbal believed that Reality is spiritual and consists of only selves or monads or egos.[11]

The monads range from the completely active to the almost inert. No created monad is completely inactive and none is completely active, but those at the lowest end of the scale would be mere matter, If they were any thing. God is the only completely active monad. Iqbal believed that there are degrees of consciousness: 

“Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence. is an ego. But there are degrees in the expression of egohood. Throughout the entire gamut of being runs the gradually rising note of egohood until it reaches its perfection in man.”[12]

For Iqbal the universe is made up of ego-unities which are living, fluid and dynamic. They are in constant flux. They exist in a kind of tension with their envoirnment, due to their mutual invasion of each other. Therefore the universe is growing and is not an already completed product which left the hands of its maker ages ago,[13] and is “now lying stretched out in space as a dead mass of matter to which time does nothing, and consequently is nothing.”[14]

The question then arises as to whether it is possible to conceive the universe as not needing a deity. Iqbal’s answer was a definite ‘no’ because “the movement of life as an organic growth involves a progressive synthesis of its various stages. Without this synthesis it will cease to be an organic growth.”[15] In other words it is determined by ends and the presence of ends meant that it must be permeated by a higher consciousness which is the ultimate self or Divine Ego. Whilst criticizing the traditional arguments for the existence of God (such as the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments) Iqbal provided his own working proof, based on his organic philosophy of nature.

He started with what he understood to be the new physics’ view which sees objective reality as being not wholly independent of the act of knowing. The knower is intimately related to the object known, and the act of knowing is a constitutive element in the objective reality.[16]

Finding support in the theory of relativity, Iqbal concluded that the object known is relative to the observing self; its size and shape change as the observer’s position and speed change. But “whatever the position and speed of the observer, what ever his frame of reference, something must always remain which confronts him as his other”.[17] An other words if, in accordance with the principle of relativity, the object confronting the subject is really relative, then there must be some Self to whom it ceases to exist as one confronting other.

The Self must be non-spatial, non-temporal Absolute, to whom what is external to us ceases to exist as external. Without such an assumption, objective reality cannot be relative to the spatial and temporal Self. To the absolute Self then, the universes is not a Reality confronting Him as His ‘other’.[18]

Iqbal should not be seen to be in favour of pure and simple pantheism. On the contrary, he was at pains to point to the Absoluteness of God. He did this by referring to the Quranic verse 24:35 where God is referred to as light. The Quranic text is a follows:-

“God is the Light of the heavens and of the the earth. His Light is like a niche in which is a lamp. The lamp encased in a glass - the glass, as it were a star”.

The description of God as Light in the revealed literature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Iqbal thought, must he interpreted differently. The teaching of modern physics is that the velocity of light cannot be exceeded and is the same for all observers whatever their own system of movement. Thus in the world of change, light is the nearest approach to the Absolute.

“The metaphor of light as applied to God must in view of modern knowledge be taken to suggest the Absoluteness of God, not his Omnipresence which easily lends itself to pantheistic interpretation.”[19]

It follows from such an analysis that the universe does not confront the Absolute Self in the same way as it confronts the human self.[20] It is a fleeting moment in the life of God. “It is a structure of events, a systematic mode of behaviour and as such organic to the Ultimate Self. Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self. In the picturesque phrase of the Quran, “it is the habit of Allah.”[21]

He regards the Ultimate reality as an Ego from which alone egos proceed. These egos as events and acts make nature.[22] In other words, the creative energy of the Ultimate

Ego, in whom deed and thought are identical, functions as egos. He said:

The world, in all its details, from the mechanical movement of what we call the atoms of matter to the free movement of thought in the human ego, is the self-revelation of the great “I am.[23]

Finite mind makes the mistake of regarding Nature as confronting ‘other’ existing per se, which the mind knows but does not make. We are therefore apt to regard the act of creation as a specific past event and the universe appears as a manufactured article as in the theological argument which he criticized. If it were like an artifact it would have no organic relation to the life of its Maker, and the Maker would be nothing more than a mere spectator. He pointed out that this had been traditionally, the problem of theology i.e. “all the meaningless theological controversies about the ideas of creation arise from this narrow vision of the finite mind”. Thus regarded the universe is only a mere accident in the life of God and might not have been created.[24]

The real question which we should address is:-”Does the universe confront God as His “other” with space intervening between Him and it”? His answer was a definite no. The universe cannot be regarded as an independent reality standing in opposition to Him.[25] This will reduce God to two seperate entities confronting each other, whereas space and matter are only interpretations that thought puts on “the free creative energy of God.[26]

In this connection Iqbal related the story of how a Sufi was once confronted with the common sense view of God by one of his disciples. The disciple said that there was a moment of time when God existed and nothing else existed beside Him. The Sufi’s comment was very pointed - “It is just the same now as it was then,” he said.[27]

Iqbal did not accept the view that the world of matter is a ‘stuff’ coeternal’ with God, operated upon by God from a distance. “it is in its real nature, one continuous act which thought breaks up into a plurality of mutually exclusive things.”[28] He quoted Eddington, whose ideas in his book Space, Time and Gravitation he saw as supportive to his own contentions. Eddington wrote;

The only way in which the mind can achieve its objects is by picking one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in, and as a necessary consequence the laws of gravity, mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed.[29] Eddington also added that perhaps it is the mind’s search for permanence that has created the world of physics.[30]

Iqbal asserted that the universe is finite because it is a passing phase of God’s extensively infinite consciousness and boundless because the creative power of God is intensively infinite. In asserting this he found support from Einstein’s view that the universe is finite but boundless. From the Qur'anic verse “and verily towards God is thy limit” he concluded that the universe is likely to increase.[31] Here, Iqbal is indicating by an apt reference to the Quran that it had a possible application in this context.

A. Bausani[32] also adds that, by implication, what Iqbal wanted to say was that “since nature is organically related to the creative Self, it can grow and is consequently infinite in the sense that none of its limits is final - nature is organically finite only towards the innermost essence of God.”[33] Iqbal himself said:-

Reality is beyond time and space,

Do not say anymore that the universe is without a limit.

Its limit is internal, not external,

There are no distinctions of low and high more or less in its internal aspect.[34]

This supports my earlier contention, i.e. that, in the main, .Iqbal was trying to explain scriptural concepts in a scientific vocabulary.

Panentheism

In the earlier period of’ his thought, roughly extending from 1901 to about 1908, Iqbal’s works did have a pantheistic tinge.[35] Iqbal soon outgrew his pantheism, however. In his later thought, the relation of the finite to the Infinite Ego is one in which “the true infinite does not exclude the finite”, but rather “embraces the finite without effacing its finitude and ... justifies its being.”[36] It can also be quite clearly seen that Iqbal did not intend that the infinite be regarded as merely the totality of all finites.[37] In other words his theology is not pantheistic (in the sense that the world is identical with God). On the contrary, as we have seen, Iqbal tried hard to impress upon his readers God’s Absoluteness and Individuality. That is why he constantly refers to God as the Ultimate Self and the Ultimate Ego. We have also seen how he has-interpreted the Quranic verse that refers to God as Light in a similar manner.

If a label has to be put on Iqbal’s theological position, perhaps ‘panentheism’ would be the best. Panentheism is the doctrine that the world is not identical with God, nor separate from God, but in God who, in His Divine nature, transcends it.[38] In this context he is in league with such western theologians as Charles Hartshorne who, in his dedication to those thinkers, who were able to see, inspite of ridicule, that the eternity or worshipful perfection of God does not imply his changelessness in all respects” included Iqbal.[39]

Oars! position can justifiably be said to be close to panentheism because, according to him, although God is an Individual, He is not totally other than the universe itself. He is, at the same time, more than the sum of egos which compose that universe.[40] As Iqbal explained it:

The Infinity of the Ultimate Ego consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which, the universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. God’s infinity is intensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not of that series.[41]

Although the Ultimate Ego holds the finite egos in His own Being, He does not obliterate their existence. From this the Ultimate Reality must be regarded as of the same nature as the self (i.e. as an individual). However, this Self does not lie apart from the universe, as if separated by a space lying between Him and the finite egos. The Ultimate Self is not transc, ndent as understood by the anthropomorphic theists because Ile is also immanent, and He comprehends and encompasses the whole universe. However His imnanence is not in the traditional pantheistic sense as He is a personal and not impersonal Reality. He is therefore both immanent and transcendent, yet neither one nor the other alone.[42] Despite this, however, Iqbal in the last analysis was more inclined to emphasise the transcendence of God than his immanence.

Traditionally the doctrine of pure immanence* is called wahdat al-wujud. In rejecting this doctrine (i.e. in stressing transcendence) Iqbal was influenced by another famous Sufi, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi[43] (d. 1625) who wrote:-

He is beyond all modes of relations, all externalizations and internalization, beyond all projection and introjections, beyond all realisable and explicable, beyond all mystic intuition and experience; beyond all conceivable and imaginable. He is the Holy One, is beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond.[44]

Iqbal’s panentheistic position seems to find support in an earlier mystic of the Naqshabandi order, Khwaja Mir Dard of Dehli (1720 - 1784) who, from the same metaphor of God as Light, concluded that God is both Absolute and Omnipresent; i.e. both Transcendent and Immanent.[45]

Iqbal was also aware that to say that God undergoes changes might mean that we are imparting imperfection to Him because of the maxim that if something undergoes change it is imperfect. Iqbal argued against this charge asserting that:

(i)          Change in the sense of a movement from an imperfect to a relatively perfect state or vice versa is obviously inapplicable to His life.[46]

(ii)         to conceive the Ultimate Ego as changeless is to conceive Him as utter inaction, a motiveless stagnant neutrality, an absolute nothing.

(iii)        The Ultimate Ego instead exists in pure duration wherein change ceases to be a succession of varying attitudes and reveals its true character as continuous creation “untouched by weariness” and “unseizable by slumber or sleep.”[47]

Therefore to the creative Self change cannot mean imperfection. His perfection does not mean a mechanistically conceived immobility as Aristotle might have led the earlier Muslim philosophers to think; it consists instead of “the vast basis of His ceative activity and the Infinite scope of His creative vision.”[48] Whereas the “not yet” of man can mean success or failure, the “not yet” of God means “unfailing relatisation of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process.”[49]

Therefore, if man chooses to do wrong deeds God will not be lessened’ in any way. The loss will entirely be man’s as we shall see in another section He would have only served in slowing down, if not preventing his own progress towards God who had created him out of love.

God’s Infinity and Creativity

Iqbal did not conceive of God as infinite in the sense of spatial infinity. “In matters of spiritual valuation, mere immensity counts for nothing” he says.[50] Moreover, as he tried to show through scientific evidence, space and time infinities are not absolute.

God is not seen as a mere contriver who works on something that is already in existence.[51] According to Schimmel, Iqbal really believed that God created the universe out of Himself. “Creation with Iqbal is the unfolding of the inner possibilities of the Ultimate Ego and is therefore, besides being a single act through which our world and serial time have come once into existence, a continuing act” - “everyday He is in a new phase (Shan) says the [Quran 5:29]”.[52] Next we shall see how Iqbal tackled the issues of freewill, determinism and destiny in relation to the problem of Good and Evil.

Freewill, Determination, Destiny and the problem of Good and Evil

According to Bergson, it is in terms of the profound self (which is intimately identical with pure duree) that the quest for freedom can start. He rejected mechanistic determinism which implies that all our conscious states are literal and perfect translations of the spatial movements that occur in our body or in the nervous system.[53] Indeed “the very concept of prediction and causality when taken from the realm of physics are meaningless when applied to consciousness.”[54] Instead “in real time, in the life of consciousness, there is a perfect continuity and our self is at every moment, as it were, in a state of being born, absorbing its past and creating its future, it has a history, no loubt, it even is, its history, stored in memory, but it cannot go through the same state again.”[55]

Working on the same principles, Iqbal regarded destiny (or takdir, a term which has been so much misunderstood in Islam to mean predestination) as time seen or understood prior to the disclosure of its possibilities. “It is time freed from causal sequence, time as felt and not as thought and calculated.”[56] To Iqbal, “the destiny of a thing is not an unrelenting fate working from without like a taskmaster; it is the inward reach of a thing, its realisable possibilities which lie within the depths of its nature and serially actualise themselves without any feeling of external compulsion”. That is “if time is real and not a mere repetition of homogenous moments which make conscious experience a delusion, then every moment in the life of Reality is original, giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable.”[57]

Thus, to exist in real time is not to be hound by the fetters of serial time, but to create it from moment to moment and to he absolutely free and original in creation.[58] Iqbal regarded all creative activity as free activity. creation is opposed to repetition which is characteristic of mechanical action. This is why he considers it impossible to explain the creative activity of life in terms of mechanism. He considered science as seeking to establish uniformities of experience i.e. the laws of mechanical repetition. In actual fact however, life with its intense feeling of spontaneity constitutes a centre of indeterminism, and thus falls outside the domain of necessity. Hence science cannot comprehend life. “What we call things are events in the continuity of Nature which thought spatialises and thus regards as mutually isolated for purposes of action. “The universes which seems to us to he a collection of things is not a solid stuff occupying a void. It is not a thing but an act.”[59]

Purpose and Teleology

Unlike Bergson Iqbal believed that thought has a deeper movement. While thought appears to break Reality up into static fragments, its real function is to synthesize the elements of experience by employing categories, suitable to the various levels which experience presents.[60] He saw Bergson as ignoring the point that the unity of consciousness has also a ‘forward’ looking aspect. and this is where the notion of purpose comes in, i.e. purpose cannot be understood except in reference to the future. He stressed that “purpose colours not only our present state of consciousness, but also reveals its future direction”. They do this by “influencing the states that are yet to be”. Accordingly, “Reality is not a blind vital impulse wholly unlimited by ideals - its nature is through and through teleological”.[61]

Iqbal’s teleology did not mean the working out of a plan of a predetermined end or goal. This would reduce the universe to a mere temporal reproduction of a pre-existing eternal scheme or structure in which individual events have already found their proper places, and are just waiting for their respective turns to enter into the temporal sweep of history.[62]

Such a view says Iqbal is only a kind of veiled materialism in which fate or destiny takes the place of rigid determinism, leaving no scope for human or even divine freedom. ‘To live means to shape and change ends and purposes and to be governed by them. He explains further:-

“The world process or the movement of the universe, is certainly devoid of purpose if by purpose we mean a foreseen end, a far-off destination towards which the whole creation moves. To endow the world process with purpose in this sense is, to rob it of its originality and its creative character. Its ends are to come and not necessarily premeditated… It is a line in the drawing - an actualization of open possibilities.”[63]

For Iqbal nothing is more alien to the Quranic outlook than the idea that the universe is the temporal working out of a preconceived plan.

God’s Omniscience

Iqbal is aware that the emergence of egos endowed with the power of spontaneous and hence unforeseeable action may be understood as a limitation on the freedom of the inclusive Ego. But this limitation is-not externally imposed, he says. It is born out of His own creative freedom whereby He has chosen finite egos to be participators of His life, power and freedom.[64]

How then, can God’s omnipotence be reconciled with the limitation that is imposed if the emergent egos are also given freedom? Iqbal tried to get around this problem by first stating that omnipotence need not be conceived only as a blind capricious power without limits. Then he referred to the Quranic conception of Nature as a cosmos (meaning an order, as opposed to chaos) of mutually related forces. It views Divine omnipotence as intimately related to Divine wisdom, and finds the infinite power of God revealed, not in the arbitrary and the capricious but in the recurrent, the regular, the orderly. The Quran also conceives God as “holding all Goodness in His hands.”[65]

 Indirectly, therefore, what Iqbal is saying can be taken to mean that God is ‘limited’ in a way, but only by those qualities that are inherently. His to begin with for example goodness, orderliness, beauty etc. Another way of saying this would be that ‘it is not that He is limited, rather, that He is just the way He is!’

This brings to mind not only the Sufi dictum as expressed by F. Schuon[66] but also by the Buddhist mystical view that what we are observing through our study and observation of Nature is only His “suchness”.[67] In this sense Iqbal does not seem to run away from the mainstream of what Capra describes as Eastern and Islamic mysticism.

Therefore, when God gives man freedom it means that man is tree to choose good or evil. If he chooses good he will be moving closer to God, if he chooses evil he will only be delaying his own progress towards him Good and Evil.

Iqbal was aware that when we say that God is good, or the rationally directed Divine will is good, a very serious problem arises, that of universal suffering and wrong doing. Here he connected the problem with Darwin’s theory of evolution.[68] He saw that the course of evolution, as revealed by modern science, involved an almost universal suffering. As with the English poet Milton, Iqbal asked the question of how we can reconcile the goodness and the omnipotence of God with the immense volume of evil in His creation.[69]

Iqbal’s answer to this dilemma shows that he does not claim to be comprehensive in his theology. He sees himself as only providing tentative new insights to some theological problems. He saw theology as an ongoing endeavour, ever dependent on or closely linked to the state of man’s scientific knowledge. For him the issue raised is also one that lies in between optimism and pessimism. The Quran, he says, “believes in the possibility of improvement in the behaviour of man and his control over natural forces. This is neither optimism nor pessimism - it is meliorism which recognises a growing universe and is animated by the hope O man’s eventual victory over evil.[70]

The purpose of the legend of the Fall (the Adam and Eve story) is to indicate man’s rise from a primitive state of instinctive appetite for the conscious possession of a free self, capable of doubt and disobedience.[71]

The Fall does not mean moral depravity; it is man’s transition from simple consciousness, to the fist flash of self-consciousness. Man’s first act of disobedience was also his first act of free choice: and that was why Adam’s first act of transgression was forgiven.[72] To Iqbal, “Goodness is not a matter of compulsion; it is the self’s free surrender to the moral ideal and arises out of a willing cooperation of free egos”. A being whose movements are wholly determined like a machine cannot produce goodness. Freedom is thus a condition of goodness.[73] In creating man and giving him the freedom to choose good and evil, God takes a great risk - but the fact that He did take that risk shows His immense faith in man.[74]

The story of Adam for Iqbal also relates to man’s desire for knowledge. Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit was wicked because being ‘hasty’ by nature. Adam yielded to Satan’s persuasions to seek a short cut to knowledge: for the tree in ancient symbolism also means occult knowledge.[75] Adam’s subsequent placement into a painful physical environment was not meant to be a punishment; it was to defeat Satan’s design by trying to keep man ignorant of the joy of perpetual growth and expansion. The experience of a finite ego to whom several possibilities are open expands only by the method of trial and error; which Iqbal describes as a kind of intellectual evil which is an indispensable factor in the building up of experience. The acceptance of selfhood as a form of life involves the acceptance of all the imperfections that flow from the finitude of self-hood.[76]

Evolution

According to Iqbal, everything organic or inorganic can be traced back to a common source of creation - the self whose existence is also known as Wujud al-Basit (Wujud meaning that He exists, al-Bath meaning the ‘Expander’).[77] The common source of creation who had no beginning,[78] in order to manifest Himself, created the non-self, as a mirror and to provide the self with an immense scope for struggle, which is the necessary basis of all evolution.[79]

The different levels of existence signify different stages in the development of egohood. The urge of self-manifestation and self-development is present in everything and is expressed in every living being - from a unicellular organism to a man’s highly developed personality. He says:-

“Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence is an ego. But there are degrees in the expression of egohood. Throughout the entire spectrum of being, runs the gradually rising note of egohood which reaches its perfection in man. This is why the Quran declares the Ultimate ego to be nearer to man than his own neck vein.”[80]

Nevertheless,- man has yet to reach his fullest development, which is the ‘seal’ of perfection.[81]

Iqbal does not consider the idea of evolution foreign to Islam. From verses such as Q 56:60-62 which say:- “And we are not to be frustrated by changing your forms and creating you (again) in forms that Ye know not. And ye certainly know already the first form of creation”,[82] Muslim thinkers were led to think of the idea of evolution. For example al-Jahiz (d. 861) was the first Muslim thinker to hint at the changes caused by migration and the environment generally. Later the association known as the “Brethren of Purity” and Ibn Miskawaih (936-1030) developed the idea of evolution further. The latter included man in the theory for the first time.[83]

There is no doubt that Iqbal himself felt quite confident that biological evolution is quite “consistent with the spirit of the Quran.”[84] He lauded Rumi[85] for regarding the question of immortality as one of biological evolution and not merely a problem to be decided by metaphysical arguments alone.[86]

He criticized the Darwinian concept of evolution, however, for the meaninglessness it attaches to the phenomenon of biological death; which in turn he saw as bringing with it the feeling of despair. He contrasted this with the optimistic view of evolution which Rumi for example expressed through his poetry. For Rumi death is but an other transition to another form for man, just as he had been through transitions from mineral to vegetable to animal to man before it.[87] In other words, death is just a phase before the next higher stage in the whole evolutionary process.[88]

For Iqbal, evolution is a physical as well as a spiritual fact. The cause of evolution is the creative activity of the consciousness of the universe (God). Evolution as the ‘method’ of creation is always gradual. From moment to moment, consciousness is continually breaking through its own resistance and outgrowing itself, creating anew the universe, advancing gradually towards its goal and the destination.[89]

To make a passage for itself towards its goal, consciousness either avoids obstacles or faces and overcomes them. This creative ‘march’ of consciousness finally resulted in the evolution of matter from stage to stage like the transition of the plant to animal. Stretched over millions of years, the evolutionary process in these states resulted in innumerable species.[90]

However Iqbal. like Bergson, did not accept that evolution proceeds along a mechanistic line (i.e. that it is the chance result of the play of mechanical forces). He quoted J. S. Haldane: for example, to support his anti-mechanistic views. For Iqbal life is a unique phenomenon and the concept of mechanism is inadequate for its analysis.[91]

Iqbal also drew ideas from the biologist Hans Driesch who thought that living things, in all the purposive processes of growth and adaptation to environment, whether their adaptation was secured by the formation of fresh or the modification of old habits. possess a career unthinkable in the case of a machine.[92] He also quoted Wildon Carr’s arqument that the intellect cannot be the result of the mechanical process of evolution.[93]

Finally Iqbal’s ideas on evolution were also very much in line \kith Berson’s ideas on evolution. Bergson wanted to prove that the evolutionary process, in particular the evolution of inoaganic matter was actually the work of mind; and that the theory of evolution is to be incorporated into an essentially spiritualist picture of the world, according to which matter is intelligible with in the framework of a creative divine spirit.”[94]

The ‘method’ of evolution at the human (or moralistic) level Iqbal’s ideas concerning the theme of evolution in its connection with morals form an important part of his theology, especially where it pertains to the socially-uplifting side of his Sufi ideas, which were expressed in his poetry more than in the Reconstruction. This section can also be what I regard as a psycho-biological interpretation of what Iqbal thought the ideal religious weltanschauung for man ought to be.

Iqbal affirmed that two very important qualities of self-consciousness (whether as the universal self-consciousness or as it is expressed in human beings) were beauty and love. The human self-consciousness loves the universal consciousness and vice-versa.[95] It is on account of their seeking one another that a perpetual process of creation occurs.[96]

And it is the ‘loving’ or ‘seeking’ which goes on at both ends of consciousness (man’s and God’s) that is the cause of history and the process of evolution which leads ultimately to the perfection of the universe or the perfection of man who is the essence of the universe.[97] Man shows his love for the Divine Self by worshipping It, adoring Its qualities and acting in Its service; i.e. by expressing Its qualities in his own actions. The Divine Self is actual Beauty, but the human self-consciousness is potential Beauty that has yet to be actualized or revealed as a result of the creative process.[98]

Beauty itself includes all the lovable, and admirable qualities like goodness, truth etc. Which are always expressed in the service of love. These qualities are also present in man to the extent that he will evolve and display them in his own self-consciousness.[99] How does the self evolve? - by adoration (worship and prayer) and by action; i.e. by identifying itself in theory and in practice more and more with the qualities of Beauty.[100]

Action, therefore, is the instrument that the self utilizes as a means for the satisfaction of its urge for Beauty. Knowledge is acquired by the self for the sake of action. All action is actually aimed at removing resistance in the part of the self’s urge for Beauty.[101] Love therefore has implications for action. To Iqbal, the search for Beauty is the sole urge of human consciousness. Therefore it has a bearing on human behaviour and psychology. And indeed he tried to cover this field in his theology in the sense that he discussed’ modern psychology in the light of his religious beliefs and vice versa. Then from what he saw to be the psychological implications of his ideas, he endeavoured to show how they would bear on political, philosophical and ethical thought in general.

Iqbal started with the premise that it is only the Divine self and its attributes that can really satisfy a man’s urge for Beauty. Consequently when a man is loving, and seeking by action and service an ideal in the universe and its qualities, he is expressing his urge for Beauty in the right way. But if and when he is ignorant of the real desire of his self, he is not doing so. His urge for Beauty then finds expression in some other idea to which he mistakenly attributes all the qualities of Beauty. The reason for this is that we constantly have urges in our nature, the most powerful one (i.e. urge for Beauty) we cannot hold back even for a single moment. In such a case a substitute ideal becomes chosen by man for his ideal which then dominates all his activities. This ‘substitute’ ideal normally appears to possess some qualities of the Real which is the reason why he is lured to it in the first place.[102]

However, his love for the wrong ideal will not last long; sooner or later the urge of his true self, his inner values of Beauty, will begin to operate and the man will discover the elements or qualities of Beauty that his temporary ideal has been lacking. When this happens, he will be disappointed and disillusioned. He will then turn to another ideal hoping for a better satisfaction of his urge for Beauty and so the process continues, but each time the mistakes learnt in a previous experience will be avoided in the new one. The process of trial and error continues as long as he does not hit upon the Right ideal.[103]

To be Continued

NOTES AND REFERENCES