Iqbal's Thought and Contributions

By Wasiullah Khan, Ph. D.

When Prophet Muhammad (s) was about to return to his Creator in 632 C.E., he said he was leaving only the Qur’an and his way of life (Sunnah) for his followers’ eternal guidance. Islam is unique among the world’s great religions that since the Prophet’s demise no person could claim to be the absolute, infallible authority to interpret the Qur’an and Sunnah. At every time and place, whatever a majority of the Muslim community members agreed upon, under the advice of the knowledgeable people, became the accepted doctrine and injunction of Islam for that time and place. However, while interpreting the Qur’an and Sunnah concerning any particular issue, it will be very egotistical to ignore the thought of great learned men of the last 1400 years.

The Prophet’s person (s) was so predominant and overwhelming that even after his demise, for about 70 years when the last of his companions lived, we don’t have any record of even one person’s thought that was independent of the Prophet’s traditions. Then the five great jurists – Jafar al-Sadiq (699-765), Abu Hanifa (699-767), Malik bin Anas (711-796), Shafii (767-820), and Ahmed ibn Hanbal (780-855) – compiled their interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah to delineate the Islamic creed and practices. Among more than one billion Muslims of the present time, there are many millions who follows the fiqh (jurisprudence) of each of these jurists. Then came other towering scholars with great followings like Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), Fakhr al-Din Razi (1149-1209), Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi (1564-1624) and Shah Waliullah (1703-1763). Every one of these and many other scholars have been the focus of learned studies and dissertations. The development of Islamic through cannot be traced without studying what they held to be the authentic beliefs and injunctions of Islam.

Some people argue that the decline of Muslim political power in the world was caused by the demise of the Rightly-guided Caliphate with the martyrdom of the fourth caliph Ali in 661 C.E. and its substitution by absolute dynastic rule of the Umayyads, Abbasids and subsequent emperors. Such monolithic governance never lets human potential of a society flourish. The Magna Carta, on the other hand, was signed in 1215 C.E. restricting the powers of the kind of England and 500 years later the industrial revolution started from the same country. In about three centuries, the Western European nations became so powerful that they colonized the huge continents of North and South America, Africa and large parts of Asia. The last great empires of the Muslim world, the Moguls and the Ottomans, became so weak that by 1857 Mogul rule in India broke up like a house of cards. It was not the overwhelming Hindu majority of India which replaced the Muslim emperors of Delhi. Surprisingly, it was the British traders of the East India Company who steadily spread their control from the coastal cities inland and finally made India a jewel of the British crown. After 1857, Muslim intellectuals and scholars were in a state of shock, too numb to figure out how God Almighty could replace believers by infidels and heretics to rule over large continents. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of India (1817-1898) followed by Jamaluddin Afghani of Iran (1839-1897), Mufti Muhammad Abduh of Egypt (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida of Syria (1865-1935) held the position that, as Qur’an says: ‘Say, are those who know equal to those who do not know? (39:9), if the collective acquisition and creation of knowledge among Muslims is at a very low level, their understanding of God’s will as enunciated by the Qur’an and Sunnah would be equally inadequate. This explanation still holds true after over 100 years.

By 1918, the Ottomon Empire also succumbed to the Europeans in World War I and vast areas of the Muslim Africa and West Asia came under their colonial rule. After many centuries this was the worst time seen by the Muslims around the world. Iqbal (1877-1937) was designed to be the pre-eminent thinker of the time and initiator of a new movement of ideas which has held sway for the last 80 years. He was the greatest synthesis of both eastern and western thought of his time. Besides Iqbal, the thinkers of this new movement – Said Nursi of Turkey (1873-1960), Abul Ala Mawdudi of Pakistan (1903-1979), Malek Bennabi of Algeria (1905-1973), Hasan Al Banna (1906-1949) and Syed Qutb (1906-1966) of Egypt, Muhammad Natsir of Indonesia (1908-1993), and Ali Shariati of Iran (1933-1977)- had a new focus: revival of the Islamic civilizational heritage. As a result, we have witnessed struggles for the establishment of an Islamic social order, creation of an Islamic republic, and organizing an Islamic economic system. The recency of these struggles is such that the jury is still out of their more resilient outcomes.

Born in November 1877 in Sialkot, Punjab (now Pakistan), Iqbal achieved high proficiency in Arabic and Persian languages at an early age. After completing graduate studies in philosophy, he became a college lecturer in Lahore at the age of 24. Later he moved to Cambridge, England for higher studies and earned Ph.D. from Munich University, Germany at the age of 30. He became barrister-at-law in 1908 and returned to Lahore to practice law. He was actively involved in the Muslims’ cultural and political strivings and was elected in 1920 a member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly. He was an outstanding and highly popular poet of Urdu and Persian languages and also delivered scholarly addresses at various occasions. A collection of his six (later seven) addresses was first published in 1930 titled Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. The same year, he delivered a historic address proposing creation of a Muslim homeland by partitioning British India when it achieves independence. He said in this country Islam would have an opportunity to ‘mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to being them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p 11) Nine years after he passed away in April 1938, Pakistan came into being in August 1947.

Although many compilations of Iqbal’s poetry also deliver his message very eloquently, his foremost book Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam was intended to ‘secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from its Magian overlayings.’ (p.114) He says, ‘far from reintegrating the forces of the average man’s inner life and thus preparing him for participation in the march of history,’ this Muslim mysticism ‘has taught man a false renunciation and made him perfectly contented with his ignorance and spiritual thralldom (or servitude).’ (pp.148-49) One cornerstone of Iqbal’s thought is his keen understanding of the profound significance of the supreme idea of finality of prophethood looked at from the view point of religious and cultural growth of man in history and also looked at from the viewpoint of ‘man’s achieving full self-consciousness’ as bearer of the ‘Divine promise of a complete subjugation of all this immensity of space and time.’ Iqbal assumes this idea of the finality of prophethood to be ‘a psychological cure for the Magian attitude of constant expectation.’ He says with the revelation of this idea of finality, one of the greatest that dawned upon the prophetic consciousness, ‘all personal authority claiming a supernatural origin came to an end in this history of man.’ (p.101) He tells us that ‘the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Qur’an and the emphasis that it lays on nature and history as sources of human knowledges are… different aspects of the same idea of finality.’ Iqbal asserts that the ‘birth of Islam is the birth of inductive intellect.’ (p. 101)

If we agree with Iqbal’s thesis, we must believe that revelation as a source of knowledge discontinued after 632 C.E. and the only source of knowledge now available to us is sense perception and reasoning by which we can both understand God’s will as enunciated in the Qur’an and Sunnah and create new knowledge to predict and control the natural and social phenomena for purposes of better survival of the humankind. Unfortunately, many Muslims, presumably out of anger towards their recent colonial past, want to discard all modern knowledge, labeling it as ‘western’, and strive to dig out a certain prescription for all our social ills through religious intuition or extra-sensory perception – an obsurantist and obviously futile effort.

Another unique contribution of Iqbal to the contemporary Islamic thought is his bracketing modern science with ‘God-consciousness’ which he considers more precious than mere belief in God. He equates the scientist’s observation of nature with seeking a kind of intimacy with God, a kind of mystic search in the act of pray. (pp. 45, 73) He asserts that ‘scientific observation of nature keeps us in close contact with the behavior of Reality (God), and thus sharpens our inner perception for a deeper vision of it.’ (p.72) ‘This alone will add to his power over nature and give him that vision of the total-infinite which philosophy seeks but cannot find.’ (p.73)

If Muslims had heeded for the last 70 years Iqbal’s advice and considered scientific advancement as an act of prayer, the road map of world power today would have been very different. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist of Pakistan, and his team seem to be the only significant exception in this regard. Of course scientific inquiry is limited to material, objective and verifiable reality. But Qur’an forbids us from striving to know the metaphysical and supernatural reality that it refers to in the verses not entirely clear which are searched for their hidden meanings only by those in whose hearts there is a deviation. (3:7) Allah has required of us only belief in the unseen. (2:3) Iqbal was despaired with the Muslim religio-philosophic tradition of his time, which he called a ‘worn-out and practically dead metaphysics’ with its peculiar though-forms and set phraseology producing manifestly ‘a deadening effect on the modern mind.’ (pp.72,78). He intended to write a book on the system of Fiqh (jurisprudence) in the light of modern knowledge which would have been another ‘work of reconstruction’ on the legal thought of Islam. To this second work of reconstruction, the present book would have been, in his own words, a prelude. Death at the age of 60 precluded his writing this greatly important book, but this idea signifies his will to the posterity.