⁂ Works · Modern Asia · No. 130

Length: 224 pagesSheikh, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Stanford, 2013 - the annotated edition
Reading: DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
Availability: In printA current standard edition is available

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Seven lectures by a poet-philosopher trained in Cambridge and Munich, arguing that Islamic thought had been static for five centuries and that the physics of the 1920s offered better support for its central claims than the Greek metaphysics it had inherited.

Date: 1930
Author: Muhammad Iqbal
Region: British India
Language: English

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Lectures
Method: Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Years back to what it answers: 835 years

The most influential work of modern Islamic philosophy, by a man who is read across South Asia as a poet first and who is a national figure in Pakistan.

What the book says

Seven lectures arguing that Islamic thought had stopped moving and that the resources for moving it again are inside it. Iqbal's diagnosis is historical: a tradition that had produced its own experimental science and its own philosophy closed the door on independent reasoning, settled into imitation of past authorities, and mistook a mysticism of self-annihilation for its highest expression. His reconstruction draws equally on Rumi and on the physics of his own day. Reality, he argues, is not a fixed system of things but a continuous creative movement, and the modern account of time, matter and energy - he engages Einstein, Whitehead and Bergson directly - supports this better than the static metaphysics the tradition had borrowed from the Greeks. The self is not an illusion to be dissolved but an ego to be strengthened and made more individual through action. Religious experience is a genuine source of knowledge, continuous with rather than opposed to scientific enquiry, and both are ways the same reality is grasped. The last lecture argues that independent legal reasoning must be reopened and that the principle of movement in Islamic law makes this a recovery rather than an innovation.

What it argues

That reality is dynamic and that a religion of a creative God should never have accepted a static picture of it. Iqbal's central concept is the self or ego - not the illusory individuality that mystical tradition urges dissolving, but a real centre of activity whose task is to become more distinct through choice and effort, and whose immortality is an achievement rather than a given. Around this he builds an argument about knowledge: religious experience is a mode of contact with reality, describable and testable in its own way, and treating it as merely subjective concedes too much to a positivism that has itself been outgrown by the sciences it appealed to. The practical conclusion concerns law. Islamic jurisprudence contains a principle of movement, and the closing of independent reasoning was a historical decision rather than a doctrinal necessity, so reopening it restores the tradition rather than departing from it.

What it answered

al-Ghazali on the relation between reason and religious experience, and the intellectual settlement that followed him. Iqbal is also answering his own moment: European scholarship that treated Islam as historically finished, and a Muslim orthodoxy that treated the past as a set of decisions rather than a method. His engagement with contemporary physics is part of the argument rather than decoration - he wants to show that the tradition's static metaphysics was Greek rather than Islamic and is not required by anything the sciences now say.

How it argues

By synthesis, at a pace that assumes the reader can follow references to Rumi, Ibn Arabi, al-Ghazali, Kant, Bergson, Whitehead, Einstein and quantum theory within a few pages. The lectures were delivered to educated audiences rather than to specialists, and Iqbal cites from memory and paraphrases freely, which makes verification difficult and gave the 2013 annotated edition a great deal to do. The prose is confident and compressed, and the scientific material is of its moment.

The moment

British India in the late 1920s. Iqbal had studied at Cambridge under McTaggart, taken a doctorate at Munich on Persian metaphysics, and qualified as a barrister; he was already the most celebrated poet in Urdu and Persian in the subcontinent. In 1930 he delivered a presidential address proposing a consolidated Muslim state in north-west India, which made him a founding figure of Pakistan - a country established nine years after his death in 1938, and one whose subsequent character has been claimed and disclaimed in his name ever since.

How it travelled

As a founding text and a contested inheritance. The Reconstruction is read across the Muslim world as the central statement of Islamic modernism, and its argument for reopening independent legal reasoning is cited by reformers of every description. In Pakistan Iqbal is a national figure whose authority is invoked by secular liberals and Islamists alike, each finding support in different lectures. Outside South Asia he is read chiefly in Islamic studies and in comparative philosophy, and much less than his influence would suggest.

The strongest objection

That the scientific scaffolding has aged badly and was load-bearing. Iqbal grounds a good deal of the metaphysics in the physics of the 1920s - relativity, quantum indeterminacy, Whitehead's process philosophy - and treats these as vindicating a dynamic conception of reality against a static one. Physics has moved, and the arguments that lean on it now read as period pieces; a reader who removes them is left with the Sufi and Quranic material and a much less distinctive position. The traditionalist objection runs the other way: that using European philosophy to reconstruct Islamic thought concedes the frame at the outset, and that a reconstruction conducted in Bergson's vocabulary has already accepted whose questions count.

Why read it

The first lecture, on knowledge and religious experience, and the sixth, on the principle of movement in Islamic law, which is the one with practical consequences and the one most often cited. The lectures on physics are the most dated. The annotated Stanford edition is worth the difference if you want to know what he was actually drawing on.

Where to read it

First printed: 1930
First in English: 1930
Digitised: Yes

The 1934 Oxford edition adds the seventh lecture and is the basis of all later printings. The Stanford annotated edition of 2013 supplies the sources Iqbal was drawing on, many of which he cited from memory.

Written in English; no translation issue. In copyright in some jurisdictions.

Where it stands

Live and politically loaded. The book is a working reference in debates about Islamic reform, legal method and the relation between religion and science, and its author's name carries a weight in South Asia that no other philosopher in this section carries anywhere.

On quoting this book

Contested

How far the political use made of Iqbal in Pakistan corresponds to anything in his philosophy is argued continuously and by people with very different aims. Whether his account of the closing of independent reasoning is historically accurate is disputed by specialists, several of whom hold that the closure was less complete than the standard narrative allows. Whether his reading of al-Ghazali is fair is questioned. And the relation between the philosophy and the poetry - which is where most of his readers encounter him, and which says some things differently - is a real interpretive problem.