Iqbal was a poet as well as a philosopher. His philosophical ideas were at first rejected but later revered in the Muslim world. His education at European universities revealed to him the gulf that lay between the developing scientific culture of the West and the entrenched traditionalism of the Islamic world. At the same time it showed him that there were relationships and affinities between Muslim and western philosophies. He saw the possibility of a fruitful interaction of Islamic and western ideas and sought to bring about the compatibility of religious faith with philosophical reasoning, drawing on the work of Hegel, Bergson and Whitehead to provide a philosophical grounding for his synthesis. There is a strong vein of Sufist mysticism in Iqbal’s philosophy as well as in his poetry.1 It is especially apparent in his analysis of the concept of God and in his poem ‘Secret of the Self’ (1915), which illustrates his concept of ‘selfhood’ (khudi) and which did much to revitalize the intellectual life of Muslims in India. In 1930 he became president of the Muslim League and proposed that there should be a Muslim India within India. In 1947, nine years after his death, the founding of Pakistan turned his proposal into a fact.
Iqbal’s career was a distinguished one and he became known worldwide. He lived life intensely. His parents were deeply religious and he seems to have shared their dispositions to mysticism. He was educated first at the Scotch Mission College in Sialkut and then at the Government College at Lahore. At Lahore he was taught by Sir Thomas Arnold and began to make his name as a poet. In 1905 he travelled to Europe to study law at Lincoln’s Inn and then at Trinity College, Cambridge. While in Cambridge he attended lectures given by two British philosophers, John McTaggart and James Ward. It was there, too, that he established a relationship with the Muslim League. He returned to Lahore in 1908 to pursue the professions of lawyer and college lecturer. In the years that followed he achieved fame as a poet, wrote numerous articles for journals and the press, and prepared the drafts of the lectures that constitute his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Six of these seven lectures were delivered in Madras in 1928 and the seventh in England. In 1932 Iqbal visited France and there met Henri Bergson and also Louis Massignon, an orientalist with a profound knowledge of Sufism. He became more and more convinced that there were the very closest affinities between Bergson’s account of Time and the views of Muslim mystics. In 1933, after he returned again to Lahore, his health began to fail. In 1935 he was unable to accept an invitation to give the Rhodes lecture in Oxford because of frequent attacks of asthma. He died in 1938 and was buried with great honour near the steps of Badshahi mosque in Lahore.
Iqbal saw his main purpose as that of transforming Islam by infusing its spirituality with the dynamism and vitality of the West, but without depriving Islam of its own moral values and cohesion. He regarded European intellectual culture as a development, albeit in some respects a wayward one, of the Islamic culture of the Middle Ages. ‘Our only fear’, he wrote, ‘is that the dazzling exterior of European culture may arrest our movement and we may fail to reach the true inwardness of that culture.’2
In the Reconstruction he examines traditional arguments for the existence of God and concludes that none of them constitutes a proof. He then argues that materialist doctrines fail to provide a satisfactory account of the true nature of things and that we have to recognize that reality is ultimately vitalistic in character: that it is matter and mind together, in an ever-changing and active process, that constitute the totality of a universe in which Allah is perpetually creative. In this vitalist account of reality Iqbal draws freely on Bergson’s conception of pure Time as a flowing sequence of continuous events which we are sometimes able to experience with an immediacy that connects us with the creative energy of the cosmos. But he rejects Bergson’s view of the place of thought in the cosmic scheme. Bergson had maintained that thought worked with static concepts that reduced the burgeoning flux of reality to a series of stationary points, thereby yielding our notions of space and time.3 But for Iqbal, thought is much more than an intellectual capacity for organizing and classifying the items of experience. It is, he says, ‘as much organic as life . . . In conscious experience life and thought permeate each other. They form a unity. Thought, therefore, in its true nature is identical with life.’4 From this fundamental notion of the identity of thought and life Iqbal endeavours to develop an account of reality that contains no hard distinctions between reason and other modes of experience, and that emphasizes its dynamic and fluctuating nature as well as its total encompassment by a creative God who is ‘the First and the Last, the Visible and the Invisible’.5 What he wishes to reject is the notion that thought is ‘an agency working on things from without’. He writes:
our present situation necessitates the dualism of thought and being. Every act of human knowledge bifurcates what might on proper enquiry turn out to be a unity into a self that knows and a confronting ‘other’ that is known . . . The true significance . . . will appeal only if we are able to show that the human situation is not final and that thought and being are ultimately one.6
To support this account he cites a wide range of theories and concepts derived from a range of philosophers of widely differing views.
The concept of self, or ego (khudi), is central to Iqbal’s thought. He describes the self as being formed in the encountering and overcoming of obstructions in the physical universe. He writes of both a metaphysical and an ethical self. The metaphysical self is ‘that indescribable feeling of “I” which forms the basis of the uniqueness of each individual’.7 The ethical self is ‘self-reliance, self-confidence, even self-assertion . . . in the interest of life and the power to stick to the cause of truth even in the face of death’.8 The self, according to Iqbal, is partly determined, partly free, and is able to increase its freedom by drawing closer to God. It is capable of a personal immortality, achieved through the consolidation of its singularity by means of allegiance to a virtuous way of life. The self, he says, is distinct, though not apart, from God, who is the Ultimate Ego.
Iqbal’s concept of God is a complex one. It has been described as panentheistic rather than pantheistic, that is, as conceiving of God as both including and transcending the world rather than as wholly identical with it. In this his thought is markedly Sufistic in character in that it permits the possibility and desirability of a mystical union of human beings with God and of the aspiration to a bliss that is attainable during a person’s life on earth rather than in the life to come. This is entirely contrary to the orthodox Koranic doctrines of the absolute transcendence or otherness of God and of the divine ordering and knowledge of every detail of the universe and its life.
Iqbal endeavours to resolve the tensions between his own ideas and those of traditional Islamic thought by means of a radical interpretation of sections of the Koran. For example, he connects parts of suras 25 and 54 with Bergson’s account of Time, declaring that the Koran, with characteristic simplicity, is alluding to the serial and non-serial aspects of duration. But it is extremely difficult to detect any such allusion in the verses, which are as follows:
Put your trust in the Ever-living who never dies. Celebrate His praise . . . In six days He created the heavens and the earth and all that lies between them, and then ascended His throne . . . We have made all things according to a fixed decree. We command but once. Our will is done in the twinkling of an eye.9
Iqbal’s broad grasp of western philosophy is impressive but he does not use it well in the service of his endeavour. In his employment of major concepts and ideas he tends to transmogrify their primary meanings by imposing unjustified interpretations on them or by reckless extrapolations from them. Many of his references to well-known philosophers amount to little more than name-dropping. Majid Fakhry, in his History of Islamic Philosophy, has remarked of him that
Very often the multiplication of authorities, ancient or modern, Western or Islamic, is done at such a pace that the reader is left breathless. In the scope of six pages, for instance, the following names are cited: Berkeley, Whitehead, Einstein, Russell, Zeno, Newton, al-Ashari, Ibn Hazm, Bergson, Cantor and Ouspensky – to mention only the principal figures or authorities.10
In spite of such failings there is something of a visionary quality in Iqbal’s perception and appreciation of issues that were of profound practical significance for Muslim cultures and peoples. He wanted to reawaken the Islamic intellect to a fresh engagement with the kind of thought and discussion that had characterized the heyday of Islamic philosophy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE. His high hope was that he would resolve the tensions he found between eastern and western cultures; and that he would effect that resolution in depth, by means of philosophy.
1 A Sufi is a Muslim mystic for whom the inward devotional life is of great importance. The name is derived from the word for the white woollen clothing worn by Sufis (sufi = coarse wool).
2 In Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lahore, Pakistan, 1968, p. 7.
3 For a fuller account of Bergson’s views see Diané Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 130–134.
4 Iqbal, op. cit., p. 52.
5 op. cit., p. 31.
6 ibid.
7 In Syed Abdul Vahid, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, Lahore, Pakistan, 1964, p. 236.
8 ibid.
9 In The Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959, p. 207 and p. 112.
10 In Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, London, Longman, 1983, p. 354.
The Development of Metaphysics in Iran, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1908 (Iqbal’s PhD thesis, submitted to Munich University)
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lahore, Pakistan, 1968
‘McTaggart’s philosophy’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. IV, 1932
Mysteries of Selflessness (Rumuz-i-Bikhundi), trans. A. Arberry, London, Murray, 1953
Malik, Hafeez (ed.), Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1971
Qadir, C.A., Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World, London, Croom Helm, 1988
Raschid, M.S., Iqbal’s Concept of God, London and Boston, Kegan Paul International, 1981
Muhammad, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd