6: The basic tenets of Iqbal's project

Jawdat Sa'eed has assigned to Muhammad Iqbal's thought a supreme status, asserting that there is in his philosophy a lot of innovation...

What are the basic tenets of Iqbal's project? What are his influences on Modern Islamic thought, particularly in the Arab World?

What can one say about Muhammad Iqbal? The main thing that attracted me to him is that he was a staunch and firm believer, with a very devout heart. Besides that fact, he had thorough and profound conception of the current world in its philosophical foundations. I used to wonder how integrated these two currents were in the mind of that man – and we needed badly that blending of science and faith. I longed to find that, and found it in the character of Muhammad Iqbal; I could not think of any other person who had the two currents so distinctly and firmly: his background in the Islamic heritage was quite thorough and assured, and he had seen modernism in its most representative circles, and in its various tongues. Such type was quite rare among Muslims, and even today those who are familiar with the Islamic heritage know little about the modern world, and those who are at home with the modern concepts are nowhere in the Islamic legacy. This is our trouble up to the present, but that was not so in the case of Iqbal, for he was aware of both dimensions: he could speak authoritatively and innovatively about theology, adapted to the modern life, in a way that Muhammad Arkoun longed for and could not realize. In mysticism, he was also an innovator, capable of sorting the valuable from the worthless; so was he in Islamic law, for he could think with originality on certain topics of dealings from an Islamic jurisprudence aspect. Unfortunately, there has been no one who supported and elaborated the foundations that Iqbal has laid, and he did realize that fact: he deplored that people did not appreciate his thought, that he was like a candle in the dark, that his ideas were like deer that no hunter seemed able to catch.

In one verse of his, he said:

I feel bored with the ancient company;

I've set my flame on my Mount of Tur, waiting for a Moses to descry.

He used to say that he was a voice, and his poet would appear later in the future, that he was a Joseph that found no bidder to buy in the Muslims' market. At the end of his verse collection Secrets and Symbols he wrote that if it were possible for him to rise from the grave some time in the future, he would find a land that was a delight to live in.

As for his impact on the modern Islamic thought, and especially in the Arab World, it has been minimal. People scarcely understood him – they took him to be another poet eulogizing Islam, and Islam is in no need of a eulogy. He sensed that, for he said: "Some would take me for a poet; they would say: "Write a panegyric of this, and a vituperation of that – it is so for they fail to get my point." In his book The Modern Trends in Islam, the British Orientalist Hamilton Jibb has written about Iqbal: "He has a new and unprecedented conception of Islam, but his cries have gone unheeded."

Some people do say that he was a great lover of Islam, but they one and all do object to him, and they scare the youth of him, on the grounds that he had mystic excesses or legal views that are not in line with mainstream Islam. They were repelled by his acceptance of history and the outcomes of historical events as a criterion in judging civilizations; they were scared of his conception of shari'ah, that its rulings may be reconsidered in view of the lessons of history. In short, his innovative thought has remained under a cloud, doubted and distrusted. Very few people have tried to devote the necessary time to probing his ideas and fathoming his philosophy.

He descried a different world – he would say: Our Ka'aba (of Mecca) is full of idols, and disbelief can well laugh at our Islam; our sheikh is gambling on Islam for his love of idols – he would sell his fatwa, and our missionary would look with envy at the idols' house. They have wasted the purity of Mecca.

Iqbal also said: "My line of though leads me to assert continuous creation, that the universe is in a state of increase and growth."

One of his conclusions was that according to the Qur'an, communities are brought to account as a whole. Also about communities he commented on a verse from the Qur'an " To every people is a term appointed (7, 34)," that this verse represented one of the historical laws … in its very condense phrase, it affirmed that social communities might be studied scientifically, as organisms.

Elsewhere he said: The Qur'an's attention of history, as a source of human knowledge, goes much farther than taking it to be historical instructions. The Qur'an lays down one of the most fundamental principles of the philosophy of history.

He says: Any earnest investigation of culture can find in the principle of tawheed 'Oneness of God' a basis for a unification of the whole world; and Islam, as a political constitution, is no more than a practical means for making such basis operative in people's intellectual and emotional life; it is so since it demands allegiance and loyalty to God, rather than to crowns and thrones.

When he handles the ossification and rigidity in the Islamic thought he refers to the dispute concerning the Qur'an's being old 'i.e. eternal' or new 'i.e. not eternal', and refers to mysticism, which, as he points out, blocked people's sight from Islam as a social constitution. The fall of Baghdad, according to Iqbal, led the conservative religious scholars to "focus 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 Shari'a as expounded by the early doctors of Islam. Their leading idea was social order, and there is no doubt that they were partly right, because organization does to a certain extent counteract the forces of decay. But they did not see, and our modern Ulema (scholars) do not see, that the ultimate fate of a people does not depend so much on organization as on the worth and power of individual men. In the over-organized society the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul. Thus a false reverence for past history and its artificial resurrection constitute no remedy for a people's decay … the only effective power, therefore, that counteracts the forces of decay in a people is the rearing of self-concentrated individuals. Such individuals alone reveal the depth of life. They disclose new standards in the light of which we begin to see that our environment is not wholly inviolable and requires revision." (From: Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Chapters Five and Six, viz. The Spirit of Muslim Culture, and The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam.) It was a new approach to things, and I pondered long over this way of analyzing the situation – I detected in this method a shaking up of our way of thinking, and a ruling out of our idolization of the environment, including what people attribute to God – I saw that this environment was not necessarily too sacred to be changed.

But up to the present day, we have not invested in Muhammad Iqbal's thought. We need to reflect long on his work to perceive the dimensions of his thought, and we need to make of his ideas the subject-matter of prolonged discussions and debates, until those ideas become incorporated into our minds, and then are developed and elaborated and deepened. Later generations will have more respect for his intellectual adventures and aspirations; there will be more studies of his work and his merits. He is an extraordinary mind, and he dedicated his energy to the service of Islam – may Allah bless Iqbal with His favour. May his name be remembered for ever, for he revived my life, and illuminated my imagination with the power of his faith and his erudition. He is a landmark and a lighthouse on the way of Islam and mankind.