Iqbal and Islam

Iqbal views religion as alive, just like a living organism, evolving with humanity’s experiences. In fact, that is the subject matter of his sixth lecture, ‘the Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam’, in the Reconstruction. For Iqbal though the soul of Islam remains permanent and intact, the body may keep changing face as it fluxes through time — a changing face enabled by the principle of ijtihad.

For Iqbal the basis of religion is wider than ethnicity or nationalism, rather it tends to encompass the whole humanity and aims to take humanity to an encounter with the Ultimate Reality of all things. And “…human unity becomes possible only with the perception that all human life is spiritual in its origin.” This relation with the Ultimate Reality frees humanity from the shackles of earthliness and binds it with the spiritual world that takes it beyond the limits of space and time.

Iqbal says, “As a cultural movement Islam rejects the old static view of the universe and reaches a dynamic view.” Change, according to the Quran, “is one of the greatest ‘signs’ of God” while ‘permanence’ is vouchsafed in the unifying principle of tauhid, which creates loyalty to God. This very principle tills the ground for ‘change’, as God Himself, who is ‘eternal’, is also constantly ‘revealing’ Himself ‘in variety and change’. Man needs to understand this principle of change and embrace it, for perpetual change is an unceasing aspect of worldly life.

For Iqbal ‘change’ is just as important as ‘the permanent’, and excluding the possibility of change “immobilizes what is essentially mobile in nature” — the human society. The failure to cope with change was the reason for the failure of the church and is also the reason of the “immobility of Islam in the last five hundred years”, and its cure is ijtihad — a process of re-assessing judgment according to new situations.

Iqbal is saddened by the fact that the doors to the possibility of ‘complete authority in legislation’ had been closed and sealed since the founding of the first schools of legislation. This “attitude seems exceedingly strange in a system of law based mainly on the groundwork provided by the Quran, which embodies an essentially dynamic outlook on life”. Iqbal explains three reasons for this attitude, as follows:

Firstly the tension between the conservative mindset and the ‘Rationalist Movement’, which was raising new questions that they might not be able to answer in the light of the Quran and Sunnah, and this fear led them to make the shariah as rigorous as possible to save Islam from disintegrating into heresy. Secondly, the rise of ascetic Sufism, based on the distinction of the zahir and baatin (appearance and reality), leading many to other-worldliness and draining the best minds of the society into non-political thinking, thus leaving the “Muslim state… in the hands of intellectual mediocrities and the unthinking masses of Islam”. Thirdly, the destruction of Baghdad at the hands of the Tartars, leaving in the hearts of the Muslims “a half-suppressed pessimism about the future of Islam”, to save which they had to focus on social order and uniformity, which was ensured by sticking to traditional teachings. This attitude of maintaining ‘an over-organised society’ crushes down the ‘individual’, as his soul is lost society faces decay.

Iqbal’s constant effort in the lecture is to knit the secular with spiritual, as he says, “In Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not two distinct domains and the nature of an act, however secular in its import, is determined by the attitude of mind with which the agent does it. It is the invisible mental background of the act which ultimately determines its character. An act is temporal or profane if it is done in a spirit of detachment from the infinite complexity of life behind it; it is spiritual if it is inspired by that complexity.”

Just like the spirit and the act are inseparable, so are the state and the religion. Human life does not have ‘two distinct realities’ with some points of contact, rather, ‘matter is spirit in space-time reference’. “The essence of tauhid… is equality, solidarity and freedom. The state, from the Islamic standpoint is an endeavor to transform these ideal principles into space-time threes, an aspiration to realize them in a definite human organization.”

Yet these equality, solidarity and freedom are not the same as in the Western ideas of Liberalism and Secularism, which tend to liberate man from the tiring shackles of religion. Rather for Iqbal, equality, solidarity and freedom come with the individual’s spirit connecting to the Ultimate; the Muslim society as a spirit connecting to the Ultimate and then the whole humanity connecting to the Ultimate spiritual basis, that is God. This great movement of a total paradigm change for humanity is not possible without the true infallible word of God. Iqbal says:

“The Ultimate Reality, according to the Quran is spiritual and its life consists in its temporal activity. The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the secular (worldly). All that is secular is, therefore, sacred in the roots of its being… the merely material has no substance until we discover it rooted in the spiritual.”

In Iqbal’s reconstruction, all that is worldly or secular is also sacred if only connected to the spirituality that connects everything. Western secularism is the theory of separating the state and religion, spirit and matter, whereas Islam, according to Iqbal, sees them in one unity.

So, as Iqbal encourages the reconstruction of religious life according to the changing needs of humanity, he warns that this reconstruction should assure the revival and reconnection of the lost spirit of Islam. He says, “Equipped with penetrative thought and fresh experience the world of Islam should courageously proceed to the work of reconstruction before them… Humanity needs three things today — a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import directing the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2022.

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