The Forgotten Treasure of Iqbal’s Reconstruction -I

By Dr. M Maroof Shah - Greater Kashmir - Srinigar,India
Monday, January 15, 2007

Need is to revive a great legacy which stands buried under the ignorance of our modern day scholars.

Iqbal’s is the unique flowering of poetical, mystical and philosophical genius in recent Islamic history. He has few predecessors and still fewer inheritors. His encyclopedic mind wrestled with almost all the important issues that modern Muslim and modern man confronts in his life’s odyssey.

His is the original, bold and very unorthodox approach. He is an arch innovator and non-conformist. He is a philosopher of no mean stature and his attempt of bridging philosophy and religion, or in general, knowledge and religion is unique in boldness of thought and originality.

His primary addressee is modern man and then the modern Muslim.The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam — makes Iqbal the most important intellectual of modernist Islam. He is perhaps the most important Muslim philosopher of science in the twentieth century.

His is a unique flowering of mystical philosophical religious genius. He and his Reconstruction are phenomena in themselves and history hardly ever repeats such phenomena. His appropriation of modern science in Islam, his rereading of Sufism and his individualist religious metaphysics are uniquely his and constitute his originality.

It is ridiculous to argue that Ibn Hnifa did something similar. Ulema have some reservations about the whole project of reconstruction. If any aalim had done something similar there would have been no reason for saying that “it would have been better if Iqbal had not written it.”

Rational appropriation of traditional Islamic metaphysical thought that invokes modern philosophical and scientific thought structures as has been done in these lectures has hardly any orthodox/ traditional warrant. Saeed Akbar Abadi’s defense of Reconstruction in traditional terms has not found and cannot find much favour with the generality of Ulema.

Iqbal’s concept of ego, his individualistic metaphysics, his divinization of time, his epistemology, his rejection of orthodox Unitarian Sufi metaphysics, his theological and philosophical dualism, his humanist orientation, his evolutionist and empiricist approach, his concept of God’s omniscience and freedom, his view of good and evil, his concept of taqdir and so many other dimensions of his metaphysical and theological thought—all are not easily reconcilable with traditional/orthodox interpretation of Islam.

Iqbal has reread Rumi and certain other great classical authorities and conceptions of traditional Islam from the perspective of philosophy of ego and this constitutes his unique approach to Islam. There is no other modern Muslim philosopher or traditional aalim who has done anything comparable. Iqbal and his overall philosophy, not just his Reconstruction are phenomena in themselves, unique, unprecedented.

Iqbal is in himself an institution, a school that originated with him. Here I intend neither to defend nor to critique Iqbal vis-à-vis traditional metaphysical/mystical/religious thought spearheaded by either the exoteric ulema or the Sufi authorities or the perennialists but just point out how radical a divergence is between the two.

There is only one Iqbal and only one Reconstruction in the history.

Without a deep familiarity with such abstruse metaphysical and Sufi works as Insani Kamil of Al-Jili, Fusus of Ibn Arabi, such modern philosophers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson etc., such scientific works as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Freud’s important works, Fraser and Comte’s works, such physicist philosophers as Einstein and Eddington, such theosophical works as Secret Doctrine to name only a few, understanding Iqbal or his Reconstruction and his originality and genius is not possible.

He is mazloom as someone has well remarked as everybody who has memorized some of his verses and has not mastered or at least has not good acquaintance with world’s metaphysical, religious, philosophical and literary traditions has hardly any moral right to dabble in Iqbali studies or discuss Reconstruction.

(...)

Iqbal lays down charter of Reconstruction in its preface. He has succinctly put forward his agenda in the book. The very first line that “Islam is a religion which emphasizes deed rather than idea” is quite a loaded statement in tune with modern sensibility though such metaphysicians as Guenon (Abdul Wahid Yaha) and Schuon (Isa Nuruddin) would question its Islamic warrant.

Iqbal has elsewhere declared that action is the highest form of contemplation.

This is quite an innovative rereading of the whole Eastern tradition. Modern man, for good or worse, is committed to action instead of contemplation. It is not however very clear what Iqbal here means by the word “Idea”. But one may reasonably infer that he has in mind eastern and Platonic idea of idea and contemplation for which the consistent philosophy of ego has not much space as the East is against the ego as well as actions that fortify it as a separate individual entity in a tensionful state with a dialectical relation to the world and associated dualistic philosophical framework.

The whole metaphysical and mystical tradition privileges contemplation over action, being over becoming, eternity and space over time, universal over individual (spirit over soul and body). However Iqbal problematizes most of these binaries and sometimes argues for reversing the hierarchies.

Starting with this assertion Iqbal makes another statement that the traditionalists would contest. He says that for a concrete type of mind the traditional modes of thought (as represented in classical mainstream Sufism as he explains after a few lines) are no longer valid or need to be adapted to changed perception. This is indeed true but the question is ‘is not concrete type of mind itself a problem?’ Could not the whole problem lie in modern mind’s peculiar make-up itself?

Should it not be asked to remould itself and renounce the whole philosophical –scientific tradition that has shaped it in the first place.

--to be concluded--