“Reconstruction of religious thought in Islam”

Introduction
Dr. Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) does not need any introduction to the Muslims of world in general and the Indian sub-continent in particular. Today he is revered as a respected national poet of Pakistan who not only gave the idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of India but also actively struggled for realization of the dream. He convinced Quaid e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah to come back from England to lead the Muslims for an Independent homeland in India. But more than that he was a great philosopher, poet, politician, academic, barrister, scholar and intellectual who was well versed with Western philosophy as well as Islamic theology. He critically analyzed the causes of decline of Muslim Ummah and indicated possible ways of renaissance of Muslims.

This theosophical scholarly aspect of the personality of Iqbal has not been given its due share. It is due to this negligence that, Muslim Ummah is paying a very heavy price by becoming hostage in the hands of few misguided pseudo terrorists under guise of corrupted ideology of terror. In fact the great religion, Islam has been hijacked by people of low intellect and limited knowledge. There is an urgent need to free Islam from the clutches of such bandits and restore it to its original position in the modern world, as visualized by Iqbal in his thought provoking lectures.

Sir Muhammad Iqbal is the best articulated Muslim response to Modernity that the Islamic world has produced in the 20th century. His response has three dimensions:

1. A creative engagement with the conceptual paradigm of modernism at a sophisticated philosophical level through his prose writings, mainly his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam which presents his basic philosophic insights.
2. His Urdu and Persian poetry which is the best embodiment of poetically mediated thought, squarely in the traditional continuity of Islamic literature and perhaps the finest flowering of wisdom poetry, or contemplative poetry or inspired poetry in the modern times.
3. As a political activist/social reformer― rising up to his social responsibility, his calling at a critical phase of history.

The theosophical views of Iqbal have been recorded in “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”, a compilation of lectures delivered by him on Islamic philosophy, published in 1930. These lectures were delivered in Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh (India). The last chapter, “Is Religion Possible”, was added to the book in 1934.

In his own words, Iqbal describes the aim:
“In these lectures I propose to undertake a philosophical discussion of some of the basic ideas of Islam in the hope that this may, at least, be helpful towards a proper understanding of the meaning of Islam as a message to humanity. Also with a view to give a kind of ground-outline for further discussion, I propose in this preliminary lecture, to consider the character of knowledge and religious experience.” (Lecture-1)

This writer consider himself to be not in a position to comment or write on the works of the great scholar Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, hence help from research work by intellectuals and experts on Iqbaliyat (study of works of Iqbal) has been found to be useful.

Special thanks to Dr. Tahir Hameed Tanoli (Iqbal Academy Pakistan) who has graciously permitted reproduction of these lectures to promote and disseminate the study and understanding of the works and teachings of Allama Iqbal. This will enable the reader to directly comprehend his views, a starting point for further studies.

Iqbal in brief
Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) is one of the greatest writers of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. He received special attention from many scholars and critics from Western and Islamic world; an indicator of his stature as a renowned global intellectual and philosopher. Commonly he is known as a poet, but his philosophical work has long term application. He is known and admired as the greatest Muslim philosopher of this modem age. Iqbal’s poetry and philosophy do not exist in isolation from each other; they are integrally related, his poetry serving as a vehicle for his thought. Iqbal wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian.

Iqbal was born in Sialkot (Punjab, in Pakistan) in 1877. He received his early education in that city, where one of his teachers was Mir Hasan, an accomplished scholar who was well familiar with many languages of Muslims. Mir Hasan gave Iqbal a thorough training in the rich Islamic literary tradition. His influence on Iqbal was formative.

Iqbal went to Lahore (1895) for higher education, obtained a degree in law (1898), joined Government College and was awarded MA in philosophy in 1899. Lahore was a major center of academic and literary activity, Iqbal was well recognized as a poet. Sir Thomas Arnold was one of the teachers of Government College whom Iqbal admired the most. He had great affection for Iqbal and helped Iqbal in his career as a teacher and also encouraged him to undertake several research projects. When Arnold returned to England in 1904, Iqbal wrote a touching poem in which he expressed his resolve to follow Arnold to England. Iqbal joined Cambridge, well reputed for the study of European philosophy, Arabic and Persian. During his three years of stay in Europe he obtained a BA from Cambridge (1906), qualified as a barrister at London’s Middle Temple (1906), and PhD from Munich University (1908).

After his return to Lahore in 1908 Iqbal taught philosophy at Government College for some time. In 1911 he resigned from government service and set up legal practice. Meanwhile he continued to write poetry in Urdu and Persian, Asrar-i Khudi (Persian) was published in 1915. Translated into English as The Secrets of the Self (1920) by Professor Reynold Nicholson of Cambridge, the book introduced Iqbal to the West. Asrar-i Khudi was followed by several other volumes: Rumuz-i Bekhudi (1918), Payam-i Mashriq (1923), Bang-i Dara (1924), Zabur-i Ajam (1927), Javid Namah (1932), Musafir (1936), Zarb-i Kalim (1937), and Armaghan-i Hijaz (1938, posthumously).

Iqbal also wrote prose which include his doctoral thesis, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia which was published in 1908, and his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (with a 7^th chapter added to the original set of six lectures, first published in 1930), in 1934. Most of Iqbal’s poetical works have been translated into many languages including English, German, Russian, Italian, Czechoslovakian, Turkish and Arabic. His works have also become a source of large critical literature in many languages.

Though Iqbal was a poet and philosopher his main interests were scholarly and he was much concerned with the political situation of the country and the political future of the Muslims of Indian subcontinent. In England, he had been chosen as a member of the executive council of the newly established British branch of the Indian Muslim League in 1908. In 1931 and 1932 he represented the Muslims of India in the Round Table Conferences held in England to discuss the issue of the political future of India. In 1930 Iqbal suggested the creation of a separate homeland for the Muslims of India while delivering a lecture. Iqbal died (1938) before the creation of Pakistan (1947) but his thought was the driving force in the creation of Pakistan.

Terminologies
Some frequently referred terminologies are briefly explained:

The Religion is one of the ways of binding the people together through common deity worship and rituals. According to Encyclopedia Britannica; “Religion is commonly regarded as consisting of a person’s relation to God or to gods or spirits. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are generally also constituent elements of the religious life as practiced by believers and worshipers and as commanded by religious teachers, messengers and scriptures.”

Philosophy is the branch of knowledge dealing with the critical examination of the grounds for fundamental beliefs and an analysis of the basic concepts employed in the expression of such beliefs. The word Philosophy is derived from Greek by way of Latin, philosophia, “love of wisdom”. Philosophical inquiry is a central element in the intellectual history of many historical civilizations. The Philosophy, Metaphysics and Theology are interlinked in the context of philosophical studies in religious perspective.

Etymologically the term Metaphysics is unenlightening, it means “what comes after physics”. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with critically examining basic philosophical assumptions and identifying what exists insofar as it exists. Metaphysics interacts with such other philosophical studies as logic, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. The metaphysical philosophy deals with the first principles of things including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, and identity. It also examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.

Theology is the discipline of religious thought. The themes of theology are God, man, the world, salvation and eschatology (the study of the final events in the history of mankind). The Philosophical Theology is devoted to the exploration of God and of the claims made about God in the various traditions and religious truth and rational inquiry into religious questions. Its range of topics typically includes what are known as the divine attributes.

Theosophy (God’s wisdom) refers to systems of esoteric philosophy concerning, or seeking direct knowledge of, presumed mysteries of being and nature, particularly concerning the nature of divinity. Theosophy is considered a part of the broader field of esotericism, referring to hidden knowledge or wisdom that offers the individual enlightenment and salvation. The theosopher seeks to understand the mysteries of the universe and the bonds that unite the universe, humanity, and the divine. The goal of theosophy is to explore the origin of divinity, humanity and the world. From investigation of those topics, theosophers try to discover a coherent description of the purpose and origin of the universe. The name Theosophy is also used in modern times to refer to the religio-philosophic doctrines.

Mysticism is “a constellation of distinctive practices, discourses, texts, institutions, traditions, and experiences aimed at human transformation, variously defined in different traditions.” During the early modern period, the definition of mysticism grew to include a broad range of beliefs and ideologies related to “extraordinary experiences and states of mind”. In modern times, “mysticism” has acquired a limited definition, with broad applications, as meaning the aim at the “union with the Absolute, the Infinite, or God”. This limited definition has been applied to a wide range of religious traditions and practices, valuing “mystical experience” as a key element of mysticism.

Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. It is an academic discipline and an applied science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.

Theosophical Views
In Reconstruction, Iqbal called for a re-examination of the intellectual foundations of Islamic philosophy. The book is a major work of modern Islamic thought. It was a major influence on Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati and other contemporary Muslim reformers, including Tariq Ramadan.

Dr. Waheed Ishrat and Dr. M.A.K. Khalil in their review article opine that:

In spite of the widely accepted importance of Allama Iqbal’s “Lectures” titled The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, in the field of Iqbal Studies, the works published on it are very limited. Only a few books have been written with reference to the “Lectures”. This is due firstly to the fact that the “Lectures” are in English language and secondly, they address profound literary and philosophical problems. The language of literary and philosophical problems is usually more difficult and delicate than the common language, which renders their comprehension difficult for the average reader. Consequently, the average researchers shy away from this serious responsibility. In addition, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is a book which has one of the greatest importances among those written after the period of our downfall. It leads us to comprehension of the spirit of our cultural and civilizational progress and the basic causes of our decade me as well as points out to us the ways of understanding the requirements of the new age and the reconstruction of our present and future and shows us the principles on which our renaissance is possible.

These “Lectures” are spread over the vast canvas of the religious, intellectual, theological, political and practical problems created for the Muslims in the evolution of the new life in the Indian sub­continent and the Muslim world, and by the continuous struggle between them and the West. In the whole Islamic world the basic challenges faced by religion itself and by the Muslim Ummah for its existence and continuity have been addressed in the background of Islam and its relationship with the West by Iqbal in an unprecedented manner.

Most of the eminent Ulema (Islamic scholars) were only good teachers in religious seminaries, but totally lacked the perception of the current thought and the political, social and economic problems confronting Muslims. In fact the conduct of some of them proved detrimental to the Muslim independence movements by knowingly or unknowingly continuing to play in the hands of the powers operating against the Muslim interests. These Ulema were ignorant of the advancements of the western philosophy, western theology, new psychology and new technology. In contrast to them the new educated mind was adopting the western ways completely. The changes continuously created by the slow and insidious hold of the Western civilization on the cultural, political and ethical life of Muslims under the guise of new technology, seriously affected the collective life of Muslims. The greater number of our Ulema could not comprehend this state of affairs, and failed to understand the special nature of the problems facing the Muslims in the present day world. Consequently, the demands of life have continued to pull Muslims towards Western culture and have been consistently creating uncertainty and doubt against religion itself and particularly Islam even in the face of the preaching and edicts of the Ulema. The modern class of Egypt, Turkey and the Indian sub­continent itself was offering such explanations of Islamic teachings as reflected the lack of ambition and indicated submission to the Western culture as well as ignorance of both Islam and Western culture. In these circumstances Iqbal formulated some basic questions with the background of Western philosophy and Islamic theology. In this way, with reference to the spirit of their times, the Muslim Ummah, particularly those of the Indian sub­continent became aware of these basic questions, the answers to which were essential for the organization of the Muslims’ new social, cultural, political and economic life. Iqbal was the first to raise these questions in the Muslim society. In the history of philosophy the answers often have not been considered as important as the questions.

Some quotes provide a brief insight to the book:
• …To have a succession of identical thoughts and feelings is to have no thoughts and feelings at all. Such is the lot of most Muslim countries today. They are mechanically repeating old values…
• …space, time, and matter are interpretations which thought puts on the free creative energy of God.
• If the aim of religion is the spiritualisation of the heart, then it must penetrate the soul of man, and it can best penetrate the inner man.
• We find that when Muhammad Ibn Tumart—the Mahdi of Muslim Spain—who was Berber by nationality, came to power and established the pontifical rule of the Muwahhidun, he ordered for the sake of the illiterate Berbers that the Quran should be translated and read in the Berber language and that the call to prayer should be given in Berber.
• Such is the attitude of the modern Turk, inspired as he is by the realities of experience, and not by the scholastic reasoning of jurists who lived and thought under different conditions of life. To my mind these arguments, if rightly appreciated, indicate the birth of an International ideal, which forming the very essence of Islam, has been hitherto overshadowed or rather displaced by Arabian Imperialism of the earlier centuries in Islam.
• The republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that were set free in the world of Islam.
• The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in important respects, from our own.
• Hard his lot and frail his being, like a rose leaf, yet no form of reality is so powerful, so inspiring, and so beautiful as the spirit of man.

The series of lectures by Dr. Muhammad Iqbal are being reproduced here courtesy of Iqbal Academy Pakistan, for direct understanding the thoughts of this great Muslim intellectual, scholar, philosopher and poet.

Preface
The Qur’ān is a book which emphasizes ‘deed’ rather than ‘idea’. There are, however, men to whom it is not possible organically to assimilate an alien universe by re-living, as a vital process that special type of inner experience on which religious faith ultimately rests. Moreover, the modern man, by developing habits of concrete thought– habits which Islam itself fostered at least in the earlier stages of its cultural career – has rendered himself less capable of that experience which he further suspects because of its liability to illusion. The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in important respects, from our own. ‘Your creation and resurrection,’ says the Qur’ān, ‘are like the creation and resurrection of a single soul.’ (31:28) A living experience of the kind of biological unity embodied in this verse requires today a method physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind. In the absence of such a method the demand for a scientific form of religious knowledge is only natural. In these Lectures, which were undertaken at the request of the Madras Muslim Association and delivered at Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh, I have tried to meet, even though partially, this urgent demand by attempting to reconstruct Muslim religious philosophy with due regard to the philosophical traditions of Islam and the more recent developments in the various domains of human knowledge. And the present moment is quite favourable for such an undertaking. Classical Physics has learned to criticize its own foundations. As a result of this criticism the kind of materialism, which it originally necessitated, is rapidly disappearing; and the day is not far off when Religion and Science may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies. It must, however, be remembered that there is no such thing as finality in philosophical thinking. As knowledge advances and fresh avenues of thought are opened, other views, and probably sounder views than those set forth in these lectures, are possible. Our duty is carefully to watch the progress of human thought, and to maintain an independent critical attitude towards it. (M I)

Chapters/Lectures
1. Knowledge and Religious Experience
2. The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience
3. The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer
4. The Human Ego – His Freedom and Immortality
5. The Spirit of Muslim Culture
6. The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam
7. Is Religion Possible?

Chapter-1

Knowledge and Religious Experience
What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These questions are common to religion, philosophy, and higher poetry. But the kind of knowledge that poetic inspiration brings is essentially individual in its character; it is figurative, vague, and indefinite. Religion, in its more advanced forms, rises higher than poetry. It moves from individual to society. In its attitude towards the Ultimate Reality it is opposed to the limitations of man; it enlarges his claims and holds out the prospect of nothing less than a direct vision of Reality. Is it then possible to apply the purely rational method of philosophy to religion? The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the Ultimate Reality. The essence of religion, on the other hand, is faith and faith, like the bird, sees its “trackless way” unattended by intellect which, in the words of the great mystic poet of Islam, “only waylays the living heart of man and robs it of the invisible wealth of life that lies within.” Yet it cannot be denied that faith is more than mere feeling. It has something like a cognitive content, and the existence of rival parties– scholastics and mystics– in the history of religion shows that idea is a vital element in religion. Apart from this, religion on its doctrinal side, as defined by Professor Whitehead, is “a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended.” Now, since the transformation and guidance of man’s inner and outer life is the essential aim of religion, it is obvious that the general truths which it embodies must not remain unsettled. No one would hazard action on the basis of a doubtful principle of conduct. Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science. Science may ignore a rational metaphysics; indeed, it has ignored it so far. Religion can hardly afford to ignore the search for a reconciliation of the oppositions of experience and a justification of the environment in which humanity finds itself. That is why Professor Whitehead has acutely remarked that “the ages of faith are the ages of rationalism”. But to rationalize faith is not to admit the superiority of philosophy over religion. Philosophy, no doubt, has jurisdiction to judge religion, but what is to be judged is of such a nature that it will not submit to the jurisdiction of philosophy except on its own terms. While sitting in judgment on religion, philosophy cannot give religion an inferior place among its data. Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man. Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis. Nor is there any reason to suppose that thought and intuition are essentially opposed to each other. They spring up from the same root and complement each other. The one grasps Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation. Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals itself to them in accordance with their function in life. In fact, intuition, as Bergson rightly says, is only a higher kind of intellect.

The search for rational foundations in Islam may be regarded to have begun with the Prophet himself. His constant prayer was: “God! Grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things!” The work of later mystics and non-mystic rationalists forms an exceedingly instructive chapter in the history of our culture, inasmuch as it reveals a longing for a coherent system of ideas, a spirit of whole-hearted devotion to truth, as well as the limitations of the age, which rendered the various theological movements in Islam less fruitful than they might have been in a different age. As we all know, Greek philosophy has been a great cultural force in the history of Islam. Yet a careful study of the Qur’an and the various schools of scholastic theology that arose under the inspiration of Greek thought disclose the remarkable fact that while Greek philosophy very much broadened the outlook of Muslim thinkers, it, on the whole, obscured their vision of the Qur’an. Socrates concentrated his attention on the human world alone. To him the proper study of man was man and not the world of plants, insects, and stars. How unlike the spirit of the Qur’an, which sees in the humble bee a recipient of Divine inspiration and constantly calls upon the reader to observe the perpetual change of the winds, the alternation of day and night, the clouds, the starry heavens, and the planets swimming through infinite space! As a true disciple of Socrates, Plato despised sense-perception which, in his view, yielded mere opinion and no real knowledge. How unlike the Qur’an, which regards “hearing” and “sight” as the most valuable Divine gifts and declares them to be accountable to God for their activity in this world. This is what the earlier Muslim students of the Qur’an completely missed under the spell of classical speculation. They read the Qur’an in the light of Greek thought. It took them over two hundred years to perceive– though not quite clearly–that the spirit of the Qur’an was essentially anti-classical, and the result of this perception was a kind of intellectual revolt, the full significance of which has not been realized even up to the present day. It was partly owing to this revolt and partly to his personal history that Ghazālī based religion on philosophical skepticism– a rather unsafe basis for religion and not wholly justified by the spirit of the Qur’an. Ghazālī’s chief opponent, Ibn Rushd, who defended Greek philosophy against the rebels, was led, through Aristotle, to what is known as the doctrine of Immortality of Active Intellect, a doctrine which once wielded enormous influence on the intellectual life of France and Italy, but which, to my mind, is entirely opposed to the view that the Qur’an takes of the value and destiny of the human ego. Thus Ibn Rushd lost sight of a great and fruitful idea in Islam and unwittingly helped the growth of that enervating philosophy of life which obscures man’s vision of himself, his God, and his world. The more constructive among the Ash‘arite thinkers were no doubt on the right path and anticipated some of the more modern forms of Idealism; yet, on the whole, the object of the Ash‘arite movement was simply to defend orthodox opinion with the weapons of Greek dialectic. The Mu‘tazilah, conceiving religion merely as a body of doctrines and ignoring it as a vital fact, took no notice of non-conceptual modes of approaching Reality and reduced religion to a mere system of logical concepts ending in a purely negative attitude. They failed to see that in the domain of knowledge– scientific or religious– complete independence of thought from concrete experience is not possible.

It cannot, however, be denied that Ghazālī’s mission was almost apostolic like that of Kant in Germany of the eighteenth century. In Germany rationalism appeared as an ally of religion, but she soon realized that the dogmatic side of religion was incapable of demonstration. The only course open to her was to eliminate dogma from the sacred record. With the elimination of dogma came the utilitarian view of morality, and thus rationalism completed the reign of unbelief. Such was the state of theological thought in Germany when Kant appeared. His Critique of Pure Reason revealed the limitations of human reason and reduced the whole work of the rationalists to a heap of ruins. And justly has he been described as God’s greatest gift to his country. Ghazālī’s philosophical skepticism which, how-ever, went a little too far, virtually did the same kind of work in the world of Islam in breaking the back of that proud but shallow rationalism which moved in the same direction as pre-Kantian rationalism in Germany. There is, however, one important difference between Ghazālī and Kant. Kant, consistently with his principles, could not affirm the possibility of knowledge of God. Ghazālī, finding no hope in analytic thought, moved to mystic experience, and there found an independent content for religion. In this way he succeeded in securing for religion the right to exist independently of science and metaphysics. But the revelation of the total Infinite in mystic experience convinced him of the finitude and inconclusiveness of thought and drove him to draw a line of cleavage between thought and intuition. He failed to see that thought and intuition are organically related and that thought must necessarily simulate finitude and inconclusiveness because of its alliance with serial time. The idea that thought is essentially finite, and for this reason unable to capture the Infinite, is based on a mistaken notion of the movement of thought in knowledge. It is the inadequacy of the logical understanding which finds a multiplicity of mutually repellent individualities with no prospect of their ultimate reduction to a unity that makes us skeptical about the conclusiveness of thought. In fact, the logical understanding is incapable of seeing this multiplicity as a coherent universe. Its only method is generalization based on resemblances, but its generalizations are only fictitious unities which do not affect the reality of concrete things. In its deeper movement, however, thought is capable of reaching an immanent Infinite in whose self-unfolding movement the various finite concepts are merely moments. In its essential nature, then, thought is not static; it is dynamic and unfolds its internal infinitude in time like the seed which, from the very beginning, carries within itself the organic unity of the tree as a present fact. Thought is, therefore, the whole in its dynamic self-expression, appearing to the temporal vision as a series of definite specifications which cannot be understood except by a reciprocal reference. Their meaning lies not in their self-identity, but in the larger whole of which they are the specific aspects. This larger whole is, to use a Qur’anic metaphor, a kind of “Preserved Tablet”, which holds up the entire undetermined possibilities of knowledge as a present reality, revealing itself in serial time as a succession of finite concepts appearing to reach a unity which is already present in them. It is in fact the presence of the total Infinite in the movement of knowledge that makes finite thinking possible. Both Kant and Ghazālī failed to see that thought, in the very act of knowledge, passes beyond its own finitude. The finitudes of Nature are reciprocally exclusive. Not so the finitudes of thought which is, in its essential nature, incapable of limitation and cannot remain imprisoned in the narrow circuit of its own individuality. In the wide world beyond itself nothing is alien to it. It is in its progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude. Its movement becomes possible only because of the implicit presence in its finite individuality of the infinite, which keeps alive within it the flame of aspiration and sustains it in its endless pursuit. It is a mistake to regard thought as inconclusive, for it too, in its own way, is a greeting of the finite with the infinite.

During the last five hundred years religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary. There was a time when European thought received inspiration from the world of Islam. The most remarkable phenomenon of modern history, however, is the enormous rapidity with which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. There is nothing wrong in this movement, for European culture, on its intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam. Our only fear is that the dazzling exterior of European culture may arrest our movement and we may fail to reach the true inwardness of that culture. During all the centuries of our intellectual stupor Europe has been seriously thinking on the great problems in which the philosophers and scientists of Islam were so keenly interested. Since the Middle Ages, when the schools of Muslim theology were completed, infinite advance has taken place in the domain of human thought and experience. The extension of man’s power over Nature has given him a new faith and a fresh sense of superiority over the forces that constitute his environment. New points of view have been suggested, old problems have been re-stated in the light of fresh experience, and new problems have arisen. It seems as if the intellect of man is outgrowing its own most fundamental categories– time, space, and causality. With the advance of scientific thought even our concept of intelligibility is undergoing a change. The theory of Einstein has brought a new vision of the universe and suggests new ways of looking at the problems common to both religion and philosophy. No wonder then that the younger generation of Islam in Asia and Africa demand a fresh orientation of their faith. With the reawakening of Islam, therefore, it is necessary to examine, in an independent spirit, what Europe has thought and how far the conclusions reached by her can help us in the revision and, if necessary, reconstruction, of theological thought in Islam. Besides this it is not possible to ignore the generally anti-religious and especially anti-Islamic propaganda in Central Asia which has already crossed the Indian frontier. Some of the apostles of this movement are born Muslims, and one of them, Tevfik Fikret, the Turkish poet, who died only a short time ago, has gone to the extent of using our great poet-thinker, Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bedil of Akbarābād, for the purposes of this movement. Surely, it is high time to look to the essentials of Islam.

In these lectures I propose to undertake a philosophical discussion of some of the basic of ideas of Islam, in the hope that this may, at least, be helpful towards a proper understanding of the meaning of Islam as a message to humanity. Also with a view to give a kind of ground-outline for further discussion, I propose, in this preliminary lecture, to consider the character of knowledge and religious experience.

The main purpose of the Qur’an is to awaken in man the higher consciousness of his manifold relations with God and the universe. It is in view of this essential aspect of the Qur’anic teaching that Goethe, while making a general review of Islam as an educational force, said to Eckermann: “You see this teaching never fails; with all our systems, we cannot go, and generally speaking no man can go, farther than that.” The problem of Islam was really suggested by the mutual conflict, and at the same time mutual attraction, presented by the two forces of religion and civilization. The same problem confronted early Christianity. The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insight of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through.

Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man’s relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within. It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal. With Islam the ideal and the real are not two opposing forces which cannot be reconciled. The life of the ideal consists, not in a total breach with the real which would tend to shatter the organic wholeness of life into painful oppositions, but in the perpetual endeavor of the ideal to appropriate the real with a view eventually to absorb it, to convert it into itself and illuminate its whole being. It is the sharp opposition between the subject and the object, the mathematical without and the biological within, that impressed Christianity. Islam, however, faces the opposition with a view to overcome it. This essential difference in looking at a fundamental relation determines the respective attitudes of these great religions towards the problem of human life in its present surroundings. Both demand the affirmation of the spiritual self in man, with this difference only that Islam, recognizing the contact of the ideal with the real, says “yes” to the world of matter and points the way to master it with a view to discover a basis for a realistic regulation of life.

What, then, according to the Qur’an, is the character of the universe which we inhabit? In the first place, it is not the result of a mere creative sport:

“We have not created the Heavens and the earth and whatever is between them in sport. We have not created them but for a serious end: but the greater part of them understand it not.

It is a reality to be reckoned with:

Verily in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and in the succession of the night and of the day, are signs for men of understanding; who, standing and sitting and reclining, bear God in mind and reflect on the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and say: “Oh, our Lord! Thou hast not created this in vain (3:190-91).

Again the universe is so constituted that it is capable of extension:

(God) adds to His creation what He wills (35: 1).

It is not a block universe, a finished product, immobile and incapable of change. Deep in its inner being lies, perhaps, the dream of a new birth:

Say– go through the earth and see how God hath brought forth all creation; hereafter will He give it another birth (29:20).

In fact, this mysterious swing and impulse of the universe, this noiseless swim of time which appears to us, human beings, as the movement of day and night, is regarded by the Qur’an as one of the greatest signs of God:

God causes the day and the night to take their turn. Verily in this is teaching for men of insight (24: 44).

This is why the Prophet said: “Do not vilify time, for time is God.” And this immensity of time and space carries in it the promise of a complete subjugation by man whose duty is to reflect on the signs of God, and thus discover the means of realizing his conquest of Nature as an actual fact:

See ye not how God hath put under you all that is in the Heavens, and all that is on the earth, and hath been bounteous to you of His favours both in relation to the seen and the unseen? (31: 20).

And He hath subjected to you the night and the day, the sun and the moon, and the stars too are subject to you by His behest; verily in this are signs for those who understand. (16: 12).

Such being the nature and promise of the universe, what is the nature of man whom it confronts on all sides? Endowed with a most suitable mutual adjustment of faculties he discovers himself down below in the scale of life, surrounded on all sides by the forces of obstruction:

That of goodliest fabric We created man, then brought him down to the lowest of the low (95: 4-5).

And how do we find him in this environment? A “restless” being engrossed in his ideals to the point of forgetting everything else, capable of inflicting pain on himself in his ceaseless quest after fresh scopes for self-expression. With all his failings he is superior to Nature, inasmuch as he carries within him a great trust which, in the words of the Qur’an, the heavens and the earth and the mountains refused to carry:

Verily We proposed to the Heavens and to the earth and to the mountains to receive the trust (of personality), but they refused the burden and they feared to receive it. Man alone undertook to bear it, but hath proved unjust, senseless! (33:72).

His career, no doubt, has a beginning, but he is destined, perhaps, to become a permanent element in the constitution of being:

Thinketh man that he shall be thrown away as an object of no use? Was he not a mere embryo? Then he became thick blood of which God formed him and fashioned him, and made him twain, male and female. Is not He powerful enough to quicken the dead? (75: 36-40).

When attracted by the forces around him, man has the power to shape and direct them; when thwarted by them, he has the capacity to build a much vaster world in the depths of his own inner being, wherein he discovers sources of infinite joy and inspiration. Hard his lot and frail his being, like a rose-leaf, yet no form of reality is so powerful, so inspiring, and so beautiful as the spirit of man! Thus in his inmost being man, as conceived by the Qur’an, is a creative activity, an ascending spirit who, in his onward march, rises from one state of being to another:

But, Nay! I swear by the sunset’s redness and by the night and its gatherings and by the moon when at her full, that from state to state shall ye be surely carried onward (84: 16- 19).

It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to shape his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to mould its forces to his own ends and purposes. And in this process of progressive change God becomes a co-worker with him, provided man takes the initiative:

Verily God will not change the condition of men, till they change what is in themselves (13: 11).

If he does not take the initiative, if he does not evolve the inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inward push of advancing life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter. But his life and the onward march of his spirit depend on the establishment of connexions with the reality that confronts him It is knowledge that establishes these connexions, and knowledge is sense-perception elaborated by understanding.

When thy Lord said to the Angels, “Verily I am about to place one in my stead on earth”, they said, “Wilt Thou place there one who will do ill and shed blood, when we celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy holiness?” God said, “Verily I know what ye know not!” And He taught Adam the names of all things, and then set them before the Angels, and said, “Tell me the names of these if ye are endowed with wisdom”. They said, “Praise be to Thee! We have no knowledge but what Thou hast given us to know. Thou art the Knowing, the Wise”. He said, “O Adam, inform them of the names”. And when he had informed them of the names, God said, “Did I not say to you that I know the hidden things of the Heavens and of the earth, and that I know what ye bring to light and what ye hide?” (2: 30-33).

The point of these verses is that man is endowed with the faculty of naming things, that is to say, forming concepts of them, and forming concepts of them is capturing them. Thus the character of man’s knowledge is conceptual, and it is with the weapon of this conceptual knowledge that man approaches the observable aspect of Reality. The one noteworthy feature of the Qur’an is the emphasis that it lays on this observable aspect of Reality. Let me quote here a few verses:

Assuredly, in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth; and in the alternation of night and day; and in the ships which pass through the sea with what is useful to man; and in the rain which God sendeth down from Heaven, giving life to the earth after its death, and scattering over it all kinds of cattle; and in the change of the winds, and in the clouds that are made to do service between the Heavens and the earth– are signs for those who “understand” (2:164).

And it is He Who hath ordained for you that ye may be guided thereby in the darkness of the land and of the sea! Clear have We made Our signs to “men of knowledge”. And it is He Who hath created you of one breath, and hath provided you an abode and resting place (in the womb). Clear have We made Our signs for “men of insight”! And it is He Who sendeth down rain from Heaven: and We bring forth by it the buds of all the plants and from them bring We forth the green foliage, and the close-growing grain, and palm trees with sheaths of clustering dates, and gardens of grapes, and the olive, and the pomegranate, like and unlike. Look you on their fruits when they ripen. Truly herein are signs unto people who believe (6: 97-99).

Hast thou not seen how thy Lord lengthens out the shadow? Had He pleased He had made it motionless. But We made the sun to be its guide; then draw it in unto Us with easy in drawing (25: 45-46).

Can they not look up to the clouds, how they are created; and to the Heaven how it is upraised; and to the mountains how they are rooted, and to the earth how it is outspread? (88: 17-20).

And among His signs are the creation of the Heavens and of the Earth, and your variety of tongues and colours. Herein truly are signs for all men (30: 22).

No doubt, the immediate purpose of the Qur’an in this reflective observation of Nature is to awaken in man the consciousness of that of which Nature is regarded a symbol. But the point to note is the general empirical attitude of the Qur’an which engendered in its followers a feeling of reverence for the actual and ultimately made them the founders of modern science. It was a great point to awaken the empirical spirit in an age which renounced the visible as of no value in men’s search after God. According to the Qur’an, as we have seen before, the universe has a serious end. Its shifting actualities force our being into fresh formations. The intellectual effort to overcome the obstruction offered by it, besides enriching and amplifying our life, sharpens our insight, and thus prepares us for a more masterful insertion into subtler aspects of human experience. It is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which trains us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal. Reality lives in its own appearances; and such a being as man, who has to maintain his life in an obstructing environment, cannot afford to ignore the visible. The Qur’an opens our eyes to the great fact of change, through the appreciation and control of which alone it is possible to build a durable civilization. The cultures of Asia and, in fact, of the whole ancient world failed, because they approached Reality exclusively from within and moved from within outwards. This procedure gave them theory without power, and on mere theory no durable civilization can be based.

There is no doubt that the treatment of religious experience, as a source of Divine knowledge, is historically prior to the treatment of other regions of human experience for the same purpose. The Qur’an, recognizing that the empirical attitude is an indispensable stage in the spiritual life of humanity, attaches equal importance to all the regions of human experience as yielding knowledge of the Ultimate Reality which reveals its symbols both within and without. One indirect way of establishing connexions with the reality that confronts us is reflective observation and control of its symbols as they reveal themselves to sense-perception; the other way is direct association with that reality as it reveals itself within. The naturalism of the Qur’an is only a recognition of the fact that man is related to nature, and this relation, in view of its possibility as a means of controlling her forces, must be exploited not in the interest of unrighteous desire for domination, but in the nobler interest of a free upward movement of spiritual life. In the interests of securing a complete vision of Reality, therefore, sense-perception must be supplemented by the perception of what the Qur’an describes as Fu’ād or Qalb, i.e. heart:

God hath made everything which He hath created most good; and began the creation of man with clay; then ordained his progeny from germs of life, from sorry water; then shaped him, and breathed of His spirit unto him, and gave you hearing and seeing and heart: what little thanks do ye return? (32: 7-9).

The “heart” is a kind of inner intuition or insight which, in the beautiful words of Rūmī, feeds on the rays of the sun and brings us into contact with aspects of Reality other than those open to sense-perception. It is, according to the Qur’an, something which “sees”, and its reports, if properly interpreted, are never false. We must not, however, regard it as a mysterious special faculty; it is rather a mode of dealing with Reality in which sensation, in the physiological sense of the word, does not play any part. Yet the vista of experience thus opened to us is as real and concrete as any other experience. To describe it as psychic, mystical, or supernatural does not detract from its value as experience. To the primitive man all experience was super-natural. Prompted by the immediate necessities of life he was driven to interpret his experience, and out of this interpretation gradually emerged “Nature” in our sense of the word. The total-Reality, which enters our awareness and appears on interpretation as an empirical fact, has other ways of invading our consciousness and offers further opportunities of interpretation. The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional. The facts of religious experience are facts among other facts of human experience and, in the capacity of yielding knowledge by interpretation; one fact is as good as another. Nor is there anything irreverent in critically examining this region of human experience. The Prophet of Islam was the first critical observer of psychic phenomena. Bukhārī and other traditionists have given us a full account of his observation of the psychic Jewish youth, Ibn Sayyād, whose ecstatic moods attracted the Prophet’s notice. He tested him, questioned him, and examined him in his various moods. Once he hid himself behind the stem of a tree to listen to his mutterings. The boy’s mother, however, warned him of the approach of the Prophet. Thereupon the boy immediately shook off his mood and the Prophet remarked: “If she had let him alone the thing would have been cleared up.” The Prophet’s companions, some of whom were present during the course of this first psychological observation in the history of Islam, and even later traditionalists, who took good care to record this important fact, entirely misunderstood the significance of his attitude and interpreted it in their own innocent manner. Professor Macdonald, who seems to have no idea of the fundamental psychological difference between the mystic and the prophetic consciousness, finds “humour enough in this picture of one prophet trying to investigate another after the method of the Society for Psychical Research.” A better appreciation of the spirit of the Qur’an which, as I will show in a subsequent lecture, initiated the cultural movement terminat­ing in the birth of the modern empirical attitude, would have led the Professor to see something remarkably suggestive in the Prophet’s observation of the psychic Jew. However, the first Muslim to see the meaning and value of the Prophet’s attitude was Ibn Khaldūn, who approached the content of mystic consciousness in a more critical spirit and very nearly reached the modern hypothesis of subliminal selves. As Professor Macdonald says, Ibn Khaldūn “had some most interesting psychological ideas, and that he would probably have been in close sympathy with Mr. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.” Modern psychology has only recently begun to realize the importance of a careful study of the contents of mystic consciousness, and we are not yet in possession of a really effective scientific method to analyze the contents of non-rational modes of consciousness. With the time at my disposal it is not possible to undertake an extensive inquiry into the history and the various degrees of mystic consciousness in point of richness and vividness. All that I can do is to offer a few general observations only on the main characteristics of mystic experience.

1. The first point to note is the immediacy of this experience. In this respect it does not differ from other levels of human experience which supply data for knowledge. All experience is immediate. As regions of normal experience are subject to interpretation of sense-data for our knowledge of the external world, so the region of mystic experience is subject to interpretation for our knowledge of God. The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.
2. The second point is the un-analysable wholeness of mystic experience. When I experience the table before me, innumerable data of experience merge into the single experience of the table. Out of this wealth of data I select those that fall into a certain order of space and time and round them off in reference to the table. In the mystic state, however vivid and rich it may be, thought is reduced to a minimum and such an analysis is not possible. But this difference of the mystic state from the ordinary rational consciousness does not mean discontinuance with the normal consciousness, as Professor William James erroneously thought. In either case it is the same Reality which is operating on us. The ordinary rational consciousness, in view of our practical need of adaptation to our environment, takes that Reality piecemeal, selecting successively isolated sets of stimuli for response. The mystic state brings us into contact with the total passage of Reality in which all the diverse stimuli merge into one another and form a single unanalysable unity in which the ordinary distinction of subject and object does not exist.
3. The third point to note is that to the mystic the mystic state is a moment of intimate association with a Unique Other Self, transcending, encompassing, and momentarily suppressing the private personality of the subject of experience. Considering its content the mystic state is highly objective and cannot be regarded as a mere retirement into the mists of pure subjectivity. But you will ask me how immediate experience of God, as an Independent Other Self, is at all possible. The mere fact that the mystic state is passive does not finally prove the veritable “otherness” of the Self experienced. This question arises in the mind because we assume, without criticism, that our knowledge of the external world through sense-perception is the type of all knowledge. If this were so, we could never be sure of the reality of our own self. However, in reply to it I suggest the analogy of our daily social experience. How do we know other minds in our social intercourse? It is obvious that we know our own self and Nature by inner reflection and sense-perception respectively. We possess no sense for the experience of other minds. The only ground of my knowledge of a conscious being before me is the physical movements similar to my own from which I infer the presence of another conscious being. Or we may say, after Professor Royce, that our fellows are known to be real because they respond to our signals and thus constantly supply the necessary supplement to our own fragmentary meanings.

Response, no doubt, is the test of the presence of a conscious self, and the Qur’an also takes the same view:

And your Lord saith, call me and I respond to your call (40: 60).

And when My servants ask thee concerning Me, then I am nigh unto them and answer the cry of him that crieth unto Me (2: 186).

It is clear that whether we apply the physical criterion or the non-physical and more adequate criterion of Royce, in either case our knowledge of other minds remains something like inferential only. Yet we feel that our experience of other minds is immediate and never entertain any doubt as to the reality of our social experience. I do not, however, mean, at the present stage of our inquiry, to build on the implications of our knowledge of other minds, an idealistic argument in favour of the reality of a Comprehensive Self. All that I mean to suggest is that the immediacy of our experience in the mystic state is not without a parallel. It has some sort of resemblance to our normal experience and probably belongs to the same category.
4. Since the quality of mystic experience is to be directly experienced, it is obvious that it cannot be communicated. Mystic states are more like feeling than thought. The interpretation which the mystic or the prophet puts on the content of his religious consciousness can be conveyed to others in the form of propositions, but the content itself cannot be so transmitted. Thus in the following verses of the Qur’an it is the psychology and not the content of the experience that is given:

It is not for man that God should speak to him, but by vision or from behind a veil; or He sendeth a messenger to reveal by His permission what He will: for He is Exalted, Wise (42: 51).

By the star when it setteth,
Your compatriot erreth not, nor is he led astray.
Neither speaketh he from mere impulse.
The Qur’an is no other than the revelation revealed to him:
One strong in power taught it him,
Endowed with wisdom with even balance stood he
In the highest part of the horizon: Then came he nearer and approached,
And was at the distance of two bows or even closer
And he revealed to the servant of God what he revealed:
His heart falsified not what he saw:
What! will ye then dispute with him as to what he saw?
He had seen him also another time
Near the Sidra tree which
marks the boundary:
Near which is the garden of repose:
When the Sidra tree was covered with what covered it:
His eye turned not aside, nor did it wander:

For he saw the greatest of the signs of the Lord (53: 1-18).
The incommunicability of mystic experience is due to the fact that it is essentially a matter of inarticulate feeling, untouched by discursive intellect. It must, however, be noted that mystic feeling, like all feeling, has a cognitive element also; and it is, I believe, because of this cognitive element that it lends itself to the form of idea. In fact, it is the nature of feeling to seek expression in thought. It would seem that the two– feeling and idea– are the non-temporal and temporal aspects of the same unit of inner experience. But on this point I cannot do better than quote Professor Hocking who has made a remarkably keen study of feeling in justification of an intellectual view of the content of religious consciousness:

What is that other-than-feeling in which feeling may end? I answer, consciousness of an object. Feeling is instability of an entire conscious self: and that which will restore the stability of this self lies not within its own border but beyond it. Feeling is outward-pushing, as idea is outward-reporting: and no feeling is so blind as to have no idea of its own object. As a feeling possesses the mind, there also possesses the mind, as an integral part of that feeling, some idea of the kind of thing which will bring it to rest. A feeling without a direction is as impossible as an activity without a direction: and a direction implies some objective. There are vague states of consciousness in which we seem to be wholly without direction; but in such cases it is remarkable that feeling is likewise in abeyance. For example, I may be dazed by a blow, neither realizing what has happened nor suffering any pain, and yet quite conscious that something has occurred: the experience waits an instant in the vestibule of consciousness, not as feeling but purely as fact, until idea has touched it and defined a course of response. At that same moment, it is felt as painful. If we are right, feeling is quite as much an objective consciousness as is idea: it refers always to something beyond the present self and has no existence save in directing the self toward that object in whose presence its own career must end!

Thus you will see that it is because of this essential nature of feeling that while religion starts with feeling, it has never, in its history, taken itself as a matter of feeling alone and has constantly striven after metaphysics. The mystic’s condemnation of intellect as an organ of knowledge does not really find any justification in the history of religion. But Professor Hocking’s passage just quoted has a wider scope than mere justification of idea in religion. The organic relation of feeling and idea throws light on the old theological controversy about verbal revelation which once gave so much trouble to Muslim religious thinkers. Inarticulate feeling seeks to fulfill its destiny in idea which, in its turn, tends to develop out of itself its own visible garment. It is no mere metaphor to say that idea and word both simultaneously emerge out of the womb of feeling, though logical understanding cannot but take them in a temporal order and thus create its own difficulty by regarding them as mutually isolated. There is a sense in which the word is also revealed.

The mystic’s intimate association with the eternal which gives him a sense of the unreality of serial time does not mean a complete break with serial time. The mystic state, in respect of its uniqueness, remains in some way related to common experience. This is clear from the fact that the mystic state soon fades away, though it leaves a deep sense of authority after it has passed away. Both the mystic and the prophet return to the normal levels of experience, but with this difference that the return of the prophet, as I will show later, may be fraught with infinite meaning for mankind.

For the purposes of knowledge, then, the region of mystic experience is as real as any other region of human experience and cannot be ignored merely because it cannot be traced back to sense-perception. Nor is it possible to undo the spiritual value of the mystic state by specifying the organic conditions which appear to determine it. Even if the postulate of modern psychology as to the interrelation of body and mind is assumed to be true, it is illogical to discredit the value of the mystic state as a revelation of truth. Psychologically speaking, all states, whether their content is religious or non-religious, are organically determined. The scientific form of mind is as much organically determined as the religious. Our judgment as to the creations of genius is not at all determined or even remotely affected by what our psychologists may say regarding its organic conditions. A certain kind of temperament may be a necessary condition for a certain kind of receptivity; but the antecedent condition cannot be regarded as the whole truth about the character of what is received. The truth is that the organic causation of our mental states has nothing to do with the criteria by which we judge them to be superior or inferior in point of value. “Among the visions and messages”, says Professor William James, some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end it had come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.

The problem of Christian mysticism alluded to by Professor James has been in fact the problem of all mysticism. The demon in his malice does counterfeit experiences which creep into the circuit of the mystic state. As we read in the Qur’an:

We have not sent any Apostle or Prophet before thee among whose desires Satan injected not some wrong desire, but God shall bring to naught that which Satan had suggested. Thus shall God affirm His revelations, for God is Knowing and Wise (22: 52).

And it is in the elimination of the satanic from the Divine that the followers of Freud have done inestimable service to religion; though I cannot help saying that the main theory of this newer psychology does not appear to me to be supported by any adequate evidence. If our vagrant impulses assert themselves in our dreams, or at other times we are not strictly ourselves, it does not follow that they remain imprisoned in a kind of lumber room behind the normal self. The occasional invasion of these suppressed impulses on the region of our normal self tends more to show the temporary disruption of our habitual system of responses rather than their perpetual presence in some dark corner of the mind. However, the theory is briefly this. During the process of our adjustment to our environment we are exposed to all sorts of stimuli. Our habitual responses to these stimuli gradually fall into a relatively fixed system, constantly growing in complexity by absorbing some and rejecting other impulses which do not fit in with our permanent system of responses. The rejected impulses recede into what is called the “unconscious region” of the mind, and there wait for a suitable opportunity to assert themselves and take their revenge on the focal self. They may disturb our plans of action, distort our thought, build our dreams and fantasies, or carry us back to forms of primitive behaviour which the evolutionary process has left far behind. Religion, it is said, is a pure fiction created by these repudiated impulses of mankind with a view to find a kind of fairyland for free unobstructed movement. Religious beliefs and dogmas, according to the theory, are no more than merely primitive theories of Nature, whereby mankind has tried to redeem Reality from its elemental ugliness and to show it off as something nearer to the heart’s desire than the facts of life would warrant. That there are religions and forms of art, which provide a kind of cowardly escape from the facts of life, I do not deny. All that I contend is that this is not true of all religions. No doubt, religious beliefs and dogmas have a metaphysical significance; but it is obvious that they are not interpretations of those data of experience which are the subject of the sciences of Nature. Religion is not physics or chemistry seeking an explanation of Nature in terms of causation; it really aims at interpreting a totally different region of human experience– religious experience– the data of which cannot be reduced to the data of any other science. In fact, it must be said in justice to religion that it insisted on the necessity of concrete experience in religious life long before science learnt to do so. The conflict between the two is due not to the fact that the one is, and the other is not, based on concrete experience. Both seek concrete experience as a point of departure. Their conflict is due to the misapprehension that both interpret the same data of experience. We forget that religion aims at reaching the real significance of a special variety of human experience.

Nor is it possible to explain away the content of religious consciousness by attributing the whole thing to the working of the sex-impulse. The two forms of consciousness– sexual and religious– are often hostile or, at any rate, completely different to each other in point of their character, their aim, and the kind of conduct they generate. The truth is that in a state of religious passion we know a factual reality in some sense outside the narrow circuit of our personality. To the psychologist religious passion necessarily appears as the work of the subconscious because of the intensity with which it shakes up the depths of our being. In all knowledge there is an element of passion, and the object of knowledge gains or loses in objectivity with the rise and fall in the intensity of passion. That is most real to us which stirs up the entire fabric of our personality. As Professor Hocking pointedly puts it:

If ever upon the stupid day-length time-span of any self or saint either, some vision breaks to roll his life and ours into new channels, it can only be because that vision admits into his soul some trooping invasion of the concrete fullness of eternity. Such vision doubtless means subconscious readiness and subconscious resonance too,– but the expansion of the unused air-cells does not argue that we have ceased to breathe the outer air:– the very opposite!

A purely psychological method, therefore, cannot explain religious passion as a form of knowledge. It is bound to fail in the case of our newer psychologists as it did fail in the case of Locke and Hume.

The foregoing discussion, however, is sure to raise an important question in your mind. Religious experience, I have tried to maintain, is essentially a state of feeling with a cognitive aspect, the content of which cannot be communicated to others, except in the form of a judgement. Now when a judgement which claims to be the interpretation of a certain region of human experience, not accessible to me, is placed before me for my assent, I am entitled to ask, what is the guarantee of its truth? Are we in possession of a test which would reveal its validity? If personal experience had been the only ground for acceptance of a judgement of this kind, religion would have been the possession of a few individuals only. Happily we are in possession of tests which do not differ from those applicable to other forms of knowledge. These I call the intellectual test and the pragmatic test. By the intellectual test I mean critical interpretation, without any presuppositions of human experience, generally with a view to discover whether our interpretation leads us ultimately to a reality of the same character as is revealed by religious experience. The pragmatic test judges it by its fruits. The former is applied by the philosopher, the latter by the prophet. In the lecture that follows, I will apply the intellectual test.

Conclusion
In this first chapter of the book; “Knowledge and Religious Experience”, Iqbal gave a brief description of the basic structure of the universe and the way we are related to it. He argued that the traditional method used to interpret religion which he describes as “reading the Qur’an in the light of Greek thought” is not the best way to understand religion properly. Although, he recognizes the fact that in the domain of religious knowledge complete independence of thought is not possible still he emphasizes on the use of rationalism. According to him “the spirit of the Qur’an was essentially anti-classical”. Another method described by the Iqbal as he calls it is the “mystic experience”. “Mystic experience for the purpose of knowledge is as real as any other region of human experience and cannot be ignored merely because it cannot be traced back to sense-perception. Nor is it possible to undo the spiritual value of the mystic state by specifying the organic conditions which appear to determine it”. Thus, Iqbal finalized his argument by concluding that religious experience is a state of feeling which cannot be explained. It is just a feeling of cognition, the content of which cannot be communicated.
(To be continued ….)

Notes
Lecture 1: Knowledge and Religious Experience
Reference here is to the following verse from the mystical allegorical work: Mantiq al-Tair (p. 243, verse, 5), generally considered the magnum opus of one of the greatest Sufi poets and thinkers, Farīd al-Dīn ‘Attār (d. c. 618/1220). Also available in English translation, see, Peter Avery, Speech of the Birds, Islamic Text Society, Cambridge, England, 2004. The verse reads as follows:

لیک آں جدل چوں رہ زند

بیشتر برمردم آگہ زند

A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 73.
Cf. H. L. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 187-88.

Allahumma arinā haqā’iq al-ashyā’i kamā hiya, a tradition, though not cited in the six canonical Hadith Collections, is to be found in the well-known Sufi works in one form or other, for example, ‘Ali b. ‘Uthmān al-Hujwīri (d. c. 465/1072), Kashf al-Mahjūb, p. 166; Mawlānā Jalāl al-Din Rūmī (d. 672/1273), Mathnawī-i Ma‘nawī, ii, 466-67; iv, 3567-68; v, 1765; Mahmūd Sbahistarī (d. 720/1320), Gulshan-i Rāz, verse 200, and ‘Abd al-Rahmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), Lawā’ih, p. 3.

Qur’an, 16: 68-69.
Ibid., 2: 164; 24: 43-44; 30: 48; 35: 9; 45: 5.
Ibid., 15: 16; 25: 6; 37: 6; 41: 12; 50: 6; 67: 5; 85: 1.
Ibid., 21: 33; 36: 40.
Cf. F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, pp. 29-109; also Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, chapter: ‘Knowledge and Per­ception in Plato.’
Qur’an, 16: 78; 23: 78; 32: 9; 67: 23.

Ibid., 17: 36. References here as also at other places in the Lectures to a dozen Qur’anic verses in two sentences bespeak of what is uppermost in Allama Iqbal’s mind, i.e. Qur’anic empiricism which by its very nature gives rise to a Weltanschauung of the highest religious order. He tells us, for example, that the general empirical attitude of the Qur’an engenders a feeling of reverence for the actual and that one way of entering into relation with Reality is through ref­lective observation and control of its perceptually revealed symbols (cf. below, pp. 11-12, italics mine; also Lecture V, p. 102, note 9).

For anti-classicism of the Qur’an cf. Mazheruddin Siddiqi, Concept of Muslim Culture in Iqbal, pp. 13-25; also Lecture V, note 21.

Cf. R. A. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality, pp. 75-77, and B. H. Zedler, ‘Averroes and Immortality’, New Scholasticism (1954), pp. 436-53. It is to be noted that Tsanoff marshals the views of S. Munk (Melanges de philosophie, pp. 454 ff.), E. Rénan (Averröes et l’ averroïsme, pp. 152, 158), A. Stockl (Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, II, 117, 119), de Boer (Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 173) and M. Horten (Die Hauptlehren des Averroes, pp. 244 ff.) as against those of Carra de Vaux as presented by him in his work Avicenne, pp. 233 ff., as well as in the article: ‘Averroes’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, 264-65, and clinches the matter thus: “certainly– and this is more significant for our purpose– it was as a denier of personal immortality that scho­lasticism received and criticised Averroes” (p. 77, lines, 16-19). For a recent and more balanced view of Ibn Rushd’s doctrine of immortality, cf. Roger Arnaldez and A. Z. Iskander, ‘Ibn Rushd’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XII, 7a-7b.

Cf. Tsanoff, op. cit., pp. 77-84, and M. Yūnus Farangī Mahallī, Ibn Rushd (Urdu; partly based on Rénan’s Averröes et l’ averroïsme), pp. 347-59.
See Lecture IV, pp. 93-98, and Lecture VII, pp. 156-57.
Reference is to the expression lawh al-mahfūz used in the Qur’anic verse 85: 22.

This comes quite close to the contemporary French philosopher Louis Rougier’s statement in his Philosophy and the New Physics, p. 146, lines. 17-21. This work, listed at S. No. 15 in the Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, is cited in Lecture III, p. 59.

Reference here is to Tevfik Fikret, pseudonym of Mehmed Tevfik, also known as Tevfik Nazmī, and not to Tawfik Fitrat as it got printed in the previous editions of the present work. Fikret, widely considered the founder of the modern school of Turkish poetry and remembered among other works for his collection of poems: Rubāb-i Shikeste (The Broken Lute), died in Istanbul on 18 August 1915 at the age of forty-eight. For an account of Fikret’s literary career and his anti-religious views, cf. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 300-2 and 338-39; also Haydar Ali Dirioz’s brief paper in Turkish on Fikret’s birth-centenary translated by Dr. M. H. Notqi for the Journal of the Regional Cultural Institute, 1/4 (Autumn 1968), 12-15.

It is for Turkish-Persian scholars to determine the extent to which Fikret made use of the great poet-thinker Bedil (d. 1133/1721) for “the anti-religious and especially anti-Islamic propaganda in Central Asia.” Among very many works on both Bedil and Fikret that have appeared since Allama’s days and are likely to receive the scholars’ attention, mention must be made of Allama’s own short perceptive study: “Bedil in the Light of Bergson”, an essay in Allama’s hand (20 folios) preserved in the Allama Iqbal Museum (Lahore), cf. Dr.. Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal (Catalogue), 1, 25, with photographic reproduction of the first sheet, see Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 1982. It is now available in print in an annotated edition, see Tehsin Firaqi, (Ed.), Bedil in the Light of Bergson, Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 1994.

Cf. John Oxenford (Tr.), Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Sorret, p. 41.

The Qur’an criticises monasticism; see 57: 27; 2: 201 and 28: 77. Cf. also L. A. Sherwani, (Ed.), Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 1977, p. 7, for Allama Iqbal’s observations on the respective attitudes of Christianity and Islam towards the problems of life leading to his keenly profound pronouncement: “The reli­gious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created.”

Qur’an, 44: 38-39. There are many verses of the Qur’an wherein it has been maintained that the universe has not been created in sport (lā‘ibīn) or in vain (bātilan) but for a serious end or with truth (bi ’l-haqq). These are respectively: (a) 21: 16 (b) 3: 191; 38: 27 (c) 10: 5; 14: 19: 15: 85: 16: 3; 29: 44; 30: 8; 39: 5; 45: 22; 46:3: and 64: 3.

See also the Qur’anic verse 51: 47 wherein the phrase innā la-mūsi‘ūn has been interpreted to clearly foreshadow the modern notion of the “expanding universe” (cf. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 805, note 31).

Reference here is in particular to the Prophetic tradition worded as: lā tasubbu ’l-dahr fa inn Allāh huwa ’l-dahr, (Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, V, 299 and 311). Cf. also Bukhārī, Sahīh, ‘Tafsīr’; 45; ‘Tawhīd’ 35; ‘Ādāb’ 101; and Muslim, Sahīh, ‘Alfaz’ 2-4; for other variants of the hadīth see, Sahīfa Hammām Ibn Munabbih (ed. Dr. M. Hamidullah), hadīth 117, gives one of its earliest recorded texts.

In an exceedingly important section captioned Al-Waqtu Saifun (Time is a Sword) of his celebrated Asrār-i Khudī (Secrets of the Self), Allama Iqbal has referred to the above hadīth thus:

زندگی از دہر ودہر از زندگی است

“لا تسبوالدھر”فرمانِ نبیﷺ است

Life is of Time and Time is of Life;
‘Do not abuse Time!’ was the command of the Prophet.
(trans. Nicholson)
Reference is to the Qur’anic verse 70: 19 which says: “Man has been creat­ed restless (halū‘an).”

This is very close to the language of the Qur’an which speaks of the hardening of the hearts, so that they were like rocks: see 2: 74, 5: 13; 6: 43; 39: 22; and 57: 16.

This shows that Allama Iqbal, through his keenly perceptive study of the Qur’an, had psychically assimilated both its meanings and its diction so much so that many of his visions, very largely found in his poetical works, may be said to be born of this rare assimilation; cf. Dr. Ghulām Mustafā Khan’s voluminous Iqbāl aur Qur’an (Urdu), Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 1994. Also see Hāmid Saeed Akhtar, “Qur’ān aur Iqbāl”, Iqbāliyāt, Journal of the Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2002, pp. 17-28; T. H. Tanūlī, “Fikr i Iqbāl aur Fehm i Qur’ān kī Jihāt”, Iqbāliyāt, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2007, pp. 75-94.
Qur’an, 41: 53; also 51: 20-21.
Reference here is to the Mathnawī; ii, 52:

حسِ ابدان قوت ظلمت می خُورد

حسِ جان ازآفتابے می چرد

The bodily sense is eating the food of darkness
The spiritual sense is feeding from a sun.
(trans. Nicholson)
Qur’an, 53: 11-12.
Ibid., 22: 46.

Cf. Bukhārī, Sahīh, ‘Janā’iz’, 79, ‘Shahādah’ 3, ‘Jihad’, 160, 178; Muslim, Sahīh, ‘Fitan’, 95-96. D. J. Halperin’s article: ‘The Ibn Sayyād Traditions and the Legend of al-Dajjal’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, XCII/ii (1976), 213-25, gives an atomistic analytic account of the Hadīth narratives listed by him.

In Arabic: law taraktuhu bayyana, an invariable part of the text of a number of Hadīth accounts about Ibn Sayyād; cf. D. B. Macdonald, The Religious Atti­tude and Life in Islam, pp. 35 ff.; this book, which represents Macdonald’s reputed Haskell Lectures on Comparative Religion at Chicago University in 1906, seems to have attracted Allama’s attention in the present discussion. Also see Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, trans. Rosenthall, Vol. III, Section vi, Discourse: ‘The Science of Sufism’; D. B. Macdonald, Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, pp. 165-74, and M. Syrier, ‘Ibn Khaldūn and Mysticism’, Islamic Culture, XXI/ii(1947), 264-302.

Cf. D. B. Macdonald, The Religious Atti­tude and Life in Islam, p. 36.
Cf. Lecture V, pp. 100 ff.

The term ‘subliminal self’ was coined by F. W. H. Myers in the 1890’s which soon became popular in ‘religious psychology’ to designate what was believed to be the larger portion of the self lying beyond the level of consciousness yet constantly influencing thought and behaviour as in para-psychic phenomena. With William James the concept of subliminal self came to stand for the area of human experience in which contact with the Divine Life may occur (cf. The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 511-15).

Macdonald, op. cit., p. 42.
Cf. Muhyiddīn Ibn ‘Arabi’s observation that ‘God is a percept, the world is a concept’, referred to in Lecture VII, p. 144.

Ibid., p. 145, where it is observed: ‘Indeed the incommunicability of religious experience gives us a clue to the ultimate nature of the human ego.’

W. E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 66. It is important to note here that according to Richard C. Gilman this concept of the inextricable union of idea and feeling is ‘the source of the strong strain of mys­ticism in Hocking’s philosophy, but it is a mysticism which does not abandon the role of intellect in clarifying and correcting intuition; cf. article: ‘Hocking, William Ernest’, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, IV, 47 (italics mine).

Reference here perhaps is to the hot and long-drawn controversy between the Mu’tazilites (early Muslim rationalists) and the Ash‘arties (the orthodox scholastics) on the issue of Khalq al-Qur’an, i.e. the createdness or the eternity of the Qur’an; for which see Lecture VI, note 9. The context of the passage, however, strongly suggests that Allama Iqbal means to refer here to the common orthodox belief that the text of the Qur’an is verbally revealed, i.e. the ‘word’ is as much revealed as the ‘meaning’. This has perhaps never been controverted and rarely if ever discussed in the history of Muslim theology– one notable instance of its discussion is that by Shāh Walī Allah in Sata‘āt and Fuyūd al-Haramain. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that there is some analogical empirical evidence in Allama’s personal life in support of the orthodox belief in verbal revelation. Once asked by Professor Lucas, Principal of a local college, in a private discourse, whether, despite his vast learning, he too subscribed to belief in verbal revelation, Allama immediately replied that it was not a matter of belief with him but a veritable personal experience for it was thus, he added, he composed his poems under the spells of poetic inspiration– surely, Prophetic revelations are far more exalted. Cf. ‘Abdul Majīd Sālik, Dhikr-i Iqbāl, pp. 244-45 and Faqīr Sayyid Wahīd-ud-Dīn, Rūzgār-i Faqīr, pp. 38-39. After Allama’s epoch-making Mathnawī: Asrār-i Khudī (Secrets of the Self) was published in 1915 and it had given rise to some bitter controversy because of his critique of Persianate Sufism and the great Hāfiz, he in a letter dated 14 April 1916 addressed to Maharāja Kishen Parshād Shād confided strictly in a personal way: ‘I did not compose the mathnawi myself; I was made to (guided to), to do so’; cf. M. ‘Abdullah Quraishī, ‘Nawādir-i Iqbāl’ (Ghair Matbu‘ah Khutut)’, Sahīfah, Bazm i Iqbal, Lahore, ‘Special Iqbal Issue’ (October 1973), Letter No. 41, p. 168.

Cf. William James, op. cit., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 21.

The designation ‘apostle’ (rasūl) is applied to bearers of divine revelations which embody a new doctrinal system or dispensation; a ‘prophet’ (nabī), on the other hand, is said to be one whom God has entrusted with enunciation and elucidation of ethical principles on the basis of an already existing dispensation, or of principles common to all dispensations. Hence, every apostle is a prophet as well, but every prophet is not an apostle.

Cf. Lecture VII, pp. 143-44, where this point is reiterated.
E. W. Hocking, op. cit., pp. 106-07.
Source: http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/prose/english/reconstruction/01.htm

References
Source: Iqbal Academy Pakistan – http://www.allamaiqbal.com
Dr. Waheed Ishrat, Tr. Dr. M.A.K. Khalil – www.allamaiqbal.com
http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/prose/english/reconstruction/
http://freebookpark.blogspot.com/2012/06/reconstruction-of-religious-thought-in.html
http://www.aftabkhan.webs.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki