The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam: Part 1/7

Chapter 1: Knowledge and Religious Experience

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful

This is part of a seven-part series. You can read the other parts here.

In this series, we will be reading and attempting to understand Dr Muhammad Iqbal’s lectures/book entitled The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. It is easily available online, e.g. here.

Before we begin, I want to think about why this is important. Why even bother reading this?

1.    First, Allama (“learned teacher”) Iqbal played a vastly influential role in 20^th century Muslim history, not merely in the Indian subcontinent, but also in Iran and indeed throughout the Muslim world. So at the very least, there is a historical interest to learning about his thought.

2.    Second, the title of the work is intriguing. The idea of reconstructing religious thought is certainly “of the moment.” There is an aspect of it that may be relevant to us, as Muslims or as people interested in understanding Islam, especially in novel ways.

3.     Third, there may be an interest out of wanting to understand his poetry.

I want to suggest that by the end of reading this excellent little book, we will not only value his work as a matter of interest, but as a work that calls us to a deep moral and religious imperative—trying to urgently understand Islam using all of our religious, scientific, and poetic knowledge.

With that in mind, I want to request that we read this work with deep sympathy. In my opinion, the best way to read a work is by considering the author to be always right and trying to understand why that must be so. Criticism should come later; any criticisms that arise will be treated as possible vulnerabilities, but not as demonstrations against the author’s claims. It is my opinion that this is the best way to truly understand someone’s work, and also the best way to allow our selves to confront it and be transformed by it. Therefore, you will observe that throughout this reading series, I will treat unresolved issues as a matter of personal flaw/ignorance or as requiring deeper thought, rather than a condemnation of the author’s thesis.

Lastly, a word of caution: I am not a scholar of any sort. I am not an academic or an expert on Allama Iqbal or anybody else, and I may be wrong in my interpretation of his (or others’) work. I am merely someone who read Allama Iqbal’s work when she was quite young and found it inspiring in spirit (even if not in total agreement with the conclusions). I am writing this in hopes that others, especially Muslims, will be encouraged to read the work of great thinkers and develop an urge to know and understand our religion.

Enough talk! Let’s begin!

¨¨¨

The first chapter is entitled, “Knowledge and Religious Experience.” There seem to be three main questions that the author considers in this chapter:

1.      What does the Holy Qur’an tell us about the universe (i.e. non-human creation)?

2.      What does the Holy Qur’an tell us about man?

3.      What are the ways of knowing reality?

The overall question that this chapter is driven by is this: what is reality and how can we know it and relate to it? A secondary question, not addressed directly in this question but that underlies the entire work is: and how does this knowledge of reality pertain to man?

Let’s consider his answer to each question in turn:

1.      What does the Holy Qur’an tell us about the universe?

Allama Iqbal uses Qur’anic verses to argue that there are several features of the universe that we recognise. Overtly we “know” these through religious means, but insofar as the verses encourage us to observe the universe, we also see this around us. The features are:

a.  The universe is not the result of sport (44:38-39) but instead, its existence has a significant and serious purpose (3:190-191)

b.   It can be and in fact is changeable; in particular it can be added to (35:1 and 29:20). God will give it a new “birth.” It is not a “finished product.” (What can we infer from this? Only that God is continuously creating!)

c.    The universe is and can be subjugated by man (31:20, 16:12)—but, as the author says later, for a noble purpose.

Why does Allama Iqbal even care about the features of the universe?

Firstly, he cares because the Holy Qur’an cares. He is desperate for people to see that a crucial part of the Holy Qur’an is its “emphasis [on] this observable aspect of Reality.” He claims that the Holy Qur’an clearly wants to foster an empirical attitude and that it seems to say that this is a prerequisite to understand—but why?

The answer to why is the other reason that he cares. He cares because he truly thinks and wants to argue that, in order to understand man’s role, we have to understand the universe. He thinks that engagement with the universe with your whole being (i.e. mentally, physically, creatively, etc) will allow you to fulfill your humanness in a way that the Holy Qur’an encourages. He says (I’ve added the numerals to indicate the ways in which the man-universe relationship ‘activates’ man’s potential):

“[T]he universe has a serious end. Its shifting actualities force our being into fresh formations. The intellectual effort to overcome the obstructions offered by it, besides (i) enriching and amplifying our life, (ii) sharpens our insight, and thus (iii) prepares us for a more masterful insertion into subtler aspects of human experience. […] Reality lives in its own appearances.”

Ultimately, the learned poet thinks that religion is about transformation in the ways of points i-iii. If that is the case—if it wants us to actively act on its claims—then we have to settle the issue of its claims! We can’t very well sit and twiddle our thumbs and hope that the basis of our conduct will just happen to be correct. He says:

“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.”

Third, he says that reality lives in its own appearances. This intriguing phrase should be explored more. Earlier in the chapter, he discussed the difference between Christianity and Islam. Both, he claims, want to “search for an independent content of spiritual life.” What this obscure phrase seems to mean is: how can we understand the meaning of man’s life? According to Allama Iqbal, Christianity said this was not by the forces of the world. Islam, however, thinks that yes, there is a “new world” that is revealed to man in his soul, but that the external world is part of the process of revealing this to him (consider points i-iii above). “[T]he illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through.”

This is why he thinks that the Holy Qur’an is fundamentally anti-classical. The classical approach has usually been to turn away from the world of becoming and look instead at the world of no-change. This was Nietzsche’s fundamental criticism of philosophy: philosophers and religious people have been too weak to bear the “world of becoming,” the world where things change. (Allama Iqbal agrees with him. He thinks that the Qur’an forces us to consider the world of becoming.

But clearly, he does not think that the world of becoming is the only reality—he accepts that God exists (in what sense, we will see later). Rather, he thinks that that nature is a “symbol” – a crucial symbol, no doubt, and one that cannot be avoided, but a symbol nevertheless. What is it a symbol for?

Evidently, he thinks that nature is a symbol for the creativity of man and of God. This is why “reality lives in its own appearances.” We will discuss this more in the continuing posts inshallah, but it is important to note that he does not think, like others, that the world of becoming will lead to some other world of no-change. This is usually how people will incorporate the world of becoming into their philosophy: they look at it, see that it exists and it changes, and then posit some world of no-change which underlies and explains the continuity of this world. Allama Iqbal won’t want to do that, not exactly in that way, though he does think that the ideal world is related to the real world through “the perpetual endeavour of the ideal to appropriate the real […] to illuminate its whole being.” We will see this later in the book inshallah.

Lastly, Allama Iqbal thinks that thought must be related to concrete existence. Concepts are formed by looking around and seeing the ideal in the real. We will talk more about this under Q3.

2.      What does the Holy Qur’an tell us about man?

All right, so Allama Iqbal thinks that the universe can be subjugated by man for some noble purpose. And he thinks that the Holy Qur’an is telling us about the relations of man to the universe and to God. So what can we learn about the nature of man, considering the features of the universe and the Holy Qur’an?

a.   He is surrounded by forces of obstruction that bring him to the “lowest of the low” (95:5)

b.   He is restless for self-expression, to the extent that he will inflict pain on others to express hiself

c.   He is superior to nature because he accepted the Trust that the Holy Qur’an talks about in 33:72. Allama Iqbal interprets this Trust (amanah) as the trust of personality—we will see what this means in coming chapters

d.    Although he has a beginning, he will surely be a permanent feature of creation (75:36-40) (this is linked to the seriousness of the universe)

e.  He is responsive to the environment, and regardless of whether the environment is negative or positive, he will respond with creativity: if it is positive, he will shape the environment, but if it is negative, he will retreat internally an create an internal world (think of melancholic poets)

f.   Man rises from state to state—he is always changing (84:16-19) and this change is through his responsiveness to the universe

Ultimately, Allama Iqbal wants to say that the universe’s change-ability is intimately linked to man’s change-ability. How? Because man responds to and acts on and acts within the universe. This is why he is restless: he constantly wants to create, to self-express. He is triggered to do this by the obstruction that the universe encounters him with. And the ways that interactions with the universe will affect him are listed in points i-iii above.

The author also makes a fairly striking claim: when man creates, God co-creates. For this, he references Q13:14:

“Verily, God will not change the condition of men till they change what is in themselves.”

We will discuss this more later, but we already have the sense that Allama Iqbal’s view of an ideal man is a dynamic person who is constantly creating by acting on the universe, and that this has implications for his view on God. Already, a reconstruction is taking place: from the stability of knowing an impassable (unchanging God), to the dynamism of a changing-person interacting with a changing-universe. He will talk more about what this signifies for the nature of God later.

3.      What are the ways of knowing reality?

Why do we need to know about reality at all? It is because without knowledge, we cannot awaken our creative spirits. Why? Because knowledge is what relates us to the changing universe, which in turn allows us to self-express and create and ascend. Since the basis of religion is transformation, religion requires that man have knowledge:

Human --> knowledge of universe --> interacts with universe --> changes states, expresses himself, etc. = the process of religion

Thus, it is crucial to know how we can know about reality, so that we can act on it. If we do not act on it, our spirit “hardens into stone and [we] are reduced to the level of dead matter. [Our] life and the onward march of [our] spirit depend on the establishment of connections with the reality that confronts [us.]” That is why the Holy Qur’an emphasises empirical reality.

Think about what a big change this is from classical thought. Normally, knowledge has been considered of unchanging, necessary things that you can be certain of (because they are unchanging and necessary). Plato considered other things, like my knowing that my husband is eating dinner, as “opinion” because it was not necessary. That’s why knowing something has been something that results in tranquility: there is a stability associated with that cognitive state.

If knowledge is now of changing reality, then the stability is no longer present. However, this is what Allama Iqbal wants us to see: knowledge is for the sake of self-transformation and this change from state to state is what leads to ascension, not just a more steady contemplation of God or some such thing. Think of it like this: classically, a man either contemplates God or he does not. It is binary. Now, Allama Iqbal wants us to think man changing states, potentially infinitely, and that this is somehow going to relate to his religiosity. It is not binary, though there is certainly hierarchy (some states better than others).

The author says that there are two types of knowledge: thought and intuition. He says that both seek vision of the same Reality, which impresses upon them differently. Let’s discuss both in turn:

Intuition:

Intuition is a special type of experience, of which a particular branch is mystical experience. Intuition is “a higher kind of intellect” that enjoys “the whole of Reality.”

Allama Iqbal discusses mystic experience to justify its use for knowing things. The features of mystic experience, which the author helpfully listed out for us, are:

a.       It is immediate—just like I see my chair and know it is there, the mystic experience ‘sees’ God and knows He is there.

b.      The mystic experience is irreducible. The ordinary difference between me, the subject, and the chair, the object, which we can analyse and break down are not present. This is because there is the minimum amount of thought. It would be something like an immediate revelation. If you have ever had a moment of serendipity, it is nigh-instant. You can try to break it down, but really, it is a moment, a flash. You can’t reduce it to further parts.

c.       It is an experience of another Self, i.e. God. At that moment or moments, your own private personality is subdued. It is like when you are struck by something very beautiful; for a moment, you do not realise you are there. There is total absorption in the beautiful object. (This is an imperfect analogy.)

d.      It is incommunicable. We can only talk about its interpretations, not its contents as such. This seems to be linked to the fact of its irreducibility. I can tell someone the conclusion of my serendipitous moment, but not convey to them the actual experience of it. Even if they understand it completely, they will not relive it. On the other hand, if I show someone my engineering problem, they can rework it and go through a very similar series of cognitive states as I did when I solved it. However, a moment of serendipity has an urge to be communicated. I realised something, I want to share it with you. Within the feeling, there is a need for expression in thought.

Thus: “religious experience […] is essentially a state of feeling with a cogniive aspect, the content of which cannot be communicated to others, except in the form of a judgment.”

Ultimately, Allama Iqbal wants us to see mystic experience as type of human consciousness – rare, no doubt, but not impossible – that encounters God in some direct sense, and is therefore incommunicable. However, because he  

One possible criticism to the author’s justification for mystic experience is this: religion is a primitive theory arising from the psychology of man in some way. One example of someone who holds this view is Freud. Another is Nietzsche. Many regular people hold this belief to varying extents. Think of Christopher Hitchens saying that religion is a type of pacifier for adults.

Nietzsche thought that religious myths – trying to escape the world of becoming and enter a world of tranquil no-change – arise out of psychological weakness. Man is too weak and sick to encounter reality as it is in all its colour and sound and smell. Like a sick man, he recoils at changes. Instead, he turns away from this world and enters a peaceful world. He meditates and prays and thinks of Heaven, thinking: it will all be OK. This decadence is what ultimately creates the world of Being.

Allama Iqbal has to answer this most critical view, the psychological view of religion. He answers it as such: yes, there are aspects of religion that act as pacifiers, that turn away from this world out of weakness and fear. But not all religion. And you cannot dismiss mystic experiences, experienced by people since the dawn of time, as merely delusional. Just because they are intense does not mean that they arise from some subconscious urges.

Religion begins in the interpretation of these experiences. We have to understand whether they are indeed true. But we cannot, prima facie, dismiss them. Do we dismiss our experience of other minds in this way? Certainly one can doubt that other minds exist, but it is hardly a psychological weakness to experience other people’s responsiveness and immediately think them to not exist. Religious people believe in God because they see Him as responding. Certainly, we must assess the mystic experience more (that’s what he will do in the next chapter) and at least accept the possibility of its truth.

Allama Iqbal cannot accept just the personal experience of mystical knowledge. Why? Because religion is sociological, it aims at transforming man and transforming societies. We must assess its claims, its general truths, before we base our entire societal structure on it.

Because of this, thought and intuition are co-dependent. How do they link? Intuition is a concrete experience with the features listed above, that seeks expression in thought. Once thought, it must be assessed and known further. Within the mystic experinece itself are urges to be expressed and known. This is because “no feeling is so blind as to have no idea of its own object.”

Thought:

Thought is “reflective observation and control of [reality’s] symbols as they reveal themselves to us in sense-perception.” Man can form concepts of things and therefore know about them. This is why the Holy Qur’an is taken to emphasise the observable aspect of reality, in which the common current is change.

The author talks about the validity of thought for a basis of religion in the context of a critique of Muhammad Ghazali. Why does he think thought matters?

First, because thought and intuition are linked, as we discussed above. But secondly, because a criticism of thought is this: thought is essentially finite, so it cannot reach the Infinite. Imagine trying to count to infinity in a finite amount of time. You could not. Similarly, the criticism of thought is that because it is finite, it simply cannot reach or understand the Infinite or experience of the Infinite (i.e. intuition).

The author’s response is this: thought’s seeming-finitude and inconclusiveness are a result of its being subject to serial time. But to think that its finitude means that it cannot reach the Infinite is wrong. It can reach the immanent Infinite. How?

Thought can reach the Infinite because of its movement. Thought is in pursuit of the Infinite, and because the Infinite is unfolding or revealing itself to us in the concrete things around us, which thought can certainly consider, then it is considering the Infinite. Certainly, at any given point it may seem that thought is inconclusive because it works in a finite sort of way. I think of the table, then I think of a book, then I think of… But the meaningfulness of what is thought is over the course of its entire movement. These concepts hold a unity to them – they must be understood in relation to one another.

There are two parts to this:

• The act of thinking is of thinking of limited and finite things. I think of a table, then a chair, then a…
• The basis of thinking is that no finite thing is in fact clearly finite. Its meaningfulness is in its relation to everything else, and in particular to the Infinite. Thus, if I think of a table, then I am somehow encountering something Infinite, even though we may grant that the table itself is essentially finite.

Ghazali’s (and Kant’s) confusion was in mistaking the serial and unfolding acts of thinking with the justifications for thinking. Just because it operates in a finite way does not mean that its conceptualizing is not somehow touching the Infinite. And reaching or understanding this Infinite is over time, because thought is linked to serial time. We have already gotten a sense of this from the idea of nature as a symbol.

Allama Iqbal compares intuition/mystic experience to the Preserved Tablet, while thought is like the unfolding of the universe in terms of the Preserved Tablet. One contains or refers to the whole, while the other understands the whole over time, in parts, but parts that necessarily linked to the whole.

Thus, mystic experience and thought are linked: in act, mystic experience wishes to be communicated, and thought is how it communicates. In essence, mystic experience experiences the whole but cannot communicate it, whereas thought moves through the parts of the whole but can communicate it.

I will leave this here, as we will have to discuss this in a future chapter.

Two philosophical issues

I want to briefly touch on two philosophical claims that the author makes and assess their plausibility:

1. Feeling is outwardly oriented

Allama Iqbal thinks that feeling is directed outwards towards an object—when one feels something, it has a cognitive component, a sense of what will bring it to rest. It directs the self towards an idea, which is the idea of what will make it end.

How plausible is this? Think about a time you were excited. Why were you excited? Probably, you could tell me why. This fact of knowing what made you excited (e.g. my book is arriving tomorrow), even if it was vague (e.g. I am excited and I don’t know why), and knowing what would end your excitement (e.g. my book order has arrived), is at least plausibly consisting of ideas. It is directed towards an idea. That means that it is intentional.

I won’t discuss the justification of this too much longer, but we can think about whether we find this to be satisfying or not. At least on face value, it seems reasonable. (Also consider psychological theories of emotions.)

Why is Allama Iqbal so insistent on feeling being self-expressive and directed towards an idea? Because he wants to say that religious thought and religious knowledge is based on mystic experiences that express themselves through thoughtful judgments. If a feeling did not result in an idea or was not object-directed, then it is impossible to evaluate mystic experiences, and the link between thought and intuition is broken.

2. Knowledge of one’s self

In the context of talking about knowing others minds, the author slips in a sentence:

“It is obvious that we know our own self and nature by inner reflection and sense-perception respectively.”

This is, in fact, crucial to his thesis. Allama Iqbal has been suggesting that the human self’s movement is what matters. He will discuss it in subsequent chapters as well. If we deny the existence of the human self altogether, then we are in a bit of trouble.

Does anybody deny that the human self exists? Certainly: there are many who deny personal identity as being a sort of illusion (just like there are Muslims who deny this world as being a realm of illusion). Consider Nietzsche again. Nietzsche thinks that the enduring reality of the I is an illusion that arises out of a pre-reflective feeling that we have.

How would Allama Iqbal defend himself against this claim? I am not sure, but it seems to me that it must be more substantial than mere introspection. Introspection points us to the experience of the self, but it is not a philosophical proof of its existence, especially against arguments such as Nagarjuna’s.

Conclusion

I want us to think about whom we envision as a perfect man. We probably think of someone who is tranquil, steady: he has conquered his ‘lower’ self to achieve a level of peace, a lack of internal struggle, an acceptance of the world. Allama Iqbal is saying: yes and no. Yes he overcomes his lower self, the mechanical self that drags him down. But no, he does not overcome this by somehow becoming still, tranquil, transcending himself. Rather, he strengthens his individuality, he exists through struggle.

Consider the hadith (narration) from Sahih Muslim:

“Suhayb reported: The Prophet said, “When the people of Paradise enter it, Allah Almighty will say: Would you like anything more? They will say: Have you not brightened our faces? Have you not admitted us into Paradise and saved us from Hellfire? Then, Allah will lift the veil and nothing they are given will be more beloved to them than looking at their Lord Almighty.” Then, the Prophet recited the verse, “For those who do good is more.””

Normally we think of viewing something as a passive act. However we interpret “looking at their Lord Almighty,” it seems to be something that is done upon us. How would Allama Iqbal interpret this narration? I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that it would involve vision as an action on our parts, something that we do.

This is radical. The author is trying to say this: the supreme act of bliss is an act, not a vision or a contemplation. The action is creation, strengthening the will. Not because it will somehow make us “mini-gods” (God forgive me), not because we enter our own moral universe where anything goes, but because….why? Why does he think this? That is what he will answer in the next few chapters. But the seeds of an answer have already been planted in our minds.

I pray that God accepts our worship of Him and grants us understanding of the “ultimate nature of things.”

میارا بزم بر ساحل کہ آنجا
نوای زندگانے نرم خیز است
بہ دریا غلت و با موجش در آویز
حیات جاودان اندر ستیز است

Do not have a party on the shore

For there, the song of life is soft and gentle

Roll with the ocean, fight its waves!

Eternal life is found in struggle

- MM, March 21^st, 2020