NOTES AND REFERENCES

Lecture I:

1. Reference here is to the following verse from the mystical allegorical work: ManÇiq al-ñair (p. 243, v. 5), generally considered the magnum opus, of one of the greatest sufi poets and thinkers Farâd al-Dân ‘AÇÇ«r’ (d.c. 618/1220):

2. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 5.

3. Ibid., p. 73.

4. Cf. H. L. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 187-88; on this intuition-intellect relation see also Allama Iqbal’s essay: Bedil in the light of Bergson, ed. Dr Tehsin Firaqi, pp. 22-23.

5. Allahumm«arin« haq«’iq al-ashy«kam«hâya, a tradition, in one form or other, to be found in well-known Sufistic works, for example, ‘Alâb. ‘Uthm«n al-Hujwayrâ, Kashf al-MaÁjëb, p. 166; Mawl«n« Jal«l al-Dân Rëmâ, Mathnawâ-i Ma’nawâ, ii, 466-67; iv, 3567-68; v, 1765; MaÁmëd Shabistarâ (d. 720/1320), Gulshan-i R«z, verse 200, and ‘Abd al-RaÁm«n J«mâ (d. 898/1492), Law«’ih, p. 3.

6. Qur’«n, 16:68-69.

7. Ibid., 2:164; 24:43-44; 30:48; 35:9; 45:5.

8. Ibid., 15:16; 25:6; 37:6; 41:12; 50:6; 67:5; 85:1.

9. Ibid., 21:33; 36:40.

10. 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’.

11. Qur’«n, 16:78; 23:78; 32:9; 67:23.

12. Ibid., 17:36. References here, as also at other places in the Lectures, to a dozen Quranic verses in two sentences bespeak of what is uppermost in Allama Iqbal’s mind, i.e. Quranic 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’a`n 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, not 9).

13. For anti-classicism of the Qur’«n cf. Mazheruddân Âiddiqâ, Concept of Muslim Culture in Iqbal, pp. 13-25; also Lecture V, note 21.

14. See R. A. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality (a work listed at S. No. 37 in the Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library), pp. 75-77; cf. also 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 (Mé langes de philosophie, pp. 454 ff.), E. Renan (Averroes et I’averroisme, pp. 152, 158), A Stockl (Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, 11, 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, II, 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. It is to be noted, however, that M. E. Marmura in his article on ‘Soul: Islamic Concepts’ in The Encyclopedia of Religion, XIII, 465 clearly avers that Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle leave no room for a doctrine of individual immortality.

15. Cf. Tsanoff, op. cit., pp. 77-84, and M. Yënus Farangi Mahallâ, Ibn Rushd (Urdu; partly based on Renan’s Averroes et l’averroisme), pp. 347-59.

16. See Lecture IV, pp. 93-98, and Lecture VII, pp. 156-57.

17. Reference is to the expression lawÁ-in mahfëzin used in the Quranic verse 85:22. For the interpretation this unique expression of the Qur’«n see M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’«n, p. 943, note; and Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’a`n, p. 98 - the latter seems to come quite close to Allama Iqbal’s generally very keen perception of the meanings of the Qur’«n.

18. This comes quite close to the contemporary French philosopher Louis Rougier’s statement in his Philosophy and the New Physics p. 146, II, 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.

19. Reference here is to Tevfâk Fikret, pseudonym of Mehmed Tevfik, also known as Tevfik Nazmâ, 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: Rub«b-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. 300-02 and 338-39; also Haydar Ali Dirioz’s brief paper in Turkish on Fikret’s birth-centenary translated by Dr M. H. Notqi in 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’, and unpublished 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.

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

21. The Qur’«n condemns monkery; see 57:27; 2:201; and 28:77. Cf. also Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, ed. A. L. Sherwani, 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’.

22. There are many verses of the Qur’«n wherein it has been maintained that the universe has not been created in sport (l«’ibân) or in vain (b«Çil-an) but for a serious end or with truth (bi’l-Áhaqq). These are respectively: (a) 21:16; 44:38; (b) 3:191; 38:27; (c) 6:73; 10:5; 14:19; 15:85; 16:3; 29:44; 30:8; 39:5; 44:39; 45:22; 46:3; and 64:3.

23. See also the Quranic verse 51:47 wherein the phrase inna la-mu`si’u`n has been interpreted to clearly foreshadow the modern notion of the ‘expanding universe’ (cf. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’a`n, p. 805, note 31).

24. Reference here is in particular to the Prophetic tradition worded as: l«tasubbëal-dahra fa inn All«h huwa’l-dahru, (AÁmad Àanbal, Musnad, V, 299 and 311). Cf. also Bukh«râ, Tafsâr: 45; TauÁâd: 35; Adab`: 101; and Muslim, Alf«z 2-4; for other variants of the Áadâth SaÁâfa Hamm«m-Bin-Munabbih (ed. Dr. M. Hamidullah) Áadâth 117, gives one of its earliest recorded texts.

In an exceedingly important section captioned Al-Waqtu Saif-un (Time is Sword) of his celebrated Asr«r-i-Khudâ, Allama Iqbal has referred to the above hadit`h thus:

Life is of Time and Time is of Life;

Do not abuse Time!’ was the command of the Prophet. (trans. Nicholson)

25. Reference is to the Quranic verse 70:19 which says: ‘Man has been created restless (halë’an).’

26. This is very close to the language of the Qur’«n 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’«n, 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 Ghul«m Mustaf« Kh«n’s voluminous Iqb«l aur Qur’«n (in Urdu).

27. Qur’«n, 41:35; also 51:20-21.

28. Reference here is to the Mathnawâ, ii, 52:

The bodily sense is eating the food of darkness

The spiritual sense is feeding from a sun (trans. Nicholson).

29. Qur’«n, 53:11-12.

30. Ibid., 22:46.

31. Cf. Bukh«râ, Jan«’iz, 79; Shah«dah 3; Jih«d: 160, 178; and Muslim, Fitan: 95-96. D. J. Halperin’s article: ‘The Ibn Âayy«d Traditions and the Legend of al-Dajj«l’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, XCII/ii (1976), 213-25, gives an atomistic analytic account of the ah«dâth listed by him.

32. In Arabic: lau tarakathu bayyana, an invariable part of the text of a number of ah«dâth about Ibn Âayy«d; 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 received Allama’s close attention in the present discussion.

33. Ibid., p. 36.

34. Cf. Lecture V, pp. 100 ff.

35. 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 parapsychic 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).

36. Macdonald, op. cit., p. 42.

37. Cf. MuÁyuddân Ibn al-‘Arabâ’s observation that ‘God is a precept, the world is a concept’, referred to in Lecture VII, p. 144, note 4.

38. 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’.

39. 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 strong strain of mysticism is Hocking’s philosophy, but it is a mysticism which does not abandon the role of intellect in clarifying and correcting intuition; cf. his article: ‘Hocking, William Ernest’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, IV, 47 (italics mine).

40. 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’«n, i.e. the createdness or the eternity of the Qur’«n; 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’«n 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 Sh«h Walâ All«h in Sata’«t and Fuyëz al-Àaramain. 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 Majâd S«lik, Dhikr-i Iqb«l, pp. 244-45 and Faqir Sayyid WaÁâd-ud-Dân, Rëzg«r-i Faqâr, pp. 38-39. After Allama’s epoch-making mathnawi: Asr«r-i Khudâ was published in 1915 and it had given rise to some bitter controversy because of his critique of ‘ajami tasawwuf, and of the great À«fiz, he in a letter dated 14 April 1916 addressed to Mah«r«ja Kishen Parsh«d confided strictly in a personal way: ‘I did not compose the mathnawâ myself; I was made to (guided to), to do so’; cf. M. ‘Abdull«h Quraishâ’ Naw«dir-i Iqb«l (Ghair MaÇbu’ah Khutët)’, Sahâfah, Lahore, ‘Iqb«l Nambar’ (October 1973), Letter No. 41, p. 168.

41. Cf. William James, op. cit., p. 15.

42. Ibid., p. 21.

43. The designation ‘apostle’ (rasël) is applied to bearers of divine revelations which embody a new doctrinal system or dispensation; a ‘prophet’ (nabâ), on the other hand, is said to be one whom God has entrusted with enunciation 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.

44. Cf. Lecture VII, pp. 143-144, where this point is reiterated.

45. E. W. Hocking, op. cit., pp.106-107.

Back to Lecture-I

Lecture II: THE PHILOSOPHICAL TEST OF THE REVELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

1. Cf. E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (trs.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes, II, 57.

2. Cf. The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.’Kemp Smith, p. 505.

3. The logical fallacy of assuming in the premisses of that which is to be proved in the conclusion.

4. Qur’«n, 41:53, also 51:20-21.

5. Ibid., 57:3.

6. Cf. R.F.A. Hoernle, Matter, Life, Mind and God, pp. 69-70.

7. Cf. H. Barker, article ‘Berkeley’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, especially the section; ‘Metaphysics of Immaterialism’; see also Lecture IV, p. 83, for Allama Iqbal’s acute observations in refutation of ‘the hypothesis of matter as an independent existence’.

8. Cf. A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, p. 30. This is what Whitehead has called the ‘theory of bifurcation of Nature’ based on the dichotomy of ‘simply located material bodies of Newtonian physics’ and the ‘pure sensations’ of Hume. According to this theory, Nature is split up into two disparate or isolated parts; the one known to us through our immediate experiences of colours, sounds, scents, etc., and the other, the world of unperceived scientific entities of molecules, atoms, electrons, ether, etc. - colourless, soundless, unscented - which so act upon the mind through ‘impact’ as to produce in it the ‘illusions’ of sensory experiences in which it delights. The theory thus divides totality of being into a reality which does not appear and is thus a mere ‘conjecture’ and appearances which are not real and so are mere ‘dream’. Whitehead outright rejects ‘bifurcation’; and insists that the red glow of sunset is as much ‘part of Nature’ as the vibrations of molecules and that the scientist cannot dismiss the red glow as a ‘psychic addition’ if he is to have a coherent ‘Concept of Nature’. This view of Whitehead, the eminent mathematician, expounded by him in 1920 (i.e. four years before his appointment to the chair of Philosophy at Harvard at the age of sixty-three) was widely accepted by the philosophers. Lord Richard Burdon Haldane, one of the leading neo-Hegelian British philosophers, said to be the first philosophical writer on the Theory of Relativity, gave full support to Whitehead’s views on ‘bifurcation’ as well as on ‘Relativity’ in his widely-read Reign of Relativity to which Allama Iqbal refers in Lecture III, p. 57, and tacitly also perhaps in lecture V. The way Lord Haldane has stated in this work his defence of Whitehead’s views of Relativity (enunciated by him especially in Concept of Nature) even as against those of Einstein, one is inclined to surmise that it was perhaps Reign of Relativity (incidentally also listed at S. No. 276 in the Descriptive Catalogue of Allama’s Personal Library) more than any other work that led Allama Iqbal to make the observation: ‘Whitehead’s view of Relativity is likely to appeal to Muslim students more than that of Einstein in whose theory time loses its character of passage and mysteriously translates itself into utter space’ (Lecture V, p. 106).

9. Allama Iqbal states here Zeno’s first and third arguments; for all the four arguments of Zeno on the unreality of motion, see John Burnet, Greek philosophy; Thales to Plato, p. 84; they generally go by names; the ‘dichotomy’; the ‘Achilles’; the ‘arrow’; and the ‘stadium’. It may be added that our primary source for Zeno’s famous and controversial arguments is Aristotle Physics (VI, 9, 239b) which is generally said to have been first translated into Arabic by IsÁ«q b. Àunain (c. 845-910/911), the son of the celebrated Àunain b. IsÁ«q. Aristotle’s Physics is also said to have been commented on later by the Christian Abë’Alâal-Àasan b. al-Samh (c. 945-1027); cf. S.M. Stern, ‘Ibn-al-Samh’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1956), pp. 31-44. Even so it seems that Zeno’s arguments as stated by Aristotle were known to the Muslim thinkers much earlier, maybe through Christian-Syriac sources, for one finds the brilliant Mu‘tazilite Naïï«m (d. 231/845) meeting Zeno’s first argument in terms of his ingenious idea of tafrah jump referred to by Allama Iqbal in Lecture III, pp. 63-64.

10. Cf. T.J. de Boer, article ‘Atomic Theory (Muhammadan)’, in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, 202-203; D.B. Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, pp. 201 ff. and Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism, pp. 33-43.

11. Cf. Kit«b al-FiÄal, V, 92-102.

12. For Bergson’s criticism of Zeno’s arguments cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 325-30, and also the earlier work Time and Free Will, pp.113-15.

13. Cf. A.E. Taylor, article ‘Continuity’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, IV, 97-98.

14. Cf. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 169-88;

also Mysticism and Logic, pp. 84-91.

15. This is not Russell’s own statement but that of H. Wildon Carr made during the course of his exposition of Russell’s views on the subject; see Wildon Carr, The General Principle of Relativity, p. 36.

16. Views of H. Wildon Carr and especially of Sir T. Percy Nunn on relativity in the present context are to be found in their symposium papers on ‘The Idealistic Interpretation of Einstein’s Theory’ published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. XXII (1921-22), 123-27 and 127-30. Wildon Carr’s, Doctrine of Monadistic Idealism, however, is to be found much more fully expounded in his General Principle of Relativity (1920) and A Theory of Monads: Outlines of the Philosophy of the Principle of Relativity (1922); passages from both of these books have been quoted in the present lecture (cf. notes 15 and 22).

T. Percy Nunn, best known as an educationist, wrote little philosophy; but whatever little he wrote, it made him quite influential with the leading contemporary British philosophers: Whitehead, Samuel Alexander, Russell, Broad, and others. He is said to have first formulated the characteristic doctrines of neo-Realism, an important philosophical school of the century which had its zealot and able champions both in England and in the United States. His famous symposium paper: ‘Are Secondary Qualities Independent of Perception?’ read in a meeting of the Aristotelian Society in 1909 was widely studied and discussed and as J. Passmore puts it: ‘it struck Bertrand Russell’s roving fancy’ (A Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 258). It is significant to note that Nunn’s correction put on Wildon Carr’s idealistic interpretation of relativity in the present passage is to be found almost in the same philosophical diction in Russell’s valuable article: ‘Relativity; Philosophical Consequences’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1953), XIX, 99d, Russell says: ‘It is a mistake to suppose that relativity adopts any idealistic picture of the world . . . . The ‘observer’ who is often mentioned in expositions of relativity need not be a mind, but may be a photographic plate or any kind of recording instrument.’

17. On this rather debatable interpretation of Einstein’s theory of relativity see Dr M. Razi-ud-dân Âiddâqâ, ‘Iqbal’s Conception of Time and Space’ in Iqbal As A Thinker, pp. 29-31, and Philipp Frank, ‘Philosophical Interpretations and Misinterpretations of the Theory of Relativity’, in H. Feigel and Mary Broadbeck (eds.), Readings in the Philosophy of Science, pp. 222-26, reprinted from his valuable work. Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Modern Physics (1938).

18. Cf. Hans Reichenbach, ‘The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity’, in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), Albert-Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, section iv.

19. Cf. Tertium Organum, pp. 33f.

20. Compare this with Bergson’s view of consciousness in Creative Evolution, pp. 189f.

21. This is a passage from J.S. Haldane’s Symposium Paper: ‘Are Physical, Biological and Psychological Categories Irreducible?’ read in July 1918 at the joint session of the Aristotelian Society, the British Psychological Society and the Mind Association; see Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XVII, (1917-1918), 423-24, reproduced in H. Wildon Carr (ed.), Life and Finite Individuality, pp. 15-16.

22. A Theory of Monads, pp. 5-6.

23. Cf. Lecture I, pp. 8-11.

24. Cf. the Quranic verses quoted on p. 39; to these may be added 22:47, 32:5, and 70:4 - according to this last verse a day is of the measure of fifty thousand years.

25. Creative Evolution, p. 1.

26. The Qur’«n says: ‘And behold a day with thy sustainer is as a thousand years of your reckoning’ (22:47). So also, according to the Old Testament: ‘One day is with the Lord as a thousand years’ (Psalms, xc.’4).

27. According to Bergson, this period may be as long as 25,000 years; cf. Matter and Memory, pp. 272-73.

28. For further elucidation of future as an open possibility’ cf. Lecture III, p.’63.

29. See among others the Quranic verses 25:2; 54:49 and the earliest on this subject in the chronological order of the sërahs: 87:2-3.

These last two short verses speak of four Divine ways governing all creation and so also man, viz. God’s creating a thing (khalaqa), making it complete (fa sawwa), assigning a destiny to it or determining its nature (qaddara) and guiding it to its fulfilment (fa hada).

Allama Iqbal’s conception of destiny (taqdâr) as ‘the inward reach of a thing, its realizable possibilities which lie within the depth of its nature, and serially actualize themselves without any feeling of external compulsion’ [italics mine] understood in terms of the Divine ways embodied in the above two short verses, seems to be singularly close to the text and the unique thought-forms of the Qur’«n. There is no place in this conception of destiny for the doctrine of Fatalism as preached by some Muslim scholastic theologians whose interpretation of the verses of the Qur’«n for this purpose is more often a palpable misinterpretation (Lecture IV, p. 89); nor for the doctrine of determinism as expounded by the philosophers who, cut off from the inner life-impulse given by Islam, think of all things in terms of the inexorable law of cause and effect which governs the human ego as much as the ‘environment’ in which it is placed. They fail to realize that the origin of the law of ‘cause and effect’ lies in the depths of the transcendental ego which has devised it or caused it under divine guidance to realize its divinely assigned destiny of understanding and mastering all things (p. 86); also Asr«r-i Khudâ, many verses especially those in the earlier sections.

30. Qur’«n, 55:29.

31. Cf. Lecture I, p. 5.

32. See Shiblâ Nu‘m«nâ, Shi‘r al-‘Ajam, II, 114.

33. This is a reference to pp. 33-36.

34. Cf. Lecture I, p. 8 and note 23.

35. The Quranic verse 25:62 quoted on p. 37.

36. Reference is to the Quranic expression: Ghanâyy-un ‘ani’i-’«lamân found in verses 3:97 and 29:6.

37. This is a reference to the Quranic verse 20:14: ‘Verily, I - I alone - am God; there is no deity save Me. Hence, worship Me alone, and be constant in prayer, so as to remember Me.’

38. Qur’«n, 42:11.

39. The reference is to the Quranic expression sunnat Allah found in 33:62; 35:43; 40:84-85; 48:23, etc.

40. Cf. Lecture III, p. 83, where Allama Iqbal observes: ‘The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.’

41. McTaggart’s argument referred to here was advanced by him in his article; ‘The Unreality of Time’ in Mind (N.S.), XVII/68 (October 1908), 457-74, reproduced later in Nature of Existence, II, 9-31, as well as in the posthumous Philosophical Studies, pp. 110-31. McTaggart has been called ‘an outstanding giant in the discussion of the reality or unreality of time’ and his aforesaid article has been most discussed in recent philosophical literature on Time. Of articles in defence of McTaggart’s position, mention may be made of Michael Dummett: ‘A Defence of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time’ in Philosophical Review, XIX (1960), 497-504. But he was criticised by C.D. Borad, the greatest expositor of his philosophy (cf. his commentary: Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, Vol. I, 1933, and Vol. II in two parts, 1938), in Scientific Thought, to which Allama Iqbal has referred in the present discussion, as well as in his valuable article: ‘Time’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, XII, 339a; and earlier than Broad by Reyburn in his article ‘Idealism and the Reality of Time’ in Mind (Oct.1913), pp. 493-508 which has been briefly summarized by J. Alexander Gunn in Problem of Time: A Historical and Critical Study, pp. 345-47.

42. Cf. C.D. Broad, Scientific Thought, p. 79.

43. This is much like Broad’s admitting at the conclusion of his examination of McTaggart’s argument that time ‘is the hardest knot in the whole of Philosophy’, ibid., p. 84.

44. The Confessions of St. Augustine, xi, 17; cf. O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, I, 140, where Augustine’s observation is quoted in connection with ‘destiny’.

45. Reference is to the Quranic verse 23:80 quoted on p. 37 above.

46. Cf. M. Afdal Sarkhwush, Kalim«t al-Shu‘ar«‘, p. 77, where this verse is given as under:

47. Cf. Kit«b al-FiÄal, II,158; also 1. Goldziher, The Z«hirâs, pp. 113 f.

48. Qur’«Än, 50:38.

49. Ibid., 2:255.

50. Goethe, Alterswerke (Hamburg edition), I, 367, quoted by Spengler, op. cit., on fly-leaf with translation on p. 140. For locating this passage in Goethe’s Alterswerke, I am greatly indebted to Professor Dr Annemarie Schimmel.

51. Reference here is to the Prophet’s last words: ‘al-sal«tu al-sal«tu wa m«malakat aim«nukum’ (meaning: be mindful of your prayers and be kind to persons subject to your authority) reported through three different chains of transmitters in AÁmad b. Àanbal’s Musnad: VI, 290, 311 and 321.

Back to Lecture-II

Lecture III: THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND THE MEANING OF PRAYER

1. Cf. Creative Evolution, p. 13; also pp. 45-46.

2. Ibid., p. 14.

3. See Qur’«n, for example, 2:163, 4:171, 5:73, 6:19, 13:16, 14:48, 21:108, 39:4 and 40:16, on the Unity of Allah and 4:171, 6:101, 10:68, 17:111, 19:88-92 emphatically denying the Christian doctrine of His sonship.

4. Cf. L.R. Farnell, The Attributes of God, p. 56.

5. The full translation here is ‘a glistening star’, required by the nass of the Qur’«n, ‘Kaukab-un îurrây-ën’.

6. On this fine distinction of God’s infinity being intensive and not extensive, see further Lecture IV, p. 94.

7. For the long-drawn controversy on the issue of the creation of the universe, see, for instance, Ghazz«lâ, Tah«fut al-Fal«sifah, English translation by S.A. Kam«lâ: Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 13-53, and Ibn Rushd, Tah«fut al-Tah«fut, English translation by Simon van den Bergh: The Incoherence of the Incoherence, pp. 1-69; cf. also G.F. Hourani, ‘Alghaz«lâ and the Philosophers on the Origin of the World’, The Muslim World, XLVII/2(1958), 183-91, 308-14 and M. Saeed Sheikh, ‘Al-Ghaz«lâ: Metaphysics’, A History of Muslim Philosophy ed. M.M. Sharif, I, 598-608.

8. Cf. Lecture II, 28, 49.

9. A.S. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, pp. 197-98 (italics by Allama Iqbal).

10. For AbuHashim’s theory of atomism cf. T.J. de Boer, ‘Atomic Theory (Muhammadan)’, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, 202-03. De Boer’s account is based on Abë Rashâd Sa‘âd’s Kit«b al-Mas«’il Fi’l-Khil«f, ed. and trans. into German by Arthur Biram (Leyden,1902).

11. Cf. Ibn Khaldën, Muqaddimah, English translation by F. Rosenthal, III, 50-51, where B«qill«nâ is said to have introduced the conceptions of atom(al-jawhar al-fard), vacuum and accidents into the Ash‘artie Kal«m. R. J. McCarthy, who has edited and also translated some of B«qill«nâ’s texts, however, considers this to be unwarranted; see his article ‘al-B«kâll«nâ’s’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition), I, 958-59. From the account of Muslim atomism given in al-Ash‘arâ’s Maq«l«t al-Isl«miyân, this much has, however, to be conceded that atomism was keenly discussed by the Muslim scholastic theologians long before B«qill«nâ.

12. For the life and works of Maimonides and his relationship with Muslim philosophy, cf. S. Pines, The Guide of the Perpelexed (New English translation, Chicago University Press, 1963), ‘Introduction’ by the translator and an ‘Introductory Essay’ by L. Strauss; cf. also Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II, 369-70 and 376-77.

13. D.B. Macdonald, ‘Continuous Re-creation and Atomic Time in Moslem Scholastic Theology’, The Moslem World, XVII/i (1928), 6-28; reprinted from Isis, IX (1927), 326-44. This article is focussed on Maimonides’ well-known ‘Twelve Propositions of the Katam’.

14. Macdonald, ‘Continuous Re-creation and Atomic Time . . .’ in op. cit., p.’24.

15. Ibid., pp. 25-28. See also The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, p. 320, where Macdonald traces the pantheistic developments in later sufi schools to Buddhistic and Vedantic influences.

16. Qur’«n, 35:1.

17. Cf. de Boer, ‘Atomic Theory (Muhammadan)’, in op. cit., II, 203.

18. Cf. Eddington, op. cit., p. 200.

19. For an account of Naïï«m’s notion of al-tafrah or jump, see Ash‘arâ, Maq«l«t al-Isl«miyân, II, 18; Ibn Àazm, Kit«b al-FiÄal, V, 64-65, and Shahrast«nâ, Kit«b al-Milal wa’l-NiÁal, pp. 38-39; cf. also Isr«’ânâ, Al-Tabsâr, p. 68, Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism, p. 39, and H.A. Wolfson: The Philosophy of the Kal«m, pp. 514-17.

20. A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 49.

21. A view, among others held by B«qill«nâ who bases it on the Quranic verses 8:67 and 46:24 which speak of the transient nature of the things of this world. Cf. Kit«b al-Tamhâd, p. 18.

22. Lecture I, p. 3; see also Lecture V, p. 102, note 21.

23. For Ash‘arites’ theory of the perpetual re-creation of the universe basing it on the Absolute Power and Will of God, cf. Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism, pp. 15, 117 ff. and M. Saeed Sheikh, ‘Al-Ghaz«lâ; Metaphysics’, in op. cit., I, 603-08.

24. In R.A. Nicholson’s edition of the Mathnawâ this verse (i.1812) reads as under:

Wine became intoxicated with us, not we with it;

The body came into being from us, not we from it.

25. Viscount Richard Burdon Haldane, the elder brother of John Scott Haldane, from whose Symposium Paper Allama Iqbal has quoted at length in Lecture II, p. 35, was a leading neo-Hegelian British philosopher and a distinguished statesman who died on 19 August 1928. Allama’s using the expression ‘the late Lord Haldane’ is indicative of the possible time of his writing the present Lecture which together with the first two Lectures was delivered in Madras (5-8 Jan. 1929). The ‘idea of degrees of reality and knowledge’, is very vigorously expounded by Haldane in The Reign of Relativity (1921) as also in his earlier two-volume Gifford Lectures: The Pathway to Reality (1903-04) in which he also expounded the Principle of Relativity on purely philosophical grounds even before the publication of Einstein’s theory; cf. Rudolf Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, p. 315.

26. This is a reference to the Qur’an, 20:14.

27. Ibid., 50:16.

28. For further elucidation of the privacy of the ego, see Lecture IV, pp. 79-80.

29. Cf. p. 64 where Iqbal says that God ‘out of His own creative freedom . . . . has chosen finite egos to be participators of His life, power, and freedom’.

30. The tradition: ‘Do not vilify time, for time is God’ referred to in Lecture I, p. 8.

31. Cf. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Vol. I, Definition viii, Scholium i.

32. Cf. Louis Rougier, Philosophy and the New Physics (An Essay on the Relativity Theory and the Theory of Quanta), p. 143. The work belongs to the earlier phase of Rougier’s philosophical output, a phase in which he was seized by the new discoveries of physicists and mathematicians such as Henry Poincare (celestial mechanics and new geometry), Max Planck (quantium theory) Nicolas L. Carnot (thermodynamics), Madame Curie (radium and its compounds) and Einstein (principle of relativity). This was followed by his critical study of theories of knowledge: rationalism and scholasticism, ending in his thesis of the diversity of ‘metaphysical temperaments’ and the ‘infinite plasticity’ of the human mind whereby it takes delight in ‘quite varied forms of intelligibility’. To the final phase of Rougier’s philosophical productivity belongs La Metaphysique et le langage (1960) in which he elaborated the conception of plurality of language in philosophical discourse. Rougier also wrote on history of ideas (scientific, philosophical, religious) and on contemporary political and economical problems - his Les Mystiques politiques et leurs incidences internationales (1935) and Les Mystiques economiques (1949) are noteworthy.

It is to be noted that both the name ‘Louis Rougier’ and the title of his book Philosophy and the New Physics cited in the passage quoted by Allama Iqbal are given puzzlingly incorrectly in the previous editions of Reconstruction including the one by Oxford University Press (London, 1934); and these were not noticed even by Madame Eva Meyerovitch in her French translation: Reconstruire la pensee religieuse de l’Islam (Paris, 1955, p. 83). It would have been well-nigh impossible for me to find out the author’s name and title of the book correctly had I not received the very kindly help of the Dutch scholar the Reverend Dr. Jan Slomp and Mlle Mauricette Levasseur of Bibliothé que Nationale, Paris, who also supplied me with many useful particulars about the life and works of Rougier. The last thing that I heard was that this French philosopher who taught in various universities including the ones in Cairo and New York and who participated in various Congresses and was the President of the Paris International Congress of Scientific Philosophy in 1935, passed away on 14 October 1982 at the age of ninety-three.

33. Cf. Space, Time and Deity, II, 396-98; also Allama Iqbal’s letter dated 24 January 1921 addressed to R.A. Nicholson (Letters of Iqbal, ed. B.A. Dar, pp. 141-42) where, while disagreeing with Alexander’s view of God, he observes: ‘I believe there is a Divine tendency in the universe, but this tendency will eventually find its complete expression in a higher man, not in a God subject to Time, as Alexander implies in his discussion of the subject.’

34. The Sufi poet named here as well as in Lectures V and VII as (Fakhr al-Dân) ‘Ir«qâ, we are told, is really ‘Ain al-Quî«t Abu’l-Mu‘«lâ ‘Abdullah b. Muhammad b. ‘Alâ b. al-Àasan b. ‘Alâ al-Miy«njâ al-Hamad«nâ whose tractate on space and time: Gh«yat al-Imk«n fi Dir«yat al-Mak«n (54 pp.) has been edited by Rahim Farmanish (Tehran, 1338 S/1959); cf. English translation of the tractate by A.H. Kamali, section captioned: ‘Observations’, pp. i-v; also B.A. Dar, ‘Iqbal aur Mas‘alah-i Zam«n-o-Mak«n’ in Fikr-i Iqbal ke Munawwar Goshay, ed. Salim Akhtar, pp. 149-51. Nadhr S«birâ, however, strongly pleads that the real author of the tractate was Shaikh T«j al-Dân Mahmëd b. Khud«-d«d Ashnawâ, as also hinted by Allama Iqbal in his Presidential Address delivered at the Fifth Indian Oriental Conference (1928) (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal,’p. 137). Cf. Shaikh Mahmëd Ashnawâ’s tractate: Gh«yat al Imk«n fi Ma‘rifat al-Zam«n wa’l-Mak«n (42 pp.) edited by Nadhr S«birâ, ‘Introduction’ embodying the editor’s research about the MSS of the tractate and the available data of its author; also H«jâKhalâfah, Kashf al-Zunën, II, 1190, and A. Monzavi, A Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts, vol. II, Part I, MSS 7556-72.

Cf. also Maul«n«Imti«z ‘AlâKh«n ‘Arshâ, ‘Zam«n-o-Mak«n kâ Bahth ke Muta‘allaq ‘All«mah Iqb«l k« aik Ma’«khidh: ‘Ir«qâya Ashnawâ’, Maq«l«t: Iqb«l ‘ÿlamâ K«ngras (Iqbal Centenary Papers Presented at the International Congress on Allama Mohammad Iqbal: 2-8 December 1977), IV, 1-10 wherein Maul«n«’ Arshâ traces a new MS of the tractate in the Raza Library, Rampur, and suggests the possibility of its being the one used by Allama Iqbal in these Lectures as well as in his Address: ‘A Plea for Deeper Study of Muslim Scientists’.

It may be added that there remains now no doubt as to the particular MS of this unique Sufi tractate on ‘Space and Time’ used by Allama Iqbal, for fortunately it is well preserved in the Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore (inaugurated by the President of Pakistan on 26 September 1984). The MS, according to a note in Allama’s own hand dated 21 October 1935, was transcribed for him by the celebrated religious scholar Sayyid Anwar Sh«h K«shmârâ Cf. Dr Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal (Catalogue), p. 12.

For purposes of present annotation we have referred to Rahi`m Farmanish’s edition of Hamad«nâ’s Gh«yat al-Imk«n fi Dir«yat al-Mak«n (Tehran, 1338/1959) and to A.H. Kamali’s English translation of it (Karachi, 1971) where needed. This translation, however, is to be used with caution.

35. Cf. ‘Ain al-Quz«t Hamad«nâ, op. cit., p. 51; English translation, p. 36.

36. The Quranic expression umm al-kit«b occurs in 3:7, 13:39 and 43:4.

37. Cf. al-Mab«hith al-Mashriqâgah, I, 647; the Arabic text of the passage quoted in English is as under:

38. Reference here is in particular to the Qur’«n 23:80 quoted in Lecture II, p.’37.

39. Cf. Lecture II, p. 49, where, summing up his philosophical ‘criticism’ of experience, Allama Iqbal says: ‘facts of experience justify the inference that the ultimate nature of Reality is spiritual and must be conceived as an ego.’

40. Cf. ‘Ain al-Quz«t Hamad«nâ, op. cit., p. 50; English translation, p. 36. For Royce’s view of knowledge of all things as a whole at once (totum simul), see his World and the Individual, II, 141.

41. About the cosmic harmony and unity of Nature the Qur’«n says: ‘Thou seest no incongruity in the creation of the Beneficent. Then look again. Canst thou see any disorder? Then turn thy eye again and again - thy look will return to thee concused while it is fatigued’ (67:3-4).

42. Qur’«n, 3:26 and 73: see also 57:29.

43. Cf. Joseph Friedrich Naumann, Briefe ü ber Religion, p. 68; also Lecture VI, note 38. The German text of the passage quoted in English is as under:

"Wir haben eine Welterkenntnis, die uns einen Gott der Macht und Starke lehrt, der Tod und Leben wie Schatten und Licht gleichzeitig versendet, und eine Offenbarung, einen Heilsglauben, der von demselben Gott sagt, dass er Vater sei. Die Nachfolge des Weltgottes ergibt die Sittlichkeit des Kampfes ums Dasein, und der Dienst des Vaters Jesu Christi ergibt die Sittlichkeit der Barmherzigkeit. Es sind aber nicht zwei Gotter, sondern einer. Irgendwie greifen ihre Arme ineinander. Nur kann kein Sterblicher sagen, wo und wie das geschieht."

44. Reference is to Browning’s famous lines in ‘Pippa Passes’:

God is in the heaven -
All is right with the world.’

45. Cf. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Book iv, section 57.

46. For the origin and historical growth of the legend of Faust before Goethe’s masterly work on it, cf. Mary Beare’s article ‘Faust’ in Cassell’s Encyclopaedia of Literature, 1, 217-19.

47. Cf. Genesis, chapter iii.

48. Strictly speaking, the word Adam for man in his capacity of God’s vicegerent on earth has been used in the Qur’«n only in 2:30-31.

49. Cf. Genesis, iii, 20.

50. Qur’«n, 7:19.

51. Ibid., 20:120.

52. Cf. Genesis, iii, 24.

53. Ibid., iii,17.

54. Qur’«n, 2:36 and 7:24.

55. Cf. also verses 15:19-20.

56. Ibid., 71:17.

57. Ibid., 52:23.

58. Ibid., 15:48.

59. Ibid., 20:118-119.

60. Ibid., 2:35-37; also 20:120-122.

61. Ibid., 95:4-5.

62. Cf. also verses 2:155 and 90:4.

63. Ibid., 2:31-34.

64. Lecture I, pp. 10-11.

65. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) is a noted spiritualist and theosophist of Russian birth, who in collaboration with Col. H.S. Olcott and W.A. Judge founded Theosophical Society in New York in November 1873. Later she transferred her activities to India where in 1879 she established the office of the Society in Bombay and in 1883 in Adyar near Madras with the following three objects: (i) to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity; (ii) to promote the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science, and (iii) to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and powers latent in man. The Secret Doctrine (1888) deals, broadly speaking, with ‘Cosmogenesis’ and ‘Anthropogenesis’ in a ponderous way; though largely based on Vedantic thought the ‘secret doctrine’ is claimed to carry in it the essence of all religions.

For the mention of tree as ‘a cryptic symbol for occult knowledge’ in The Secret Doctrine, cf. I, 187: ‘The Symbol for Sacred and Secret knowledge in antiquity was universally a Tree, by which a scripture or a Record was also meant’; III, 384: ‘Ormzad . . . is also the creator of the Tree’ (of Occult and Spiritual Knowledge and Wisdom) from which the mystic and the mysterious Baresma is taken’, and IV, 159: ‘To the Eastern Occultist the Tree of Knowledge (leads) to the light of the eternal present Reality’.

It may be added that Allama Iqbal seems to have a little more than a mere passing interest in the Theosophical Society and its activities for, as reported by Dr M. ‘Abdull«h Chaghat«‘â, he, during his quite busy stay in Madras (5-8 Jan. 1929) in connection with the present Lectures, found time to pay a visit to the head office of the Society at Adyar. One may also note in Development of Metaphysics in Persia (p. 10, note 2) reference to a small work Reincarnation by the famous Annie Besant (President of the Theosophical Society, 1907-1933, and the first and the only English woman who served as President of the Indian National Congress in 1917) and added to this are the two books published by the Theosophical Society in Allama’s personal library (cf. Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, No. 81 and Relics of Allama Iqbal; Catalogue IV, 11). All this, however, does not enable one to determine the nature of Allama Iqbal’s interest in the Theosophical Society.

66. Qur’«n, 17; 11; also 21:37. The tree which Adam was forbidden to approach (2:35 and 7:19), according to Allama Iqbal’s remarkably profound and rare understanding of the Qur’«n, is the tree of ‘occult knowledge’, to which man in all ages has been tempted to resort in unfruitful haste. This, in Allama’s view, is opposed to the inductive knowledge ‘which is most characteristic of Islamic teachings’. He indeed, tells us in Lecture V (p. 101) that ‘the birth of Islam is the birth of inductive intellect.’ True, this second kind of knowledge is so toilsome and painfully slow: yet this knowledge alone unfolds man’s creative intellectual faculties and makes him the master of his environment and thus God’s true vicegerent on earth. If this is the true approach to knowledge, there is little place in it for Mme Blavatsky’s occult spiritualism or theosophism. Allama Iqbal was in fact opposed to all kinds of occultism. In one of his dialogues, he is reported to have said that ‘the forbidden tree’ (shajr-i mamnë‘ah) of the Qur’«n is no other than the occultistic taÄawwuf which prompts the patient to seek some charm or spell rather than take the advice of a physician. The taÄawwuf, he added, which urges us to close our eyes and ears and instead to concentrate on the inner vision and which teaches us to leave the arduous ways of conquering Nature and instead take to some easier spiritual ways, has done the greatest harm to science. [Cf. Dr Abu’l-Laith Siddâqâ, Malfëz«t-i Iqb«l, pp. 138-39]. It must, however, be added that Allama Iqbal does speak of a genuine or higher kind of taÄawwuf which soars higher than all sciences and all philosophies. In it the human ego so to say discovers himself as an individual deeper than his conceptually describable habitual selfhood. This happens in the ego’s contact with the Most Real which brings about in it a kind of ‘biological transformation’ the description of which surpasses all ordinary language and all usual categories of thought. ‘This experience can embody itself only in a world-making or world-shaking act, and in this form alone’, we are told, ‘can this timeless experience . . . make itself visible to the eye of history’ (Lecture VII, p. 145).

67. Qur’«n, 2:36; 7:24; 20:123.

68. Ibid., 2:177; 3:200.

69. Lecture II, p. 58.

70. Lecture V, pp. 119ff.

71. The Principles of Psychology, I, 316.

72. Cf. R.A. Nicholson (ed. and tr.), The Mathnawi of Jalalëddân Rëmâ, Vol. IV (Books i and ii - text), ii, w. 159-162 and 164.

73. Cf. ibid., Vol. IV, 2 (Books i and ii - translation), p. 230. It is to be noted that quite a few minor changes made by Allama Iqbal in Nicholson’s English translation of the verses quoted here from the Mathnawâ are due to his dropping Nicholson’s parentheses used by him for keeping his translation literally as close to the text as it was possible. Happily, Allama’s personal copies of Volumes 2-5 and 7 of Nicholson’s edition of the Mathnawi are preserved in Allama Iqbal Museum (Lahore) and it would be rewarding to study his usual marginal marks and jottings on these volumes.

74. Cf. the Quranic verse 3:191 where so far as private prayers are concerned the faithful ones are spoken of remembering God standing and sitting and lying on their sides.

75. The Qur’«n speaks of all mankind as ‘one community’; see verses 2:213, 10:19.

76. Ibid., 49:13.

Back to Lecture-III

LectureIV: THE HUMAN EGO - HIS FREEDOM AND IMMORTALITY

1. Cf. Qur’«n, 6:94, 19:80 and 19:93-95; see also p. 93 where Allama Iqbal, referring to these last verses, affirms that in the life hereafter the finite ego will approach the Infinite Ego ‘with the irreplaceable singleness of his individually’.

2. This is, in fact translation of the Quranic text: wa l«taziru w«zirat-unw wizra ukhr« which appears in verses 6:164; 17:15; 35:18; 39:7 and 53:38. Chronologically the last verse 53:38 is the earliest on the subject. The implication of this supreme ethical principle or law is three-fold: a categorical rejection of the Christian doctrine of the ‘original sin’, refutation of the idea of ‘vicarious atonement or redemption’, and denial of the possibility of mediation between the sinner and God (cf. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’«n, p. 816, note 31).

3. Again, translation of the Quranic verse 53:39 which is in continuation of the verse last referred to above.

4. Cf. O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, I, 306-07. Also Lecture V, p. 114 where Allama Iqbal makes the important statement: ‘Indeed my main purpose in these lectures has been to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from its Magian overlayings’ (italics mine). This may be read in conjunction with Allama’s reply to a Parsi gentleman’s letter published in Statesman. This reply makes it clear that: ‘Magian thought and religious experience very much permeate Muslim theology, philosophy and Sufism. Indeed, there is evidence to show that certain schools of Sufism known as Islamic have only repeated the Magian type of religious experience . . . . There is definite evidence in the Qur’«n itself to show that Islam aimed at opening up new channels not only of thought but the religious experience as well. Our Magian inheritance, however, has stifled the life of Islam and never allowed the development of its real spirit and aspirations’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, ed. A.L. Sherwani, p. 170). It is important to note that, according to Allama Iqbal, Bahaism and Qadianism are ‘the two forms which the modern revival of pre-Islamic Magianism has assumed’, cf. his article ‘Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims’, ibid., p. 162. This is reiterated in ‘Introduction to the Study of Islam’, a highly valuable synopsis of a book that Allama contemplated to write. Under section ‘E’ Sub-section (iii) one of the topics of this proposed book is: ‘Babi, Ahmadiyya, etc. Prophecies. All More or Less Magian’ (Letters and Writings of Iqbal, p. 93; italics mine). Earlier on pp. 87-88 there is an enlightening passage which reads: ‘Empire brought men belonging to earlier ascetic cultures, which Spengler describes as Magian, within the fold of Islam. The result was the conversion of Islam to a pre-Islamic creed with all the philosophical controversies of these creeds: Rëh, Nafs; Qur’«n; Àadâth or Qadâm. Real Islam had very little chances.’ This may be compared with Allama’s impassioned statement in his article: ‘Islam and Mysticism’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 122): ‘The Moslems of Spain, with their Aristotelian spirit, and away from the enervating influences of the thought of Western and Central Asia, were comparatively much closer to the spirit of Islam than the Moslem races of Asia, who let Arabian Islam pass through all the solvents of Ajam and finally divested it of its original character. The conquest of Persia meant not the conversion of Persia to Islam, but the conversion of Islam to Persianism. Read the intellectual history of the Moslems of Western and Central Asia from the 10th century downwards, and you will find therein verified every word that I have written above.’ And Allama Iqbal wrote this, be it noted, in July 1917, i.e. before Spengler’s magnum opus: The Decline of the West was published (Vol. I, 1918, revised 1923, Vol. II, 1922; English translation, Vol. I, 23 April 1926, Vol. II, 9 November 1928) and before the expressions such as ‘Magian Soul’, ‘Magian Culture’ and ‘Magian Religion’ came to be used by the philosophers of history and culture.

5. Cf. the Quranic verses 41:53 and 51:20-21, which make it incumbent on men to study signs of God in themselves as much as those in the world around them.

6. Cf. Husain b. Mansër al-Àall«j, Kit«b al-ñaw«sân, English translation by Aisha Abd Ar-Rahman, also by Gilani Kamran, (Ana al-Haqq Reconsidered, pp. 55-108), ñ«sân VI, 23, containing al-Àall«j’s ecstatic utterance: an« al-Haqq, and L. Massignon’s explanatory notes on it translated by R.A. Butler in his article ‘Kit«b al-Taw«sân of al-Hall«j’ Journal of the University of Baluchistan, 1/2 (Autumn 1981), 79-85; cf. also A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, pp. 66 ff.

It may be noted that Allama Iqbal in his, in many ways very valuable, article ‘McTaggart’s Philosophy’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 143-51), compares McTaggart to Àall«j (pp. 148-49). In the system of this ‘philosopher-saint’, ‘mystical intuition, as a source of knowledge, is much more marked than in the system of Bradley . . . . In the case of McTaggart the mystic Reality came to him as a confirmation of his thought . . . . When the mystic Sultan Abë Sa‘id met the philosopher Abë ‘Alâ ibn Sân«, he is reported to have said, ‘I see what he knows.’ McTaggart both knew and saw’ (pp. 145-46). The key to McTaggart’s system indeed, is his mysticism as is borne out from the concluding sentence of his first work Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic: ‘All true philosophy must be mystical, not indeed in its methods, but in its final conclusions.’

This in-depth article on ‘McTaggart’s Philosophy’ also contains Allama Iqbal’s own translation of two passages from his poem The New Garden of Mystery (Gulshan-i R«z-i Jadâd) dealing with Questions VI and VIII; the latter Question probes into the mystery of Àall«j’s ecstatic utterance: ‘I am the Truth’. Cf. B.A. Dar (tr.), Iqbal’s Gulshan-i R«z-i Jadâd and Bandagâ N«mah, pp. 42-43, 51-54.

7. Cf. The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal, II, 76-103.

8. Note Iqb«l significant observation that ‘modern psychology has not yet touched even the outer fringe of religious life and is still far from the richness and variety of what is called religious experience’ (Lecture VII, p. 152).

9. Cf. Ethical Studies (1876), pp. 80 f.

10. Cf. The Principles of Logic (1883), Vol. II, chapter ii.

11. Cf. Appearance and Reality (1893), pp. 90-103.

12. Jâv«tm« is the individual mind or consciousness of man or his soul distinguished from the cosmic mind, cosmic consciousness or world-soul; cf. ‘Atman’, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II,195, also XII, 597.

13. Cf. Appearance and Reality, p. 89; also ‘Appendix’, p. 497.

14. Misprinted as, mutual, states in the previous editions.

15. For Ghaz«lâ’s concept;ion of the soul, cf. M. Saeed Sheikh, ‘Al-Ghaz«lâ: Mysticism’, A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M.M. Sharif, I, 619-21.

16. Reference here is to what Kant named ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’, i.e. fallacious arguments which allege to prove substantiality, simplicity, numerical identity and eternality of the human soul; cf. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 328-83.

17. Ibid., pp. 329-30.

18. Ibid., pp. 372-73; this is, in fact, Kant’s argument in refutation of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s ‘Proof of the Permanence of the Soul’; cf. Kemp Smith, Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 470-71.

19. Cf. Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, chapter ix, especially pp. 237-48.

20. Ibid., p. 340.

21. Ibid., p. 339; cf. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 342, note (a) where Kant gives an illustration of a series of elastic balls in connection with the third paralogism to establish the numerical identity of the ego. Kemp Smith in his Commentary p. 461, has rightly observed that William James’s psychological description of self-consciousness is simply an extension of this illustration.

22. Qur’«n, 7:54.

23. Cf. pp. 84-85, where Allama Iqbal gives a philosophical answer to this question in terms of contemporary theory of emergent evolution as expounded by S. Alexander (Space, Time and Deity, 2 vols., 1920) and C.L. Morgan (Emergent Evolution, 1923). The theory distinguishes between two kinds of effects: ‘resultants’ which are the predictable outcome of previously existing conditions and ‘emergents’ which are specifically new and not completely predictable. According to Alexander, who in his original conception of emergence was indebted to Morgan (cf. Space, Time and Deity, II, 14), mind is ‘an ‘emergent’ from life, and life an emergent from a lower physico-chemical level of existence’ (ibid.). When physico-chemical processes attain a certain degree of Gestalt-like structural complexity life emerges out of it. Life is not an epiphenomenon, nor is it an entelechy as with Hans Driesch but an ‘emergent’ - there is no cleft between life and matter. At the next stage of ‘configurations’ when neural processes in living organisms attain a certain level of structural complexity, mind appears as a novel emergent. By reasonable extrapolation it may be assumed that there are emergents (or ‘qualities’) higher than mind.

This is very close to Maul«n« Rëmâ’s ‘biological future of man’, ‘Abd al-Karâm al-Jâlâ’s ‘Perfect Man’ and Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’. No wonder that Allama Iqbal in his letter dated 24 January 1921 to R.A. Nicholson (Letters of Iqbal, pp. 141-42), while taking a strict notice of E.M. Forster’s review of The Secrets of the Self (translation of his epoch-making Asr«r-i Khudâ) and particularly of the Nietzschean allegation against him (cf. Forster’s review in Dr Riffat Hassan, The Sword and the Sceptre, p. 284) writes: ‘Nor does he rightly understand my idea of the Perfect Man which he confounds with the German thinker’s Superman. I wrote on the Sufi doctrine of the Perfect Man more than twenty years ago, long before I had read or heard anything of Nietzsche . . . . The English reader ought to approach this idea, not through the German thinker, but through an English thinker of great merit (italics mine) - I mean Alexander - whose Gifford Lectures (1916-18) delivered at Glasgow were published last year.’ This is followed by a quotation from Alexander’s chapter on ‘Deity and God’ (op. cit., II, 347, II, 1-8) ending in a significant admission: ‘Alexander’s thought is much bolder than mine (italics mine).

24. More generally known as James-Lange theory of emotions. This theory was propounded by the Danish physician and psychologist, Carl George Lange in a pamphlet Om Sindsbevaegelser in 1885, while William James had already set forth similar views in an article published in Mind in 1884. For a full statement of the theory, see William James, Principles of Psychology, II, 449 ff. and for its refutation (as hinted at by Allama Iqbal), Encyclopaedia Britanica, s.v., XII, 885-86.

25. For Iqbal’s very clear and definitive verdict of body-mind dualism, cf. Lecture VI, p. 122.

26. Reference is to the Quranic verse (7:54) quoted on p. 82.

27. Cf. Lecture II, p. 28.

28. Qur’«n, 57:3.

29. Cf. William James, op. cit., II, 549.

30. More generally known as Gestalt Psychology, this German school of psychology was the result of the combined work of M. Wertheimer, K. Koffka and W. Kö hler during 1912-14. It came as a reaction against the psychic elements of analytic or associationistic psychology, insisting upon the concept of gestalt, configuration, or organized whole which, if analyzed, it was averred, would lose its distinctive quality. Thus it is impossible to consider the phenomenon of perception as in any way made up of a number of isolable elements, sensory or of any other origin, for what we perceive are ‘forms’, ‘shapes’ or ‘configurations’. From ‘perception’ the gestalt-principle has been extended throughout psychology and into biology and physics. Important for Iqbal scholars are the suggestions recently made to discern some ‘points of contact’ between the Gestalt and the philosophies of J. C. Smuts (holism) and A.N. Whitehead (philosophy of organism); cf. K. Koffka, ‘Gestalt’, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, VI, 642-46; also J. C. Smuts, ‘Holism’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, XI, 643.

31. The concept of ‘insight’ was first elaborately expounded by W. Kö hler in his famous work: The Mentality of Apes (first English translation in 1924 of his Intelligerprufü ngen an Menschenaffen, 1917); cf. C.S. Peyser, ‘Kohler, Wolfgang (1887-1967)’, Encyclopedia of Psychology, II, 271.

32. In the history of Islamic thought, this is one of the finest arguments to resolve the age-long controversy between determinism and indeterminism and to establish the soundest basis for self-determinism.

33. Cf. The Decline of the West, II, 240, where Spengler says: ‘But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes Islam. (italics by Spengler); earlier on p. 235 speaking of Magian religions (and for him Islam is one of them) Spengler observes: ‘the impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions’.

34. Cf. Lecture II, p. 40.

35. Cf. Introduction to the Secrets of the Self (English translation of Allama Iqbal’s ‘philosophical poem’: Asr«r-i Khudâ), pp. xviii-xix.

36. See Ibn Qutaibah, Kit«b al-Ma‘«rif, ed. ‘Ukashah, p. 441; cf. also Obermann, ‘Political Theology in Early Islam’: Àasan al-Basrâ’s Treatise on qadar’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LV (1935), 138-62.

37. Cf. D. B. Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, pp. 123-24, for a brief mention of ‘the origin of the theory of the accomplished fact’ with reference to the political attitude of the Murjâ‘ites, and Khuda Bukhsh, Politics in Islam, p. 150, for Ibn Jam«’ah’s view on the subject as contained in his work on constitutional law of Islam: TaÁrâr al-Ahk«m fâ Tadbâr Ahl al-Isl«m (ed. Hans Kofler), p. 357. It may be added that Allama Iqbal did take notice of Ibn Jama`’ah’s view (of bai‘ah through force) and observed: ‘This opportunist view has no support in the law of Islam’: cf. his article ‘Political Thought in Islam’ Sociological Review, I (1908), 256, II, 15-16; reproduced in Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, ed. A. L. Sherwani, p. 115.

38. Cf. Renan, Averrö es et l’averroisme (pp. 136f.) as quoted in R.A. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality, p. 76.

39. Cf. William James, Human Immortality, p. 32.

40. Ibid., p. 28.

41. Ibid., p. 29.

42. Cf. Lecture II, pp. 26-28; also p. 83.

43. This passage in its entire import seems to be quite close to the one quoted from Eddington’s widely read Nature of the Physical World (p. 323) in Lecture VII, p. 147.

44. Cf. R. A. Tsanoff, op. cit., pp. 143-78, for a commendable account of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence.

45. Cf. H. Spencer, First Principles, pp. 549 ff.

46. Cf. Tsanoff, op. cit., pp. 162-63.

47. Cf. Oscar Levy (ed.), Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, XIV, 248 and 250, quoted in Tsanoff, op. cit., p. 163.

48. Cf. Levy, op. cit., XVI, 274, and Tsanoff, op. cit., p. 177.

49. Cf. Lecture V, p. 113 where Iqbal says: ‘Whatever may be the criterion by which to judge the forward steps of creative movement, the movement itself, if conceived as cyclic, ceases to be creative. Eternal recurrence is not eternal creation, it is eternal repetition’.

50. Barzakh, according to Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, means ‘a thing that intervenes between any two things, or a bar, an obstruction, or a thing that makes a separation between two things’. As signifying the state between death and resurrection the word barzakh occurs in the Qur’«n, 23:99-100.

51. Reference is to the Quranic verses 23:12-14 quoted on p. 83.

52. See also verses 6:94 and 19:80.

53. Translation of the Quranic expression ajr-un ghairu mamnun-in found in verses 41:8; 84:25 and 95:6.

54. Reference here is among others to the Quranic verses 69:13-18; 77:8-11.

55. Cf. also the Quranic verses 20:112; 21:103; 101:6-7.

56. This alludes to the difference of the Prophet’s encounter with God as stated in the Quranic verse 53:17 from that of Prophet Moses’ as given in verses 7:143. Referring to the Persian verse (ascribed by some to the Sufâ poet Jam«lâ of Delhi who died in 942/1535), Iqbal in his letter to Dr Hadi Hasan of Aligarh Muslim University observes: ‘In the whole range of Muslim literature there is not one verse like it and these two lines enclose a whole infinitude of ideas’. See B.A. Dar (ed.), Letters and Writings of Iqbal, pp. 2-3.

57. So important is ‘action’ or ‘deed’ according to the Qur’«n that there are more than one hundred verses urging the believers to act righteously - hence, the opening line of Allama Iqbal’s Preface to the Lectures; see M. Fu‘«d ‘Abd al-B«qâ’s al-Mu‘jam al-Mufahras li Alf«z al-Qur’«n al Karâm, verses under the radicals: ml, slh and hsn.

58. This, according to Helmholtz, one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, was about thirty metres per second. Before Helmholtz the conduction of neural impulse was thought to be instantaneous, too fast to be measured. After he had demonstrated its measurement through his experimental studies; his researches came to be used in experiments on reaction time (cf. Gardner Murphy, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, p. 138 and N. A. Haynie’s article: ‘Helmholtz, Hermann von (1821-1894)’ in Encyclopedia of Psychology, II, 103. Allama Iqbal’s Hypothetical statement with reference to Helmholtz’s discovery: ‘If this is so, our present physiological structure is at the bottom of our present view of time’ is highly suggestive of new physiological or biological studies of time. It is to be noted that some useful research in this direction seems to have been undertaken already; cf. articles: ‘Time’ and ‘Time Perception’ in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Macropaedia), XVIII, 420-22.

59. See George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, I, 597, where it is said that the Kit«b al-Hayaw«n of al-J«Áiï contains the germs of many later theories: evolution adaptation, animal psychology. Cf. also M. Plessner, ‘Al-J«Áiï’ in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, VII, 63-65.

60. For a statement of the views of ‘Brethren of Purity’ with regard to the hypothesis of evolution, cf. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, pp. 72-74.

61. See Lecture V, p. 107, for Ibn Maskawaih’s very clear conception of biological evolution, which later found expression in the ‘inimitable lines’ of ‘the excellent Rëmâ’ quoted in the next passage as well as in Lecture VII, pp. 147-48.

62. Cf. E. H. Whinfield (tr.), Masnavi, pp. 216-17; this is translation of verses 3637-41 and 3646-48 of Book iv of Rëmâ’ s Mathnawâ- cf. Allama Iqbal’s observation on these verses in his Development of Metaphysics in Persia, p. 91.

63. For the keeping of a book or record of whatever man does in life here, there is repeated mention in the Qur’a`n; see, for example, verses 18:49; 21:94; 43:80 and 45:29.

64. Reference seems here to be to the Quranic verse 29:20 though ‘second creation’ is also alluded to in such verses as 10:4; 27:64; 30:11. See also 56:61.

65. Qur’«n, 17:13.

66. Reference here is to the Quranic description of life hereafter such as is to be found in verses 37:41-49 and 44:51-55 for the state of life promised to the righteous, and 37:62-68 and 44:43-49 for the kind of life to be suffered by the wicked. See also 32:17.

67. Qur’«n, 104:6-7.

68. Reference is to the Quranic expression h«wâyah (for hell) in 101:9.

69. See the Quranic verse 57:15 where the fire of hell is spoken of as man’s friend (maul«), i.e. ‘the only thing by which he may hope to be purified and redeemed’ (cf. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’«n, p. 838, note 21).

70. Qur’«n, 55:29.

Back to Lecture-IV

Lecture V: THE SPIRIT OF MUSLIM CULTURE

1. Cf. ‘Abd al-Quddës Gangàhâ, Lat«’if-i Quddësâ, ed. Shaikh Rukn al-Di`n, LaÇâfah 79; the Persian text rendered into English here is:

Reference may also be made here to very pithy and profound jottings of Allama Iqbal on the back cover of his own copy of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, especially to those under the sub-heading: ‘Mystical and Prophetic Consciousness’ with explicit mention of ‘Abd al-Quddu`s Gango`hi`; see Muhammad Siddiq, Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, Plate No. 8.

2. This great idea is embodied in the Quranic verse 33:40, i.e. ‘Muhammad... is All«h’s Apostle and the Seal of all Prophets, (Muhammad-un rasël All«h wa kh«tam-un nabâyyân). It has also been variously enunciated in the Àadâth literature (i) y« Muhammad-u anta rasël Ull«h-i wa kh«tam al-anbiy«’ : ‘O Muhammad! you are Allah’s Apostle and the Seal of all Prophets’; this is what other Prophets would proclaim on the Day of Resurrection (Bukh«râ, Tafsâr: 17). (ii) Wa ‘an«kh«tim-un-nabâyyân: ‘And I am the last of the Prophets’ (ibid., Man«qib: 7; Muslim, ¥m«n: 327). (iii) Laisa nabâyyu ba’dâ: ‘There is no Prophet after me’ (Bukh«râ, Magh«zâ: 77). (iv) L«nabâyya badâ: ‘There is no Prophet after me’ (ibid., Anbâya: 50; Muslim, Im«rah: 44; Fad«’il al-Sah«bah: 30-31). (v) Wa l«nabâyya ba’dahë: ‘And there is no Prophet after him’, said so by Abë Awf« as narrated by Ism«‘âl (Bukh«râ, ÿd«b: 109). (vi) L«nubuwwah ba’dâ: ‘There is no prophethood after me’ (Muslim, Fad«‘ al-Sah«bah: 30-32).

3. Though wahy matluww (revelation which is recited or worded revelation) is specific to the Prophets, the Qur’«n speaks of revelation in connection with earth (99:5), heavens (41:12), honey-bee (16:68-69), angels (8:12), mother of Moses (28:7) and disciples of Jesus (5:111). As to the different modes of revelation see 42:51.

4. Reference here is to the last but one passage of the Quranic verse 5:3 which reads: ‘This day have I perfected your religion for you and completed My favour unto you and have chosen for you as religion al-Isl«m’. This passage, according to all available aÁ«dâth on the testimony of the Prophet’s contemporaries, was revealed at ‘Araf«t in the afternoon of Friday, the 9th of Dhu’l-Àijjah 10 A.H., the year of the Prophet’s last pilgrimage to Makkah (cf. Bukha`ri`, ¥m«n: 34, where this fact is authenticated by Haîrat ‘Umar b. al-Khatta`b). It is to be noted that the Prophet’s death took place eighty-one of eighty-two days after the revelation of this verse and as it speaks of the perfection of religion in Islam, no precept of legal import whatsoever was revealed after it; cf. R«zâ, al-Tafsâr al-Kabâr.

5. Qur’«n, 41:53.

6. The first half of the formula of Islam is: l«il«h ill All«h, i.e. there is no god but Allah, or nothing whatever is worthy of worship except Allah. The other half is Muhammad-un Rasëlull«h, i.e. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. The expression ‘formula of Islam’ signifies that by bearing witness to the truth of these two simple propositions a man enters the fold of Islam.

7. Cf. Bukh«râ, Jan«’iz: 78; Shah«dah: 3; and Jih«d: 160 and 178 (Eng. trans. M. Muhsin Khan, II, 244-45; III, 488-89, and IV, 168-69 and 184-86) and Muslim: Fitan: 95-96 (Eng. trans. A.H. Siddiqi, IV, 1510-15).

8. Cf. Muqaddimah, trans. Rosenthal, 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 Khaldu`n and Mysticism’, Islamic Culture, XXI/ii (1947), 264-302.

9. Reference here is to the Quranic verses: 41:37; 25:45; 10:6; 30:22 and 3:140 bearing on the phenomena of Nature which have quite often been named in the Qur’«n as «y«t All«h, i.e. the ‘apparent signs of God’ (R«ghib, al-Mufrad«t, pp. 32-33); this is followed by reference to verses 25:73 and 17:72 which in the present context clearly make it as much a religious duty of the ‘true servants of the Most Gracious God ‘Iba`d-ur-Rahma`n’ to ponder over these apparent signs of God ‘as revealed to the sense-perception of man’ as to ponder over the Divine communications («y«t al-Qur’«n) revealed to the Holy Prophet - this two-way God-consciousness alone ensures man’s physical and spiritual prosperity in this life as well as in the life hereafter.

10. Cf. G. H. Lewes, The Biographical History of Philosophy (1857), p. 306, lines, 4-8, where Lewes says: ‘It is this work (‘Revivification of the Sciences of Religion’) which A. Schmö lders has translated; it bears so remarkable a resemblance to the Discours de la mé thod’ of Descartes, that had any translation of it existed in the days of Descartes, everyone would have cried against the plagiarism’. The second sentence of this passage was quoted by Allama Iqbal in his doctoral dissertation: The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (1908), p. 73, note (1), in support of his statement that Ghazz«lâ anticipated Descartes in his philosophical method’.

It is to be noted that Schmö lders’ Essai sur les é coles philosophiques chez les Arabes (Paris, 1842) was not the French translation of Ghazz«lâ’s voluminous ‘Revivification’ (Ihy«’ ‘Ulëm al-Dân in forty books) but that of his autobiographical work Al-Munqidh min al-Dal«l with its earliest edited Arabic text. It seems that the remarkable originality and boldness of Ghazz«lâ’s thought in the French version of al-Munqidh led Lewes to confuse it with the greater, the more famous ‘Revivification’ (Ihy«). For the ‘amazing resemblance’ between Ghazz«lâ’s Al-Munqidh min al-Dal«l (Liberation from Error) and Descartes’ Discours de la method’ (Discourse on Method), see Professor M. M. Sharif, ‘The Influence of Muslim Thought on the West’, ‘Section: D’, A History of Muslim Philosophy, II, 1382-84.

11. Cf. al-QisÇ«s al-Mustaqâm, trans. D.P. Brewster (The Just Balance), chapters ii-vi and translator’s Appendix III: ‘Al-Ghazz«lâ and the Syllogism’, pp. 126-30; cf. also Michael E. Marmura, ‘Ghaza`li`’s Attitude to the Secular Sciences and Logic’, Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science, ed. G. F. Hourani, Section II, pp. 102-03, and Susanna Diwald’s detailed review on al-QisÇ«s in Der Islam (1961), pp. 171-74.

12. For an account of Ishra`qi`’s criticism of Greek logic contained in his Hikmat al-Ishr«q, cf. S. Hossein Nasr, ‘Shiha`b al-Di`n Suhrawardi`Maqtu`l’, A History of Muslim Philosophy, I, 384-85; a fuller account of Ishra`qi`’s logic, according to Nicholas Rescher, is to be found in his extant but unpublished (?) Kit«b al-Talwâh«t and Kit«b al-Lamah«t (cf. Development of Arabic Logic, p. 185). It is to be noted that the earliest explanation of Ishra`qi`’s disagreement with Aristotle that logical definition is genus plus differentia, in terms of modern (Bosanquet’s) logic, was given by Allama Iqbal in his Development of Metaphysics in Persia, pp. 97-98.

For an expose of Ibn Taimâyyah’s logical masterpiece al-Radd ‘ala’l-Mantâqâyin (Refutation of the Logicians’) cf. Serajul Haque, ‘Ibn Taimi`yyah’ in A History of Muslim Philosophy, II, 805-12; also Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (pp. 352-53) for a lucid summing up. A valuable study of Ibn Taimi`yyah’s logical ideas is that by ‘Alâ S«mâ al-Nashsh«r in Man«hij al-Bahth ‘inda Mufakkiri’l-Isl«m wa Naqd al-Muslimân li’l-Mantiq al-Aristat«lâsâ, chapter III, sections ii and iii. Al-Nashsh«r has also edited Suyëtâ’s Jahd al-Qarih«h fi tajrâd al-Nasâhah, an abridgment of ibn Taimâyyah’s Al-Radd ‘ala’l-Mantiqiyân.

13. Aristotle’s first figure, al-shakl al-awwal or al-qiyas al-k«mil of the Muslim logicians, is a form of syllogism in which the middle term occurs as a subject in the first premiss and as a predicate in the second premiss. It is the only form of syllogism in which the conclusion becomes available in the form of a general (universal - proposition needed for scientific purposes; cf. M. Saeed Sheikh, A Dictionary of Muslim Philosophy, s.v.

As to the criticism of the first figure referred to here, it is more rightly to be ascribed to Fakhr al-Dân R«zâ, who, besides his own now available logical works, wrote quite a few critical commentaries on the works of Ibn Sân«, rather than to the eminent physician of Islam, Abë Bakr Zakarâya R«zâ, none of whose short treatises on some parts of the Aristotelian Organon seems to have survived; cf. Nicholas Rescher, The Development of Arabic Logic, pp. 117-18. Happily this stands confirmed by Allama Iqbal’s Presidential comments (almost all of which have been incorporated in the present passage) on Khwajah Kamal’s Lecture (in Urdu) on ‘Islam and Modern Sciences’ in the third session of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference, 1911, in Delhi; see S.’A.’Vahid (ed.), Maq«l«t-i Iqb«l, pp. 239-40; cf. also Allama’s letter dated 1^st February 1924 to Sayyid Sulaim«n Nadvâ, Iqb«ln«mah, I, 127-28; reference in both cases is to Fakhr al-Dân al-R«zâ and not to Abë Bakr R«zâ.

It is to be noted that of all the writings of Allama Iqbal including his more than 1200 letters Abë Bakr R«zi`is mentioned only in Development of Metaphysics in Persia: ‘as a physician and as a thinker who admitted the eternity of matter, space and time and possibly looked upon light as the first creation’ (pp. 24, 96). In a significant passage on p. 96 of this work Allama has listed about ten Muslim thinkers who were highly critical either of Greek philosophy in general or Greek logic in particular – Abë Bakr R«zâ’s name does not appear in this list.

14. This is Ibn Hazm’s Àudëd al-Mantiq referred to in his well-known Kit«b al-Fisal (I, 4 and 20; V, 70 and 128) under somewhat varied titles; also mentioned by his contemporary and compatriot Sa`’id b. Ahmad al-Andalusâ in his ñabaq«t al-Umam (p.’118) and later listed by Brockelmann in GAL; Supplementbä nde (I, 696). C. van Arendonk, however, in his article on ‘Ibn Hazm’ in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (II, 385) and I. Goldziher, s.v. in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, VII, 71 have declared that ‘the work has not survived’. And certainly very little was heard of this work until Dr Ihsan ‘Abba`s of the University of Khartoum discovered possibly the only MS and published it under the title: al-ñaqrâb li-Àadd al-Mantiq (The Approach to the Limits of Logic) in 1959. Allama’s comments on Ibn Àazm’s ‘Scope of Logic’ (Hudëd al-Mantiq), at a time when it was generally considered to have been lost is a proof of his extraordinary knowledge of Muslim writers and their works.

15. Cf. Development of Metaphysics in Persia (1964), p. 64, where it is stated that ‘Al-Birënâand Ibn Haitham (d. 1038) . . . anticipated modern empirical psychology in recognizing what is called reaction-time’: in the two footnotes to this statement Allama Iqb«l quotes from de Boer’s History of Philosophy in Islam, pp. 146 and 150, to establish the positivism, i.e. sense-empiricism respectively of both al-Birënâ and Ibn Haitham. On pp. 151-52 of this work is a passage (possibly referred to by Allama Iqbal here) which describes reaction-time very much in the modern sense: ‘not only is every sensation attended by a corresponding change localized in the sense-organ, which demands a certain time, but also, between the