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 stimulation of the organ and consciousness of the perception an interval of time must elapse, corresponding to the transmission of stimulus for some distance along the nerves.’

As to al-Kindâ’s discovery that sensation is proportionate to stimulus, cf. de Boer, op. cit., p. 101, where he speaks of ‘the proportional relation existing between stimulus and sensation’ in connection with al-Kindâ’s mathematized theory of compound remedies. This is given in al-Kindâ’s celebrated treatise: Ris«lah fi Ma‘rifah Quwwat-Adwâyat al-Murakkabah which was at least twice translated into Latin (Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II, 342 and 896).

16. Cf. Opus Majus, trans. Robert Belle Burke, Vol. II, Part V (pp. 419-82). It is important to note that Sarton’s observation on Roger Bacon’s work on optics is very close to that of Allama Iqbal. ‘His optics’, says Sarton, ‘was essentially based upon that of Ibn al-Haitham, with small additions and practical applications’ (op. cit., II, 957). As reported by Dr M. S. N«mës, Allama Iqbal helped him in understanding the rotographs of the only MS (No. 2460 in Bibliothé que Nationale, Paris) of Ibn Haitham’s T«hrâr al-Man«zir for a number of days; cf. Ibn al-Haitham: Proceedings of the Celebrations of 1000th Anniversary (held in November 1969 under the auspices of Hamdard National Foundation Pakistan, Karachi), p. 128.

See, however, Professor A. I. Sabra’s scholarly article: ‘Ibn al-Haytham’ in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, VI, 189-210, especially p. 205 where he gives an up-to-date information about the MSS of Ibn Haitham’s Kit«b al-Man«zir. According to Professor Sabra, ‘The reference in Brockelmann to a recension of this work in the Paris MS, ar. 2460 (Brockelmann has 2640) is mistaken; the MS is a recension of Euclid’s Optics which is attributed on the title page to Hasan ibn (Mës«ibn) Sh«kir’.

17. ‘Ibn Hazm’ here is a palpable misprint for ‘ibn Haitham’ - the context of the passage more fittingly demands and latter rather than the former name. Ibn Hazm’s influence on Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus, a predominantly science-oriented work, looks somewhat odd. There seems to be no evidence of it in the text of Opus Majus - Ibn Hazm is not even so much as mentioned by name in this work. Sarton, despite his great praise for Ibn Hazm’s scholarship (op. cit. I, 713), nowhere hints at his contributions to ‘science’ or his influence of Roger Bacon, nor is this to be found in other standard works, for example, in the sixteen-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

18. Qur’«n, 53:42.

19. For ñësâ’s discussion of the parallel postulate (also named ‘axiom of parallelism’), see his ‘Al-Ris«lat al-Sh«fâyan ‘an al-Shakk fi’l-Khutët al-Mutaw«zâyah’ in (ñësâ’s) Ras«’il, Vol. II, Pt. viii, pp. 1-40. Commenting on this work Sarton observes (op. cit., II, 1003): ‘NaÄâr al-Dân’s discussion was remarkably elaborate’. Cf. also Cajori, A History of Elementary Mathematics, p. 127, Q. À«fiz ñauq«`n, Tur«th al-‘Arab al-‘Ilmâ, pp. 97-98, R. Bonola, Non-Euclidean Geometry, pp. 12-13 and 37-38 and Dr S. H. Nasr’s article: ‘Al-ñësâ’ in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XIII, 508-14 especially p. 510.

20. This passage may be read in conjunction with Allama Iqbal’s observation on ñësâ in his Sectional Presidential Address (delivered at the Fifth Oriental Conference, Lahore, on 20 November 1928): ‘A Plea for the Deeper Study of Muslim Scientists’: ‘It is Tusi’s effort to improve the parallel postulate of Euclid that is believed to have furnished a basis in Europe for the problem of space which eventually led to the theories of Gauss and Riemann’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 138). Euclid’s parallel postulate is Postulate V of the first book of his Elements. What it means to say is that through a given point ‘P’ there can be only one straight line ‘L’ parallel to a given straight line. It is to be noted that to Euclid’s successors this postulate had signally failed to appear self-evident, and had equally failed to appear indemonstrable - hence, Allama Iqbal’s generalized statement that ‘since the days of Ptolemy (87-165 A.D.) till the time of NaÄâr ñësâ nobody gave serious thought’ to the postulate. Deeper and wider implication of the postulate, however, cannot be denied. ‘The innumerable attempts to prove this fifth postulate on the one hand and the development of the non-Euclidean geometries on the other are as many tributes to Euclid’s wisdom’, says Sarton (op. cit., I, 153). A long note on the postulate by Spengler - well versed in mathematics - in his Decline of the West, 1, 176, admirably brings out its deep philosophical import.

These non-Euclidean geometries were developed in the nineteenth century by certain European mathematicians: Gauss (1777-1855) in Germany, Lobachevski (1792-1856) in Russia, Bolyai (1802-1860) in Hungary and Riemann (1826-1866) in Germany. They abandoned the attempt to prove Euclid’s parallel postulate for they discovered that Euclid’s postulates of geometry were not the only possible postulates and that other sets of postulates could be formulated arbitrarily and self-consistent geometries based on them. They further discovered that the space assumed in Euclidean geometry is only a special case of a more general type. These non-Euclidean geometries assumed immense scientific significance when it was found that the space-time continuum required by Einstein’s theory of gravitation is non-Euclidean.

This in short is the movement of the idea of parallel postulate from Euclid to Einstein. Allama Iqbal with his seer-like vision for ideas was very much perceptive of this ‘movement’ and also of the scientific and philosophical significance of the non-Euclidean geometries. It is to be noted that Allama’s keenly perceptive mind took full notice of the scientific developments of his days, for example, of anti-mechanistic biologism (neo-vitalism) of Hans Driesch and J. S. Haldane and of quantum theory as well as of relativity-physics especially as expounded by Eddington, Louis Rougier, Lord Haldane, Wildon Carr and other philosopher-scientists. Among other things, one may notice a score of books on the ‘Philosophy of Contemporary Science, more than half of which are on relativity-physics (mostly published between 1920 and 1928) in his personal library alone. See M. Siddiq, Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, pp. 4-7 and 71-76, as well as Plates Nos. 22 and 23 giving the facsimiles of Allama’s signatures dated July 1921 and September 1921 on his own copies of Einstein’s work: Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition (1920) and Edwin E. Slosson’s Easy Lessons in Einstein (1920); cf. also Dr Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal (Catalogue), books listed at IV. 41 and IV. 46. The first book The Mystery of Space by Robert T. Browne by its very sub-title: ‘A Study of the Hyperspace Movement in the Light of the Evolution of New Psychic Faculties and an Inquiry into the Genesis and Essential Nature of Space’ suggests that it was probably this book which was foremost in Allama’s mind when he spoke of highly mathematical notion of ‘hyperspace movement’ in connection with Tusi’s effort to improve the parallel postulate here as well as in his ‘Plea for Deeper Study’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 141). Allama’s keen interest in higher mathematics is evinced by his references in the present rather compact discussion on Newton’s interpolation formula, recent developments in European mathematics and Whitehead’s view of relativity as distinguished from that of Einstein. For the development of Allama’s interest in certain mathematical key-concepts and in sciences in general see M. Saeed Sheikh, ‘Allama Iqbal’s interest in the Sciences’, Iqbal Review, XXX/i (April-June, 1989), 31-43.

21. Cf. a fairy long passage from Spengler’s Decline of the West (I, 75) quoted in Allama’s Address: ‘A Plea for Deeper Study of the Muslim Scientists’ and an account of the way he went into the authentication of al-Bârënâ’s view of mathematical function (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 135-36). Allama’s interest in ‘mathematical idea of function’ seems to be two-fold: religio-philosophical and scientific. The function-idea, he says, ‘turns the fixed into the variable, and sees the universe not as being but as becoming’. This is in full accord with the Quranic view of the universe which God has built with power and it is He Who is steadily expanding it (cf. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’«n, p. 805, note 31) and again ‘He adds to his creation whatever He wills: for verily, God has the power to will anything’ (35:1). The Quranic view of the growing universe is thus ‘a clear departure’ from the Aristotelian view of the fixed universe. Aristotle’s doctrine of potentiality passing into actuality fails to resolve the mystery of becoming, in its living historicity and novelty or, as W. D. Ross has put it: ‘The conception of potentiality has often been used to cover mere barrenness of thought’ (cf. his Aristotle, p. 176). Hence, Allama’s repeated pronouncement, that the spirit of the Qur’«n is essentially anti-classical. Philosophically speaking, time, which in the present context has been linked up with the notion of functionality and rightly so, is the most indispensable condition for the very possibility and reality of human experience, cognitive or moral. This explains, partly at least, why ‘Time’ is the recurring theme in Allama’s works in both prose and verse.

In mathematics function is a relationship of correspondence between two variables called independent variable and dependent variable and is expressed by saying ‘y is a function of x’ which means y change with x , so that for a certain value of x, y has a certain value (or values). In Europe though the term ‘function’ in its full mathematical sense was first used by Leibniz in 1694, the theory of functions had already emerged with the analytic geometry of Pierce Fermat in 1629 and that of the father of modern philosophy Ré ne Descartes - Descartes’ La Geometrie appeared along with his better known Discours de la mé thode in 1637. After that such rapid advances took place in mathematics that within, say, fifty years it was completely metamorphosed into its modern form or, as Spengler puts it: ‘Once this immense creation found wings, its rise was miraculous’. Being well versed in mathematics, Spengler gives an exciting account of the new discoveries of the Western mathematicians and their impact of European science and arts (op. cit., I, 74-90). Two of his statements are to be noted. Not until the theory of functions was fully evolved, says Spengler, ‘could this mathematics be unreservedly brought to bear in the parallel sphere of our dynamic Western physics’. Generally speaking, this means that Nature speaks the subtle and complex language of mathematics and that without the use of this language the breath-taking progress of science in the West, since the seventeenth century, would have been a sheer impossibility. Spengler, however, did not care to know that the mathematical idea of function originated, not in the West, but in the East, more particularly with the most brilliant al-Bârënâ’s Al-Qnën al Mas‘ëdâ in 1030, i.e. six hundred years before Fermat and Descartes.

The second statement to be noted is that, according to Spengler, ‘The history of Western knowledge is thus one of progressive emancipation from classical thought’ (ibid, p. 76). As it is, Allama Iqbal has the least quarrel with Spengler on the truth of this statement for he says: ‘The most remarkable phenomenon of modern history, however, is the enormous rapidity with which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. There is nothing wrong in this movement, for European culture, on its intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam’ (Lecture I, p. 6: italics mine). And further, ‘Spengler’s view of the spirit of modern culture is, in my opinion, perfectly correct’ (p. 114). What Allama Iqbal, however, rightly insists is ‘that the anticlassical spirit of the modern world has really arisen out of the revolt of Islam against Greek thought’ (ibid). This revolt consists in Islam’s focusing its vision on ‘the concrete’, ‘the particular’ and ‘the becoming as against the Greeks’ search for ‘the ideal’ ‘the universal’ and ‘the being’. Spengler failed to see these Islamic ingredients of modern culture because of his self-evolved thesis ‘that each culture is a specific organism, having no point of contact with cultures that historically precede or follow it’. Spengler’s thesis has its roots, not in any scientifically established dynamics of history, but in his uncompromising theory of cultural holism (note the sub-title of the first volume of his work: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit). Cf. W. H. Dray’s article, ‘Spengler, Oswald’, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, VII, 527-30 for critical evaluation of Spengler’s philosophical position.

22. Cf. M. A. Kazim, ‘al-Bârënâ and Trignometry’, al-Bârënâ Commemoration Volume, esp. pp. 167-68, for the English translation of the passage from al-Bârënâ’s al-Q«nën al-Mas‘ëdâ wherein al-Bârënâ generalizes his interpolation formula ‘from trignometrical function to any function whatever’. This is likely the passage pointedly referred to by Allama Iqbal in his ‘A Plea for Deeper Study of the Muslim Scientists’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 136). See, however, Professor E. S. Kennedy’s highly commendable article on ‘al-Bârënâ’ in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, II, 147-58. He bases al- Bârënâ’s theory of function on his ‘Treatise on Shadows’ already translated by him.

23. Cf. M. R. Siddiqi, ‘Mathematics and Astronomy’, A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif, II, 1280, and Juan Vernet, ‘Mathematics, Astronomy, Optics’, The Legacy of Islam ed. Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth, pp. 466-68. According to Sarton, al-Khaw«rizmâ may be called one of the founders of analysis or algebra as distinct from geometry’ and that his astronomical and trignometric tables were the first Muslim tables which contained, not simply the sine function, but also the tangent’ (op. cit., I, 563).

24. Cf. Al-Fauz al-Asghar, pp. 78-83; also Development of Metaphysics in Persia, p. 29 where an account of Ibn Maskawaih’s theory of evolution is given as summed up by Shiblâ Nu’m«ni in his ‘Ilm al-Kal«m, pp. 141-43.

25. This is a reference to the views of Khw«jah Muhammad P«rs«as contained in his short but valuable tractate on time and space: Ris«lah dar Zam«n-o-Mak«n, the only extant MS (6 folios) of which, perhaps, is the one listed by A. Monzavi in his Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts, Vol II, Part I, p. 800. I am greatly indebted to Q«zâ Mahmëd ul Haq of British Library, London, for the microfilm of this MS. This resulted as a preliminary in the publication of Urdu translation of Khw«jah Muhammad P«rs«’s Ris«lah dar Zam«n-o-Mak«n along with a brief account of his life and works by Dr Khw«ja Hamâd Yazd«nâ in Al-Ma‘«rif (Lahore), XVII/vii, July 1984), 31-42, 56. Cf. Nadhr S«birâ, Gh«yat al-Imk«n fi Ma’rifat al-Zam«n by Shaikh Mahmëd Ashnawâ, ‘Introduction’, p. ‘r’ where it is alleged that Khw«jah P«rs«made an extensive use of Ashnawâ’s said tractate on space and time, which is not very unlikely seeing the close resemblance between the two tractates; yet at places Khw«jah P«rs«’s treatment of the subject is sufistically more sophisticated.

26. Cf. Lecture II, pp. 60-61.

27. Misprinted as ‘weight’ in previous editions; see also the significant Quranic text repeated in verse 34:3.

28. Cf. Gh«yat al-Imk«n fi Dirayat al-Mak«n, ed. Rahâm Farmanâsh, pp. 16-17; English trans. A. H. Kamali, p. 13. On the authorship of this sufistic tractate on space and time, see note 34 in Lecture III.

29. Ibid., p. 17; English trans., p. 13.

30. Ibid., p. 23; English trans., p. 17.

31. Ibid., pp. 24-25; English trans., pp. 18-19.

32. Ibid., p. 25; English trans., p. 19.

33. Ibid., p. 17; English trans., pp. 20-21.

34. Ibid., pp. 27-28; English trans., p. 21.

35. Ibid., pp. 28-29; English trans., pp. 21-22.

36. Cf. Space, Time and Deity, II, 41; also R. Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, pp. 634-38, and article ‘S. Alexander’ in The Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. D. D. Runes, wherein it is made clear that the term ‘deity’ is not used by Alexander in any theological sense but in terms of his doctrine of emergent evolution: ‘The quality next above any given level (of evolution) is deity to the beings on that level’.

37. Alexander’s metaphor that time is mind of space is to be found in statements such as this: ‘It is that Time as a whole and in its parts bears to space as a whole and its corresponding parts a relation analogous to the relation of mind . . . or to put the matter shortly that Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time’ (Space, Time and Deity, II, 38). Allama Iqbal’s references to Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity, in the sufistic account of space and time in the present Lecture as also in his address earlier: ‘A Plea for Deeper Study of Muslim Scientists’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements, p. 142) coupled with his commendatory observations on Alexander’s work in his letter dated 24 January 1921 addressed to R. A. Nicholson (Letters of Iqbal, p. 141) are suggestive of Allama’s keen interest in the metaphysical views of Alexander.

Of all the British philosophers, contemporaries of Allama Iqbal, Alexander can be singled out for laying equal emphasis on space and time as central to all philosophy. ‘All the vital problems of philosophy’, says Alexander, ‘depend for their solution on the solution of the problem what Space and Time are and, more particularly, in how they are related to each other’. According to Allama Iqbal, ‘In [Muslim] . . . culture the problem of space and time becomes a question of life and death’ (p. 105). ‘Space and Time in Muslim Thought’ was the subject selected by Allama for his proposed Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford (1934-1935) (cf. Letters of Iqbal, pp.135-36 and 183; also Relics of Allama Iqbal: Catalogue, Letter II, 70 dated 27 May 1935 from Secretary, Rhodes Trust) which very unfortunately he could not deliver owing to his increasing ill health. A letter dated 6 May 1937 addressed to Dr Syed Zafarul Hasan of Aligarh Muslim University (author of the well-known Realism, 1928), discovered only recently, shows that Allama Iqbal had already gathered ‘material’ for his Rhodes Memorial Lectures; cf. Rafâal-Dân Ha`shimi`, ‘Allamah Iqbal ke Chand Ghair Mudawwan KhuÇëÇ’, Iqbal Review, XXIII/iv (January 1983), 41-43.

Attention may be called here also to an obviously unfinished two-page draft on ‘The Problem of Time in Muslim Philosophy’ in Allama’s own hand preserved in the Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore; cf. Dr Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal: Catalogue, I, 37.

38. Cf. Gh«yat al-Imk«n fi Dir«yat al-Mak«n, pp. 16-17; English trans., p. 13.

39. Ibid., p. 50; English trans., p. 36.

40. This is a reference to the Quranic verses: 6:6; 9:39; 17:16-17; 18:59; 21:11; 22:45; 36:31.

God’s judgment on nations, also called ‘judgment in history’, according to the Qur’«n is said to be more relentless than God’s judgment on individuals - in the latter case God is forgiving and compassionate. Nations are destroyed only for their transgression and evil doings. And when a nation perishes, its good members meet the same doom as its bad ones for the former failed to check the spread of evil (11:116), cf. F. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’«n, p. 53.

41. See also Quranic verses 15:5 and 24:43.

42. For very special circumstances under which a keen sense of history grew in Islam, see I. H. Qureshi, ‘Historiography’, A History of Muslim Philosophy, II, 1197-1203.

43. Abë ‘Abdullah Muhammad b. Ish«q (d. c. 150/767) has the distinction of being the first biographer of the Holy Prophet. His work Kit«b Sirat Rasël All«h (‘The Life of the Apostle of God’) has, however, been lost and is now known only through Ibn Hish«m’s recension of it.

44. Abë Ja‘far Muhammad b. Jarâr al-ñabarâ is one of the greatest Muslim historians. His remarkably accurate monumental history Kit«b Akhb«r al-Rusël wa’l-Mulëk (‘Annals of the Apostles and the Kings’), the first comprehensive work in the Arabic language, has been edited M. J. de Goeje and others in 15 volumes (Leiden, 1879-1901). Al-Tabarâ is equally well known for his commendable commentary on the Qur’«n: J«mi’ al-Bay«n ‘an T«wâl al-Qur’«n in 30 volumes - a primal work for the later commentators because of its earliest and largest collection of the exegetical traditions.

45. Abë’l-Hasan ‘Ali b. al-Husain b. ‘Alâ al-Mas’ëdi (d. c. 346/957), after al-Tabari`, is the next greatest historian in Islam - rightly named as the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs’. He inaugurated a new method in the writing of history: instead of grouping events around years (annalistic method) he grouped them around kings, dynasties and topics (topical method); a method adopted also by Ibn Khaldu`n. His historico-geographical work Murëj al-Dhahab wa’l-Ma‘«din al-Jauhar (‘Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems’) also deals with Persian, Roman and Jewish history and religion.

46. Reference is to the Quranic verses 4:1; 6:98; 7:189; 39:6.

47. See Robert Flint, History of the Philosophy of History, p. 86. Flint’s eulogy of Ibn Khaldën, expressive of his sentiment of a discovery of a genius, now stands more or less confirmed by the realistic assessments made of Ibn Khaldën by eminent scholars such as A. Toynbee, A Study of History, III, 322; Sarton, op. cit., III, 1262; Gaston Bouthoul in his Preface to de Slane’s Les Prolegomenes d’Ibn Khaldoun (second edition, Paris, 1934-38) and R. Brunschvig, La Berberie orientale sous les Hafsides, II, 391.

48. Cf. Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal, III, 246-58, also M. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, pp. 361-64.

49. Phenomenon of the alternation of day and night is spoken of in many verses of the Qur’«n such as 2:164; 3:190; 10:6; 23:80; 45:5.

50. Ibid., 55:29.

51. Cf. p. 107.

52. Cf. p. 106.

53. On the notion of time as held by Zeno, Plato, Heraclitus and Stoics, cf. A. J. Gunn, The Problem of Time, pp. 19-22.

54. Cf. O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, II, 189-323.

55. Cf. Lecture I, p. 3, Lecture III, p. 56 and p. 102.

56. Cf. Spengler, op. cit., II, 248-55.

57. Ibid., pp. 235, 240; cf. also note 33 in Lecture IV.

58. Ibid., p. 238.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., pp. 206-07.

61. Cf. Muqaddimah, Chapter III, section 51: ‘The Fatimid . . . ‘, trans. Rosenthal, II, 156-200. Ibn Khaldu`n recounts formally twenty-four traditions bearing upon the belief in Mahdi (none of which is from Bukh«râ or Muslim) and questions the authenticity of them all. Cf. also the article ‘al-Mahdi`’ in Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam and P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, pp. 439-49, for the religio-political background of the imam-mahdi idea.

Reference may also be made to Allama Iqbal’s letter dated 7 April 1932 to Muhammad Ahsan wherein, among other things, he states that, according to his firm belief (‘aqâdah), all traditions relating to mahdâ, masâhâyat and mujaddidâyat are the product of Persian and non-Arab imagination; and he adds that certainly they have nothing to do with the true spirit of the Qur’«n (Iqb«ln«mah, II, 231).

And finally it shall be rewarding to read this last paragraph in conjunction with Allama’s important notes on the back cover of his own copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West, facsimile of which is reproduced in Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, Plate No. 33.

Back to Lecture-V

Lecture VI: THE PRINCIPLE OF MOVEMENT IN THE STRUCTURE OF ISLAM

1. The Qur’«n maintains the divine origin of man by affirming that God breathed of His own spirit unto him as in verses 15:29; 32:9; and 38:72.

2. Constantine the Great was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. He was converted to Christianity, it is said, by seeing a luminous cross in the sky. By his celebrated Edict of Toleration in 313 he raised Christianity to equality with the public pagan cults in the Empire. For his attempt at the unification of Christianity, cf. Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, pp. 655-61, and The Cambridge Medieval History, vol.1, chapter i.

3. Flavius Claudius Julianus (331-363), nephew of Constantine, traditionally known as Julian the Apostate, ruled the Roman Empire from 361 to 363. Studying in Athens in 355, he frequented pagan Neoplatonist circles. As emperor, he at once proclaimed himself a pagan, restored freedom of worship for pagans and began a campaign against the orthodox church. Cf. Alice Gardner, Julian and the Last Struggle of Paganism against Christianity, and Will Durant, The Age of Faith, pp. 10-19.

4. See J. H. Denison, Emotion as the Basis of Civilization, pp. 267-68.

5. The principle of Divine Unity as embodied in the Quranic proclamation: l«il«ha illa-All«h: there is no God except All«h. It is a constant theme of the Qur’«n and is repeatedly mentioned as the basic principle not only of Islam but of every religion revealed by God.

6. Reference is to the Quranic verse 29:69. During the course of his conversation with one of his admirers, Allama Iqbal is reported to have made the following general observation with reference to this verse: ‘All efforts in the pursuit of sciences and for attainment of perfections and high goals in life which in one way or other are beneficial to humanity are man’s exerting in the way of Allah (Malfëz«t-i Iqb«l, ed. and annotated Dr Abë’l-Laith Siddâqâ, p. 67).

Translating this verse thus: ‘But as for those who strive hard in Our cause - We shall most certainly guide them onto paths that lead unto us’, Muhammad Asad adds in a footnote that the plural ‘used here is obviously meant to stress the fact - alluded to often in the Qur’«n - that there are many paths which lead to a cognizance (ma‘rifah) of God’ (The Message of the Qur’«n, p. 616, note 61).

7. Cf. Abë D«wëd, Aqdâya: 11; Tirmidhâ, AÁk«m: 3, and D«rimâ, Kit«b al-Sunan, I, 60; this hadâth is generally regarded as the very basis of Ijtih«d in Islam. On the view expressed by certain scholars that this hadâth is to be ranked as al-mursal, cf. ‘Abd al-Q«dir, Nazarah, ÿ mmah fi T«rikh al-Fiqh al-Isl«mâ, I, 70 and 210, and Sayyid Muhammad Yësuf Binorâas quoted by Dr Kh«lid Mas‘ëd, ‘Khutub«t-i Iqb«l men Ijtih«d ki Ta‘râf: Ijtih«d k« T«râkhâ Pas-i Manzar’, Fikr-o-Nazar, XV/vii-viii (Islamabad, Jan-Feb. 1978), 50-51. See also Ahmad Hasan (tr.), Sunan Abë D«wëd, III, 109, note 3034 based on Shams al-Haqq, ‘Aun al-Ma’bëd li-hall-i Mushkil«t Sunan Abë D«wëd, III, 331.

8. These three degrees of legislation in the language of the later jurists of Islam are: ijtih«d fi’l-shar’, ijtih«d fi’l-madhhab and ijtih«d fi’l-mas«’il; cf. Subhâ Mahmas«nâ, Falsafat al-Tashrâ’ fi’l-Islam, English trans. F. J. Ziadeh, p. 94, and N. P. Aghnides, Mohammeden Theories of Finance, pp. 121-22. For somewhat different schemes of gradation of the jurists (for example the one laid down by the Ottomon scholar and Shaikh al-Isla`m Kem«l P«shaza`deh (d. 940/1534) in his (Tabaq«t al-Fuqah«’) and minor differences in nomenclature in different schools of law (Hanafis, Sh«fâ‘â’s and others), cf. Z«hid al-Kautharâ, Husn al-Taq«dâfâ Sârat al-Im«m abâYësuf al-Q«îâ, pp. 24-25.

It is the possibilities anew of the first degree of Ijtih«d - complete authority in legislation - that Allama Iqbal proposes to consider in what he calls (and this is to be noted) ‘this paper’ rather than ‘this lecture’ as everywhere else in the present work. This is a manifest reference to a ‘paper on Ijtih«d’ that he read on 13 December 1924 at the annual session of Anjuman-i Him«yat-i Isl«m. Cf. M. Khalid Mas‘ëd, ‘Iqbal’s Lecture on Ijtih«d’, Iqbal Review, XIX/iii (October 1978), p. 8, quoting in English the announcement about this Lecture published in the Daily Zamând«r Lahore, 12 December 1924; and also S. M. Ikram, Modern Muslim India and the Birth of Pakistan, p. 183, note 19 where the worthy author tells us that he ‘was present at this meeting as a young student’.

Among Allama Iqbal’s letters discovered only recently are the four of them addressed to Professor M. Muhammad Shafi’ of University Oriental College, Lahore (later Chairman: Urdu Encyclopaedia of Islam). These letters dating from 13 March 1924 to 1 May 1924, reproduced with their facsimiles in Dr Rana M. N. Ehsan Elahie, ‘Iqbal on the Freedom of Ijtiha`d’, Oriental College Magazine (Allama Iqbal Centenary Number), LIII (1977), 295-300, throw light, among other things, on the authors and movements that Allama Iqbal thought it was necessary for him to study anew for the writing of what he calls in one of these letters a paper on the ‘freedom of Ijtih«d in Modern Islam’. A few months later when the courts were closed for summer vacation Allama Iqbal in his letter dated 13 August 1924 to M. Sa‘âd al-Dân Ja’farâ informed him that he was writing an elaborate paper on ‘The Idea of Ijtih«d, in the Law of Islam’ (cf. Aur«q-i Gumgashtah, ed. Rahâm Bakhsh Shaheen, p. 118). This is the paper which when finally written was read in the above-mentioned session of the Anjuman-i Àim«yat-i Isl«m in December 1924; the present Lecture, it is now generally believed, is a revised and enlarged form of this very paper.

9. Cf. M. Hanâf Nadvâ, ‘Mas’alah Khalq-i Qur’«n’ in ‘Aqliy«t-i Ibn Taimâyyah (Urdu), pp. 231-53, and A. J. Arberry, Revelation and Reason in Islam, pp. 23-27.

References to this hotly debated issue of the eternity or createdness of the Qur’«n are also to be found in Allama Iqbal’s private notes, for example those on the back cover of his own copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West (cf. Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, Plate No. 33) or his highly valuable one-page private study notes preserved in Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore (cf. Relics of Allama Iqbal: Catalogue, I, 26). It is, however, in one of his greatest poems ‘Iblâs ki Majlis-i Shër« (‘Satan’s Parliament’) included in the posthumous Armugh«n-i Hij«z that one is to find his final verdict on this baseless scholastic controversy:

Are the words of the Qur’«n created or uncreated?

In which belief does lie the salvation of the ummah?

Are the idols of L«t and Man«t chiselled by Muslim theology

Not sufficeint for the Muslims of today?

10. Cf. Ibn Qutaibah, Ta’wâ l Mukhtalif al-Àadâth, p.19.

11. Cf. Development of Metaphysics in Persia, p. 54, where it is stated that rationalism ‘tended to disintegrate the solidarity of the Islamic Church’; also W. M. Watt, ‘The Political Attitudes of the Mu‘tazilah’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1962), pp. 38-54.

12. Cf. Muhammad al-Khudari, T«râkh al-Tashrâ’ al-Isl«mâ, Urdu trans. ‘Abd al-Sal«m Nadvâ, p. 323; Ibn Qutaibah, Ma‘«rif, p. 217, and J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, p. 242. According to A. J. Arberry, Sufy«n al-Thaurâ’s school of jurisprudence survive for about two centuries; cf. Muslim Saints and Mystics, p. 129 translator’s prefatory remarks.

13. On the distinction of z«hir and b«tin, see Allama Iqbal’s article ‘Ilm-i Za`hir wa ‘Ilm-i Ba`tin (Anw«r-i Iqb«l, ed. B. A. Dar, pp. 268-77) and also the following passage from Allama Iqbal’s article captioned as ‘Self in the Light of Relativity’ (Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, ed. S. A. Vahid, pp. 113-14): ‘The mystic method has attracted some of the best minds in the history of mankind. Probably there is something in it. But I am inclined to think that it is detrimental to some of the equally important interests of life, and is prompted by a desire to escape from the arduous task of the conquest of matter through intellect. The surest way to realise the potentialities of the world is to associate with its shifting actualities. I believe that Empirical Science - association with the visible - is an indispensable stage in the life of contemplation. In the words of the Qur’«n, the Universe that confronts us is not ba`til. It has its uses, and the most important use of it is that the effort to overcome the obstruction offered by it sharpens our insight and prepared us for an insertion into what lies below the surface of phenomena.

14. The founder of Z«hirâ school of law was D«wëd b. ‘Alâb. Khalaf (c. 200-270/c. 815-884) who flourished in Baghdad; Ibn Haïm (384-456/994-1064) was its founder in Muslim Spain and its most illustrious representative in Islam. According to Goldziher, Ibn Hazm was the first to apply the principles of the Z«hirite school to dogmatics (The Z«hiris: Their Doctrine and Their History, p. 112); cf. also Goldziher’s articles: ‘D«wëd B. ‘Alâ B. Khalf’ and ‘Ibn Hazm’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, V, 406 b and VII, 71 a.

15. Cf. Serajul Haque, ‘Ibn Taimiyya’s Conception of Analogy and Consensus’, Islamic Culture, XVII (1943), 77-78; Ahmad Hasan, The Doctrine of Ijm«‘ in Islam, pp. 189-92, and H. Laoust, ‘Ibn Taymiyya’, Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition), III, 954.

16. Cf. D.’B. Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, p. 275.

17. Suyëtâ, Husn al-Mëh«darah 1, 183; also ‘Abd Muta’«l al-Sa’idâ, Al-Mujaddidën fi’l-Isl«m, pp. 8-12. Cf. also Allama Iqbal’s ‘Rejoinder to The Light’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 167-68) wherein, commenting on the tradition that mujaddids appear at the head of every century (Abë Dawëd, Mal«him: 1), he observed that the tradition ‘was probably popularised by Jal«lud-Dân Suyëti in his own interest and much importance cannot be attached to it.’

Reference may also be made here to Allama’s letter dated 7 April 1932 addressed to Muhammad Ahsan wherein, among other things, he observes that, according to his firm belief (‘aqâdh), all traditions relating to mujaddidiyat are the product of Persian and non-Arab imagination and they certainly are foreign to the true spirit of the Qur’«n (cf. Iqb«ln«mah, II, 231).

18. For Allama Iqbal’s statements issued from time to time in clarification on meanings and intentions of pan-Islamic movement or pan-Islamism see: Letters and Writings of Iqbal, pp. 55-57; Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 237; Guft«r-i Iqb«l, ed. M. Rafâq Afîal, pp. 177-79 and 226 - the earliest of these statements is contained in Allama’s letter dated 22 August 1910 to Editor: Paisa Akhb«r reproduced in Riaz Hussain, ‘1910 men Duny«-i Isl«m kü H«l«t’ (Political Conditions of the Islamic World in 1910), Iqbal Review, XIX/ii (July 1978), 88-90.

In three of these statements Allama Iqbal has approvingly referred to Professor E. G. Browne’s well-grounded views on ‘Pan-Islamism’, the earliest of which were published (s.v.) in Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, ed. F. Kirpatrick (Cambridge, 1904).

It may be added that Allama’s article ‘Political Thought in Islam’, Sociological Review, I (1908), 249-61 (reproduced in Speeches, Writings and Statements, pp. 107-21), was originally a lecture delivered by him in a meeting of the Pan-Islamic Society, London, founded by Abdullah Suhrawardy in 1903 - the Society also had its own journal: Pan-Islam. Incidentally, there is a mention of Allama’s six lectures on Islamic subjects in London by his biographers (cf. Abdullah Anwar Beg, The Poet of the East, p. 28, and Dr Abdus Sal«m Khurshâd, Sargudhasht-i Iqb«l, pp. 60-61) which is supported by Allama’s letter dated 10 February 1908 to Khwa`jah Hasan Niz«mâ, listing the ‘topics’ of four of these lectures as (i) ‘Islamic Mysticism’, (ii) ‘Influence of Muslim Thought on European Civilization’, (iii) ‘Muslim Democracy’, and (iv) ‘Islam and Reason’ (cf. Iqb«ln«mah, II, 358). Abdullah Anwar Beg, however, speaks of Allama’s extempore lecture on ‘Certain Aspects of Islam’ under the auspices of the Pan-Islamic Society, which, it is said, was reported verbatim in a number of leading newspapers the next day (ibid.).

19. Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahh«b’s date of birth is now more generally given as 1115/1703; cf., however, Khair al-Dân al-Zikriklâ, Al-A’l«m, VII, 138 (note) and A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif, II, 1446, in support of placing it in 1111/1700.

It is significant to note that whenever Allama Iqbal thought of modernist movements in Islam, he traced them back to the movement of Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahh«b cf. Letters and Writings of Iqbal, pp. 82 and 93. In his valuable article ‘Islam and Ahmadism’ Allama Iqbal observes: ‘Syed Ahmad Khan in India, Syed Jamal-ud-Din Afghani in Afghanistan and Mufti Alam Jan in Russia. These men were probably inspired by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab who was born in Nejd in 1700, the founder of the so-called Wahabi movement which may fitly be described as the first throb of life in modern Islam’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements, p. 190). Again, in his letter dated 7 April 1932 to Muhammad Ahsan, Allama Iqbal, explaining the pre-eminent position of Jam«l al-Dân Afgh«nâ in modern Islam, wrote: ‘The future historian of the Muslims of Egypt, Iran, Turkey and India will first of all mention the name of ‘Abd al-Wahh«b Najadi and then of Jam«l al-Dân Afgh«nâ’ (cf. Iqb«ln«mah, II, 231).

20. Cf. article ‘Ibn Tëmart’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition), III, 958-60, also in Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam and R. Le Tourneau, The Almohad Movement in North Africa in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, chapter 4.

21. This is a clear reference to the well-known saying of the Prophet: innamal-a’m«lu bi’nniyy«ti, i.e. ‘Actions shall be judged only by intentions’. It is to be noted that this Áadâth of great moral and spiritual import has been quoted by Bukh«râ in seven places and it is with this that he opens his Al-J«mâ al-SaÁiÁ.

22. For this Áadâth worded: ‘al-arÁu kulluh«masjid-an’, see Tirmidhâ, Sal«t: 119; Nas«â, Ghusl: 26; Mas«jid: 3 and 42; Ibn M«jah, Tah«rah: 90, and D«rimâ, Siyar: 28 and Sal«t: 111. This superb saying of the Prophet also found expression in Allama’s verse, viz. Kulliy«t-i Iqb«l (F«risâ), Rumëz-i Bekhudâ, p. 114, v. 3, and Pas Chih B«yad Kard, p. 817, v. 8:

Through the bounty of the ruler of our faith,
the entire earth became our mosque.
The King of the Faith said to the Muslims:
The whole earth is my mosque’ (trans. B. A. Dar).

23. Cf. The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal, I, 388-92.

24. For the Khawa`rij’s view of the Caliphate, see Allama Iqbal’s article ‘Political Thought in Islam’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 119-20); also W. Thomson, ‘Kharijitism and the Kharijites’, Macdonald Presentation Volume, pp. 371-89, and E. Tyan, Institutions du droit public musulman, ii, 546-61.

25. Cf. F. A. Tansel (ed), Ziya Gö kalp kü lliyati ‘i: Sü rler ve halk masallar, p. 129. On Allama’s translation of the passages from Ziya G’kalp’s kulliyati, Dr Annemarie Schimmel observes: ‘Iqbal did not know Turkish, has studied his (Ziya Gö kalp’s) work through the German translation of August Fischer, and it is of interest to see how he (Iqbal) sometimes changes or omits some words of the translation when reproducing the verses in the Lecture’ (Gabriel’s Wing, p. 242).

It may be added that these changes of omissions are perhaps more due to August Fischer’s German translation as given in his Aus der religiö sen Reformbewegung in der Tü rkei (Religious Reform Movement in Turkey) than to Allama. The term ‘esri’, for example, has been used by Ziya Gö kalp for ‘secular’ and not for ‘modern’ as Fischer has put it. Again, a line from the original Turkish text is missing in the present passage, but this is so in the German translation.

For this comparative study of the German and English translations of passages from Gö kalp’s kü lliyati, I am very much indebted to Professor S. Qudratullah Fatimi, formerly Director: Regional Cooperation for Development, Islamabad.

26. This is a reference to the Quranic verse 49:13.

27. Cf. Ziya Gö kalp kü lliyati, p. 112. According to the Turkish original, the second sentence in this passage should more fittingly have begun with ‘in this period’ rather than with ‘in every period’ as rendered by A. Fischer. Again the next, i.e. the third sentence, may be said to be not so very close to the text; yet it is quite faithful to its German version.

28. Cf. ibid., p. 113; also Uriel Heyd, Foundation of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gö kalp, pp. 102-03, and Allama Iqbal’s statement ‘On the Introduction of Turkish Prayers by Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha’ published in the Weekly Light (Lahore), 16 February 1932, reproduced in Rahim Bakhsh Shaheen (ed.), Memontos of Iqbal, pp. 59-60.

29. On Ibn Tumart’s innovation of introducing the call to prayer in the Berber language, cf. Ibn Abâ Zar’, Raud al-Qirt«s, Fr. trans. A. Beaumier, Histoire des souverains du Magreb, p. 250; I. Goldziher, ‘Materalien zur Kenntniss der Almohadenbewegung in Nordafrika’, ZDMG, XLI (1887), 71, and D. B. Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, p. 249. This practice, according to Ahmad b. Kh«lid al-Sal«wâ, was stopped and call to prayer in Arabic restored by official orders in 621/1224; cf. his Al-Istiqs«li Akhb«r Duwal al-Maghrib’l-Aqs«, II, 212.

30. Cf. Ziya Gö kalp kü lliyati, p. 133. The word ‘sun’ in the second sentence of this passage stands for Gunum in Turkish which, we are told, could as well be translated as ‘day’; some allowance, however, is to be made for translation of poetical symbols from one language into another.

31. Cf. ibid., p. 161. It is interesting to note how very close is late Professor H. A. R. Gibb’s translation of this passage as well as of the one preceding it (Modern Trends in Islam, pp. 91-92), to that of Allama’s even though his first reference is to the French version of them in F. Ziyaeddin Fahri’s Ziya Gö kalp: sa vie et sa sociologie, p. 240.

32. Cf. Bukh«râ, I’tis«m: 26; ‘Ilm: 39; Jan«’iz: 32; Marad«: 17, and Muslim, Jan«’iz: 23 and Wasâyyah: 22; see also last in Sahih Muslim, English translation by A. H. Siddiqi`, III 870, note 2077.

33. For further elucidation of Allama’s observations on Luther and his movement here as also in a passage in his ‘Statement on Islam and Nationalism in Reply to a Statement of Maulana Husain Ahmad’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 254), see his most famous and historical ‘All-India Muslim League Presidential Address of 29 December 1930’, ibid., pp. 4-5. Cf. also the closing passages of the article: ‘Reformation’ in An Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Vergilius Ferm, p. 642.

34. Cf. Subhâ Mahmas«nâ, Falsafah-i Sharâ‘at-i Isl«m, Urdu trans. M. Ahmad Ridvâ, pp. 70-83.

35. This acute observation about the development of legal reasoning in Islam from the deductive to the inductive attitude in interpretation is further elaborated by Allama Iqbal on pp. 140-41. It may be worthwhile to critically examine in the light of this observation the attempts made by some of the well-known Western writers on Islamic law to analytically trace the historical development of legal theory and practice in early Islam, viz. N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, chapters 3-5; J. Schacht, Introduction to Islamic Law, chapters 7-9 and his earlier pioneer work: Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, by General Index especially under ‘Medinese and ‘Iraqians’.

36. This is a reference to a passage in Lecture I, p. 7.

37. Cf. M. V. Merchant, A Book of Quranic Laws, chapters v-vii.

38. Cf. Briefe ü ber Religion, pp. 72 and 81. The passages translated here are as under:

"Das Urchristentum legte keinen Wert auf die Erhaltung von Staat Recht, Organisation, Produktion. Es denkt einfach nicht ü ber die Bedingungen der Existenz der menschlichen Gesellschaft nach."

Also entweder man wagt es, staatslos sein zu wollen, man wirft sich der Anarchie freiwillig in die arme, oder man entschliesst sich, neben seinem religiö sen Bekenntnis ein politisches Bekenntnis zu haben.

Joseph Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919), a passage from whose very widely read Briefe ü ber Religion (‘Letters on Religion’) has been quoted above in Lecture III, pp. 64-65, was a German Protestant theologian, socialist politician, political journalist and a champion of Mitteleuropa plan. He was one of the founders and the first president of German National Socialist Party (1896) which both in its name and in its policy of according great importance to the agricultural and working classes in the development of the State adumbrated Hitler’s Nazi Party (1920). His Mitteleuropa published in 1915 (English translation by C. M. Meredith in 1916) stirred up considerable discussion during World War I as it revived, under the impulse of Pan-Germanism, the idea of a Central European Confederation including Turkey and the Balkan States under Germany’s cultural and economic control. It also contemplated the expansion of the Berlin-Baghdad railway into a grandiose scheme of empire extending from Antwerp in Belgium to the Persian Gulf.

Except for the year 1912-13, Naumann was the member of Reichstag (German Parliament) from 1907 to 1919. Shortly before his death, he was elected as the leader of Democratic Party. Naumann known for his wide learning, acumen and personal integrity was very influential with German liberal intellectuals of his day. For the life and works of Naumann, cf. the two articles: ‘Naumann, Friedrich’ and ‘National Socialism, German’ by Theodor Heuss in the Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences, XI, 310 and 225a; also The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Micropaedia), VIII, 561. For some information given in the above note I am deeply indebted to the Dutch scholar the Reverend Dr Jan Slomp and his younger colleague Mr Harry Mintjes. Mr Mintjes took all the trouble to find out what he said was the oldest available edition of Briefe ü ber Religion (Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1916, sixth edition) by making a search for it in all the libraries of Amsterdam. Dr Jan Slamp was kind enough to mark the passages in Briefe quoted by Allama Iqbal in English and mail these to me for the benefit of all Iqbalian scholars.

39. Hence, The Introduction of Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act or Indian Act VIII of 1939. Cf. Maul«n« Ashraf ‘Alâ Th«nawâ, Al-Hilat al-N«jizah lil-Halâlat al-’ÿjizah, p. 99 and A. A. A. Fyzee, Outlines of Muhammadan Law, pp. 153-61.

40. See Al-Muw«fiq«t, II, 4: also Ghaz«lâ, Al-Mustasf«, 1, 140.

41. Cf. al-Marghin«nâ, Al-Hid«yah, II, Kit«b al-Nik«h, p. 328; English trans. The Hedaya or Guide by C. Hamilton, p. 66.

42. Cf. Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 194, where, while making an appraisal of Ataturk’s ‘supposed or real innovations’, Allama Iqbal observes: ‘The adoption of the Swiss code with its rule of inheritance is certainly a serious error . . . . The joy of emancipation from the fetters of a long-standing priest-craft sometimes derives a people to untried courses of action. But Turkey as well as the rest of the world of Islam has yet to realize the hitherto unrevealed economic aspects of the Islamic law of inheritance which von Kremer describes as the supremely original branch of Muslim law.’ For some recent accounts of the ‘economic significance of the Quranic rule of inheritance’, cf. M. A. Mannan, Islamic Economics, pp. 176-86 and Shaikh Mahmud Ahmad, Economics of Islam, pp. 154-58.

43. Marriage has been named in the Qur’«n as mâth«q-an ghalâz-an, i.e. a strong covenant (4:21).

44. Cf. M. V. Merchant, op. cit., pp. 179-86.

45. Cf. I. Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, English trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, Muslim Studies, II, 18f. This is the view held also by some other orientalists such as D. S. Margoliouth, The Early Development of Mohammedanism, pp. 79-89, and H. Lammens, Islam: Beliefs and Institutions, pp. 65-81.

46. This is the closing paragraph of chapter III of Mohammedan Theories of Finance: With an Introduction to Mohammedan Law and a Bibliography by Nicolas P. Aghnides published by Columbia University (New York) in 1916 as one of its Studies in History, Economics and Public Law. A copy of this work as reported by Dr M. ‘Abdulla`h Chaghata`’i was sent to Allama Iqbal by Chaudhry Rahmat ‘Ali`Kha`n (President: American Muslim Association) from the United States and was presented to him on the conclusion of the thirty-eighth annual session of Anjuman-i Àim«yat-i Isl«m (Lahore), i.e. on 31 March 1923 or soon after. Dr Chaghat«‘âs essay: ‘Khutuba`t-i Madra`s ka Pas-i Manzar’ in his Iqb«l kâ Âuhbat Men and the section: ‘Six Lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam’ with useful notes in Dr. Rafâ al-Dân H«shimâ’s TaÄ«nâf-i Iqb«l k« TaÁqâqâ-o Tauîâhâ MuÇ«la’ah throw light on the immediate impact that Aghnides’s book had on Allama’s mind. It seems that Aghnides’s book did interest Allama and did play some part in urging him to seek and study some of the outstanding works on Usël al-Fiqh such as those by ÿmidâ, Sh«Çibâ, Sh«h Walâ All«h, Shauk«nâ, and others. This is evident from a number of Allama’s letters to Sayyid Sulaim«n Nadvâas also from his letters from 13 March 1924 to 1 May 1924 to Professor Maulavâ M. Shafâ’ [Oriental College Magazine, LIII (1977), 295-300]. It is to be noted that besides a pointed reference to a highly provocative view of Ijm«’ alluded to by Aghnides, three passages from part I of Mohammedan Theories of Finance are included in the last section of the present Lecture, which in this way may be said to be next only to the poems of Ziya Gö kalp exquisitely translated from Fischer’s German version of them.

47. This is remarkable though admittedly a summarized English version of the following quite significant passage from Sh«h Walâ All«h’s magnum opus Hujjat All«h al-B«lighah (I,118):

This is the passage quoted also in Shiblâ Nëm«nâ’s Al-Kal«m (pp. 114-15), a pointed reference to which is made in Allama Iqbal’s letter dated 22 September 1929 addressed to Sayyid Sulaim«n Nadvâ. There are in fact three more letters to Sayyid Sulaim«n Nadvâ in September 1929, which all show Allama’s keen interest in and preceptive study of Hujjat All«h al-B«lighah at the time of his final drafting of the present Lecture (cf. Iqb«ln«mah, pp. 160-63).

From the study of these letters it appears that Allama Iqbal in his interpretation of at least the above passage from Àujjat All«h al-B«ligah was much closer to Shiblâ Nëm«nâ than to Sayyid Sulaimân Nadvâ.

It is to be noted that Allama Iqbal was always keen to seek and study the works of Sha`h WalâAll«h, whom he considered to be ‘the first Muslim who felt the urge of a new spirit in him’ (Lecture IV, p. 78). Some of these works have been referred to by titles in Allama’s more than 1200 letters and it is noteworthy that their number exceeds that of the works of any other great Muslim thinker; Ghazz«lâ, Fakhr al-Dân R«zâ, Jal«l al-Dân Rumâ, Ibn Taimiyyah, Ibn Qayyim; Sadr al-Dân Shâr«zâ, or any other. In his letter dated 23 September 1936 to Maulavi Ahmad Rid« Bijnàrâ, Allama reports that he had not received his copies of Sh«h WalâAll«h’s Al-Khair al-Kathâr and Tafhâm«t supposed to have been dispatched to him through some dealer in Lahore. He also expresses in this letter his keen desire to have the services on suitable terms of some competent Muslim scholar, well-versed in Islamic jurisprudence and very well-read in the works of Sh«h Walâ All«h.

48. Cf. Aghnides, op. cit., p. 91. This is the statement which, according to Dr ‘Abdullah Chaghat«‘â (op. cit., pp. 300-04) and Dr. Rafâ al-Dân H«shimâ occasioned Allama Iqbal’s fiqhi discussions with a number of renowned religious scholars which finally led to his writing a paper on Ijtih«d in 1924; the present Lecture may be said to be only a developed form of that paper. On the impossible question of Ijm«’s repealing the Qur’«n one is to note Allama’s two inquiring letters to Sayyid Sulaim«n Nadvâ and more importantly a letter also to Maul«n« Abul Kal«m Az«d (Iqb«ln«mah, 1, 131-35).

49. ÿmidâ, Ihk«m fi Usël al-Ahk«m, 1, 373.

50. Shauk«nâ, Irsh«d al-Fuhël, pp. 65-72.

51. Mu’awwidhat«n are the last two sërahs of the Qur’«n, i.e. 113 and 114; they are called so because they teach man how to seek refuge with God and betake himself to His protection.

52. This is summing up of Karkhi`’s somewhat longer statement as quoted by Aghnides, op. cit., p. 106; cf. also Sarakhsâ, Usul «l-Sarakhsâ, II, 105.

53. For Allama’s views on Persian constitutional theory see his articles: ‘Political Thought in Islam’ and ‘Islam and Ahmadism’, Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 118-19 and 195.

54. For Allama’s practical guidelines to reform the present system of legal education in the modern Muslim world especially in the subcontinent, see his very valuable letter dated 4 June 1925 to Sahibzadah Aftab Ahmad Khan (Letters of Iqbal, p. 155); also the last paragraph of his Presidential Address at the All-India Muslim Conference on 21 March 1932 (Speeches, Writings and Statements, p. 43).

55. For Sh«fâ’â’s ‘identification’ of Qiy«s and Ijtih«d, cf. M. Khadduri, Islamic Jurisprudence Sh«fi’âs Ris«lah, p. 288 and J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, pp. 127-28.

56. Cf. Shauk«nâ, op. cit., p. 199; ÿmidâ, op. cit., IV, 42ff; and Mahmas«nâ, op. cit., Urdu trans. M. A. Ridvâ, p. 188.

57. Cf. Mohammedan Theories of Finance, p. 125. This is the observation, in fact, of the Sh«fi’âjurist Badr al-Dân Muhammad b. Bah«dur b. ‘Abd All«h al-Zarkashâ of eighth century and not of Sarkashâof tenth century of the Hijrah, as it got printed in the previous editions of the present work (including the one by Oxford University Press in 1934). ‘Sarkashâ’ is a palpable misprint for Zarkashâ’; Aghnides in the above-cited work spells it ‘Zarkashi’ but places him in the tenth century of the Hijrah. None of the Zarkashâs, however, given in the well-known biographical dictionaries, say, ‘Umar Rid« Kahhalah’s fifteen-volume Mu‘jam al-Mu‘allifân (V, 181; IX, 121; X, 22, 205, 239 and XI, 273) is reported to have belonged to tenth century - except, of course, Muhammad b. Ibra`hi`m b. Lu’lu’ al-Zarkashâ mentioned in VIII, 214 who is said to be still living after 882/1477 or as al-Ziriklâ puts it to have died sometime after 932/1526 (op. cit., V, 302); but this Zarkashâ, though he may be said to have made name as an historian of the Muwahhids and the Hafasids, was no jurist.

It is to be noted that the passage on the future prospects of Ijtih«d quoted by Allama Iqbal is only a more significant part of Zarkashâ’s somewhat longer statement which Aghnides gives as under:

If they [i.e., the people entertaining this belief] are thinking of their contemporaries, it is a fact that they have had contemporaries like al-Qaff«l, al-Ghazz«lâ, al-Razâ, al-R«fi’â, and others, all of whom have been full mujtahids, and if they mean by it that their contemporaries are not endowed and blessed by God with the same perfection, intellectual ability and power, or understanding, it is absurd and a sign of crass ignorance; finally, if they mean that the previous writers had more facilities, while the later writers has more difficulties, in their way; it is again nonsense, for it does not require much understanding to see that Ijtih«d for the later doctors (muta’akhirën) is easier than for the earlier doctors. Indeed the commentaries on the Koran and the sunnah have been compiled and multiplied to such an extent that the mujtahid of today has more material for interpretation than he needs.’

This statement on ijtih«d which Aghnides ascribes clearly to Zarkashâ, albeit of the tenth century of Hijrah, is in fact, as may be seen, translation of the following passage from Shauk«nâ’s Irsh«d al-Fuhël (p. 223):

From the study of the section of Irsh«d al-Fuhël dealing with the ‘possibility of there being a period of time without a mujtahid, it becomes abundantly clear that the views embodied in the above passage are those of the Sh«fi’â jurist Badr al-Dân Zarkashâ of the eighth century of Hijrah and not of Sarkashâ, nor of Zarkashâof the tenth century. For an account of the life and works of Badr al-Dân Zarkashâ, cf. Muhammad Abë’l-Fadl al-Rahâm’s ‘introduction’ to Zarkashâ’s well-known, Al-Burh«n fi ‘ulëm al-Qur’«n.

It may be added that the Persian translator of the present work Mr. Ahmad ÿr«m considers ‘Sarkashâ’ to be a misprint for ‘Sarakhsâ’, i.e. the Hanafâ jurist Shams al-ÿimmah Abë Bakr Muhammad b. Abâ Sahl al-Sarakhsâ, the author of the well-known thirty-volume al-Mabsët, who died in near about 483/1090. Referring to ‘many errors and flaws’ that have unfortunately crept into the Lahore edition of the present work, Mr. ÿr«m is inclined to think that ‘tenth century’ is another misprint for ‘fifth century’ (cf. Ihy«-i Fikr-i Dânâ dar Isl«m, pp. 202-03, note).

Ahmad ÿr«m admittedly takes his clue from a line in Madame Eva Meyerovitch’s French translation: Reconstruire la pensee religieus de l’Islam (p.192) and perhaps also from the Urdu translation: Tashkâl-i Jadâd Il«hiy«t-i Isl«mâyah (p. 274) by the late Syed Nadhir Niy«zâ who corrects the name (Sarakhsâ) but not the date. This is, however, better than the Arabic translator who retains both the misprints without any comments (cf. ‘Abb«s Mahmëd, Tajdâd al-Tafkâr al-Dânâfi’l-Isl«m, p. 206).

58. Cf. article ‘Turkey’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, (1953) XXII, 606-08. The French writer alluded to by Allama Iqbal is Andre Servier whose work L’Islam et la psychologie da Musulman translated under the intriguing title Islam and the Psychology of a Musulman by A. S. Moss Blandell (London, 1924) aroused the curiosity of many. It is in the last chapter of his work dealing with French foreign policy that Servier makes some observations on Turkey such as the following:

(a) ‘The Turks constitute an element of balance . . . they form a buffer State between Europe and the Asiatic ferment’ (p. 267). (Italics mine.)

(b) ‘Our interests, therefore, make it our duty to protect them, to maintain them as an element of equilibrium in the Musulman World’ (p. 268). (Italics mine.)

59. This may profitably be compared with the following passage from Allama’s famous ‘Statement on Islam and Nationalism in Reply to a Statement of Maulana Husain Ahmad’: ‘The history of man is an infinite process of mutual conflicts, sanguine battles and civil wars. In these circumstances can we have among mankind a constitution, the social life of which is based upon peace and security? The Quran’s answer is: Yes, provided man takes for his ideal the propagation of the Unity of God in the thoughts and actions of mankind. The search for such an ideal and its maintenance is no miracle of political manoeuvring: it is a peculiar greatness of the Holy Prophet that the self-invented distinctions and superiority complexes of the nations of the world are destroyed and there comes into being a community which can be styled ummat-am muslimat-al laka (a community submissive to Thee, 2:128) and to whose thoughts and actions the divine dictate shuhada’a ‘al-an nas-i (a community that bears witness to the truth before all mankind, 2:143) justly applies’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 262-63).

Back to Lecture-VI

Lecture VII: IS RELIGION POSSIBLE?

Lecture delivered in a meeting of the fifty-fourth session of the Aristotelian Society, London, held on 5 December 1932 with Professor J. Macmurray in the chair, followed by a discussion by Professor Macmurray and Sir Francis Younghusband - cf. ‘Abstract of the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for the Fifty-Fourth Session’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series), XXXIII (1933), 341.

The Lecture was published in the said Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, pp. 47-64, as well as in The Muslim Revival (Lahore), I/iv (Dec. 1932), 329-49.

1. This is a reference to Allama Iqbal’s own father, who was a devout Sufâ; cf. S. Sulaim«n Nadvâ, Sair-i Afgh«nist«n, p. 179; also S. Nadhâr Niy«zâ, Iqb«l ke Àëîur, pp. 60-61. This bold but religiously most significant statement, I personally feel, is Allama’s own; it has been attributed here to an unnamed ‘Muslim Sufi’ perhaps only to make it more presentable to the orthodoxy; see M. Saeed Sheikh, ‘Philosophy of Man’, Iqbal Review, XIX/i (April-June 1988), 13-16, found expression in Allama’s verse, viz. Kulliy«t-i Iqb«l (Urdë), B«l-i Jibrâl, Pt. II, Ghazal 60, v. 4:

Unless the Book’s each verse and part
Be revealed unto your heart,
Interpreters, though much profound,
Its subtle points cannot expound.

2. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, section vi, pp. 57-58; also Kemp Smith’s Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique’, pp. 68-70. Metaphysics, if it means knowledge of the ‘transcendent’, or of things-in-themselves, was rejected by Kant as dogmatic, because it does not begin with a critical examination of human capacity for such knowledge. Reference may here be made to one of the very significant jottings by Allama Iqbal on the closing back page of his own copy of Carl Rahn’s Science and the Religious Life (London, 1928), viz. ‘Is religion possible? Kant’s problem’; cf. Muhammad Siddiq, Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, pp. 21-22 and Plate No. 7.

3. The ‘principle of indeterminacy’ was so re-christened by A. S. Eddington in his Nature of the Physical World, p. 220. Now more often known as ‘principle of uncertainty’ or ‘uncertainty principle’, it was ‘announced’ by the physicist philosopher Heisenberg in Zeitschrift fü r Physik, XLIII (1927), 172-98. Broadly speaking, the principle states that there is an inherent uncertainty in describing sub-microscopic process. For instance, if the position of an electron is determined, there remains a measure of uncertainty about its momentum. As in a complete casual description of a system both the properties must needs be accurately determined, many physicists and philosophers took this ‘uncertainty’ to mean that the principle of causality had been overthrown.

4. Cf. Fusës al-Hikam (ed. ‘Afâfâ), I, 108, II, 11-12 - the words of ‘the great Muslim Sufâ philosopher’ are: al-khalqu ma’qël-un w’al-Haqqu mahsës-un mashhëd-un. It is noteworthy that this profound mystical observation is to be found in one of Allama Iqbal’s verses composed as early as 1903; cf. B«qây«t-i Iqbal, p. 146, v. 2.

5. For the Sufi`doctrine of plurality of time and space stated in Lecture III, pp. 60-61 and Lecture V, pp. 107-10 on the basis of the then a rare Persian MS: Gh«yat al-Imk«n fi Dir«yat al-Mak«n (The Extent of Possibility in the Science of Space) ascribed by Allama Iqbal to the eminent Sufâ poet (Fakhr al-Dân) ‘Ir«qâ, see Lecture III, note 34; cf. also Allama’s letter to Dr M. ‘Abdull«h Chaghat«‘â in Iqbalnamah, II, 334.

6. Cf. John Passamore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 98. In fact both these pronouncements on metaphysics are to be found in Hans Vaihinger’s work referred to in the next note. Vaihinger in his chapter on Nietzsche tells us that ‘Lange’s theory of metaphysics as a justified form of ‘poetry’ made a deep impression upon Nietzsche’ (p. 341) and he also alludes to Nietzsche’s patiently asking himself: ‘Why cannot we learn to look upon metaphysics and religion as the legitimate play of grown ups?’ (p. 346, note). Both these passages are underlined in Allama’s personal copy of Vaihinger’s work (cf. M. Siddiq, op. cit., p. 6).

7. This is a reference to the title: The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1924), translation of Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911), a work of the German Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933). The ‘as if’ philosophy known as fictionism is an extreme form of James’s pragmatism or Dewey’s instrumentalism; it, however, traces its descent from Kant through F. A. Lange and Schopenhauer. It holds that as thought was originally an aid and instrument in struggle for existence it still is incapable of dealing with purely theoretical problems. Basic concepts and principles of natural sciences, economic and political theory, jurisprudence, ethics, etc., are merely convenient fictions devised by the human mind for practical purposes - practical life and intuition, in fact, are higher than speculative thought.

One meets quite a few observations bearing on Vaihinger’s doctrine in Allama’s writings, for example, the following passage in ‘Note on Nietzsche’: ‘According to Nietzsche the ‘I’ is a fiction. It is true that looked at from a purely intellectual point of view this conclusion is inevitable; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ends in the conclusion that God, immoratality and freedom are mere fictions though useful for practical purposes. Nietzsche only follows Kant in this conclusion’ (Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, ed. S. A. Vahid, pp. 239-40).

Also in ‘McTaggart’s Philosophy’: ‘Not William James but Kant was the real founder of modern pragmatism’ (ibid., p. 119).

8. For a comparative study of Indian, Greek, Muslim and modern theories of atomism, cf. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, 197-210, and for a more recent account of modern atomism Niels Bohr’s article: ‘Atom’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, II, 641-47.

9. A. Eddington, The Nature of Physical World, chapter: ‘Science and Mysticism’, p. 323.

10. N«nikr«m Vasanmal Thad«nâ The Garden of the East, pp. 63-64. Cf. Mathnawi, iii, 3901-06, 3912-14, for Rëmâ’s inimitable lines on the theme of ‘biological future of man’ which Thad«nâ has presented here in a condensed form. Thada`ni`in the Preface to his book has made it clear that ‘The poems . . . are not translations of renderings . . .; they are rather intended to recreate the spirit and idea of each master . . . .’

11. Cf. The Joyful Wisdom, Book V, where Nietzsche denounces ‘nationalism and race-hatred (as) a scabies of the heart and blood poisoning’, also The Twilight of the Idols, chapter viii where he pronounces nationalism to be ‘the strongest force against culture’.

12. Cf. pp. 145-46.

13. Reference here is to the misguided observations of the orientalists to be found in such works as A. Sprenger, Des Leben und die Lehre des Mohammed (1861), 1, 207; D.S. Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (1905), p. 46; R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907), pp. 147-48; and D. B. Macdonald, Religious Attitude and life in Islam (1909), p. 46.

14. C. Jung, Contribution to Analytical Psychology, p. 225.

15. Idem, Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. 42-43.

16. Cf. Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindâ, Maktëb«t-i Rabb«nâ, vol. I, Letter 253, also Letters 34, 257 and 260. In all these letters there is listing of the five stations, viz. Qalb (the ‘heart’), Rëh (the ‘spirit’), Sirr (the ‘inner’), Khafiy (the ‘hidden’), and Akhf«; together they have also been named as in Letter 34 Jaw«hir-i Khamsah-i ÿlam-i Amr (‘Five Essences of the Realm of the Spirit’). Cf. F. Rahman, Selected Letters of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, chapter iii (pp. 54-55).

17. Cf. Stray Reflections, ed. Dr Javid Iqbal, p. 42, where Nietzsche has been named as a ‘great prophet of aristocracy’; also article: ‘Muslim Democracy’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 123-24), where a critical notice of Nietzsche’s ‘Aristocracy of Supremen’ ends up in a very significant rhetorical question: ‘Is not, then, the democracy of early Islam an experimental refutation of the ideas of Nietzsche?’

18. Cf. Kulliy«t-i Iqb«l (F«risâ), J«vâd N«mah, p. 741, vv. 4 and 3.

Compare this with Allama Iqbal’s pronouncement on Nietzsche in his highly valuable article: ‘McTaggart’s Philosophy’:

A more serious thing happened to poor Nietzsche, whose peculiar intellectual environment led him to think that his vision of the Ultimate Ego could be realized in a world of space and time. What grows only out of the inner depths of the heart of man, he proposed to create by an artificial biological experiment’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 150).

Again in ‘Note on Nietzsche’: ‘Nietzsche’s Supreman is a biological product. The Islamic perfect man is the product of moral and spiritual forces’ (Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, ed. S. A. Vahid, p. 242).

19. Allama Iqbal wished that Nietzsche were born in the times of Shaikh Ahmad of Sirhind to receive spiritual light from him see Kulliy«t-i Iqb«l (F«risâ), J«vâd N«mah, p. 741, v. 10:

Would that he had lived in Ahmad’s time
so that he might have attained eternal joy. (trans. Arberry)

And he himself could be Nietzsche’s spiritual mentor, were he be in Iqbal’s times; see Kulliy«t-i Iqb«l (Urdë), B«l-i Jibrâl, Pt. II, Ghazal 33, v. 5.

If that Frankish Sage
Were present in this age

Him Iqbal would teach
God’s high place and reach (trans. S. Akbar Ali Shah).

20. Cf. A. Schimmel, ‘Some Thoughts about Future Studies of Iqbal,’ Iqbal, XXIV/iv (1977), 4.

21. Cf. pp. 145-46.

22. Cf. Bertrand Russell, ‘Relativity: Philosophical Consequences’, Section: ‘Force and Gravitation’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, XIX, 99c.

23. Cf. Kulliy«t-i Iqb«l (F«risâ), J«vâd N«mah, p. 607, vv. 10-15 and p. 608, vv. 1-7.

Commenting on Allama’s translation of this passage A. J. Arberry in the Introduction to his translation of J«vâd Nam«h observes that this ‘affords a very fair example of how close and how remote Iqbal was prepared to make his own version of himself’. And he adds that for comparison, in addition to the translation of this passage offered by him, the reader may like to consider its verse-paraphrase by Shaikh Mahmud Ahmad in Pilgrimage of Eternity, II, 230-256.

Back to Lecture-VII

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