Allama Iqbal on Reason, Revelation & Islam

Indexed: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. In this series we are engaging with one of the most profound works of modern Islamic thought, Allama Iqbal's The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. To do justice to its depth and richness, we have recorded four podcasts covering the major themes of the book. And inshallah, we will continue to do our best to present thoughtful, meaningful, and high-quality content for our audience. This episode is just an introduction to the series.

[00:00:25]In future episodes, we will throw a scholarly light on Dr. Iqbal's groundbreaking book, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, exploring its philosophical arguments, Quranic foundations, and enduring relevance for Muslim intellectual life today. For this episode, we are honored to host Professor Mufti Mudassir, Head of Department of English at the University of Kashmir. He is widely respected for his academic insight, scholarly refinement, and serious engagement with literature, thought, and research. His scholarly work spans British and post-colonial literature, cultural theory, and critical studies with a special focus on the intersections of literature, ideology, and identity. He has contributed numerous research papers to peer-reviewed journals and has been actively involved in academic discourse at both national and international levels. As a teacher and researcher, he brings both intellectual depth and careful critical perspective to complex ideas, making him an especially valuable guest for a discussion on Iqbal's philosophical and religious vision.

[00:01:23]Thank you very much. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Let me quote from a book which states that what is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it? And what is the kind of conduct that benefits the place we occupy? This quote may seem a bit metaphysical. It has got essence of physics also if you think deeply.

[00:01:48]Actually, we are relating to the first chapter of Allama Iqbal's book, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a chapter that opened just not a book but a whole new way of thinking about religion, reason, and human experience. Remember, it's the colonial era where science and reason we are trying to degrade or make religion a secondary source. What makes this chapter so important is that Iqbal does not accept the limits of these philosophers placed on knowledge without question. He challenges the narrow boundaries of reason, especially where religion is reduced to something secondary or merely subjective. So, we'll start by asking our first question to Dr. Sahib whose introduction I have given you that in the early part of the video. The question goes like this, what is the intellectual background of these lectures, Dr. Sahib?

[00:02:32]Iqbal's [clears throat] reconstruction of religious thought in Islam is undoubtedly one of the major works by a Muslim thinker in modern times. And we can actually call it an attempt by a thinker, by a scholar to write a new Kalam, that is new dialectical theology, which was prevalent in the classical age of Islam where Muslim thinkers tried to defend and demonstrate the the rationality of Islamic beliefs.

[00:03:03]And with a major difference that their intellectual paradigm and framework was it had come from ancient Greece and philosophers like Aristotle predominate predominated in that way of thinking, that mode of thinking.

[00:03:18]So, >> [clears throat] >> with the coming of the modern age, we find that there is a shift now.

[00:03:24]And Iqbal is writing at the age where Aristotelianism no longer had that position, that place that it enjoyed for centuries in both the Western and Eastern world.

[00:03:34]A new paradigm has emerged, and that new paradigm is the paradigm of science.

[00:03:39]And along with modern science, we have modern philosophy.

[00:03:42]>> We have modern philosophy.

[00:03:44]Which come up with which which come with a new set of challenges to religion in general, and that is precisely what Iqbal starts with. In the first chapter, he is not in the first lecture because they are basically, you know, lectures that Iqbal delivered at various places. So, this first lecture is an attempt to justify uh faith, to justify religion from a philosophical point of Now, if you just say a few I have to say a few more things about about this intellectual background.

[00:04:16]The intellectual background is definitely given by secular modernity.

[00:04:20]And that secular modernity has, as I said, uh thrown a new challenge to the very to the very idea of faith, to the very idea of um the belief system which we were having.

[00:04:30]religion.

[00:04:31]So, uh if if you just go through a few of them. For example, the idea that religion is not something that is sent by God, it is man-made.

[00:04:39]It is completely a natural phenomenon.

[00:04:41]Natural not in the sense that it it belongs to the natural world uh and uh hence there's, you know, some something that has always been there.

[00:04:48]Natural in the sense that it is there is nothing supernatural about it.

[00:04:52]What it claims to be. In other words, there there's no interference of God or we don't need to create such an entity.

[00:04:57]>> Yeah. So, we can understand religion as a human construct. And when we try to understand what that um where from these ideas come in modern thought, there are a few people who have largely contributed to this idea. For example, the ideas of Karl Marx, the idea ideas of Sigmund Freud, ideas of philosophers like Nietzsche, and some other sociologists and philosophers who contributed to the creation of the modern secular age. Uh if you look at Marx, Marx said that uh religion is opium of the masses. Um the full quote actually is that it is the only balm in a boundless world. Mhm. So, what Marx is saying is that although religion is not rooted in truth or reality, but it at least has one aspect that it provides some kind of comfort to people. But that is done at a very at a big cost. At a very big price, yes.

[00:05:42]Yeah, the cost is that it distracts you from those uh things which need your immediate attention. It It says that this life doesn't really matter. It is the next life which >> Which actually matters, right? And there are other writers and and and Marx had taken these ideas or many of these ideas from Ludwig Feuerbach who had written against religion, against Christianity in particular before him. Then there were other people like Freud. Freud approached religion from a from psychological point of view and he thought that it was an illusion. He wrote a book called The Future of an Illusion. And he thought that religion is there because man has some kind of some kind of weakness, some kind of insecurity and it creates, you know, an illusory world in which man wants to live. But these people Another name that comes to my mind is that of August Comte who [clears throat] who was a social scientist, a sociologist and he gave a theory that actually mankind has passed through several stages. We have gone from a theological stage which is a mythical stage dominated by religions. Then we have come into the metaphysical stage where you have abstract philosophies and now we have entered the scientific stage.

[00:06:48]Empirical stage. That scientific stage he thought or he expected that as science grows in future there will be no need for religion. Religion will die its own death because there will be no justification or any reason for religion to exist, right?

[00:07:03]>> So this is the This is broadly speaking the intellectual background of secular modernity in which Iqbal finds himself and which he's trying to respond to. Now he's writing as a philosopher but who is also a believer. Who's also a believer, right?

[00:07:17]He has to define his beliefs also. Yes.

[00:07:19]So he starts with this with this argument that religion is not any of these that I have, you know, you know, briefly tried to tell you.

[00:07:29]Religion is primarily concerned with the ultimate concern of man and religion actually tells us some truth, vital and eternal and most important truth about humans. And therefore he begins with the problem of religious experience. Mhm.

[00:07:45]What is religious experience? Does religious experience reveal any kind of knowledge, or is it merely some kind of human, you know, imagination or construct, or it fulfills some sociological function, psychological function? Iqbal believes that religion and religious experience, especially, reveals some truth. Not just some truth, it reveals a vital truth about human life. Okay, okay. So, that's very interesting. But there are certain things which actually raised against Iqbal that he had not properly read other things also. We will discuss those things in this when we deal with the second chapter of The Reconstruction of Islamic Islam. But I actually want to know why does Iqbal begin with defending the validity of knowledge provided by religion? Was he actually having some preoccupied notions that made him to defend Islam, or in general religion, against those well-documented and empirically tested proofs? No, here I want to say something that this in continuation to what I said earlier, that Iqbal recognizes the importance of modern science.

[00:08:41]And that is one of the reasons that he does not really champion those thinkers of of the medieval, I don't know, age in in Islam or in in in the West who somehow seem to him to him not scientific enough. Mhm. And he's saying things that the spirit of Islam is in complete harmony with the spirit of modern science. This is the reason that Iqbal critiques Plato because Plato Plato, according to Iqbal, is a philosopher who talks about an ideal world which is completely transcendental. And reality for it uh for Plato does not exist in this phenomenal world, it exists in in an ideal world which is which cannot be grasped by human senses. Iqbal thinks that this world, the phenomenal world, is the real world. Mhm. And there is no justification for turning away from this real world. And in fact, he says that Islam should be seen as a harbinger of modern period insofar as it uh contributed to and it actually encouraged uh Muslims to ponder, to reflect over the empirical reality that surrounds them. So, this is one thing.

[00:09:40]Iqbal is a champion of modern science.

[00:09:42]The philosophy behind modern science, in so far as modern science says that truth is to be found in the empirical world, the phenomenal world. Number one. Number two, Iqbal thinks that uh This is fine, but when science reaches its end, it also recognizes its limitations. The limitations are that it can tell us a whole lot about the phenomenal world, but it cannot give us the reason why the phenomenal world exists. In other words, as many philosophers have said said that science can explore the question of how, but it cannot explore the question of why.

[00:10:15]>> Why? It does not reach at that point yet. And Iqbal thinks that this is also provided by faith or religion. It is It is It is something that mankind has been given as a gift by God through revelation. Hence, the importance of religious experience. And I will be saying something more about how he actually defines that religious experience, not merely something, inferential.

[00:10:38]>> Yeah, he's not simply speaking in vacuum. He has got his own logic and validity. But the question is that science at the time of Iqbal was in its infancy stage. The questions which we are actually experienced by Iqbal or which he seemed to be very nagging are now very simple. There are There have been many great answers to those burning questions at the time of Iqbal, but science at that time we have to take this also into consideration. Now, the thing is that is really science and religion have their common point of interaction or not. We will come to that later part. Moving to one more question, Dr. Sahib. We see Iqbal alluding to various Islamic and Western thinkers like Ghazali, Kant, and some others. Why is it important to understand Iqbal's criticism of these thinkers? Was he against the nominal concept of Kant or how was he acknowledging the phenomenal realm?

[00:11:21]Yeah, it is true that Iqbal throughout these lectures, he alludes to many philosophers and thinkers both from the Islamic world and Western Western world.

[00:11:30]And in the very first chapter, he talks about thinkers like Al-Ghazali from the Islamic world, Immanuel Kant from the Western world, Bergson, and William James, and Whitehead, and many other theorists and philosophers and thinkers.

[00:11:45]Why does he do so? Because he just cannot write in a vacuum as you said. He has to relate to what all already has been said by how they had dealt with this problem and what new Iqbal has to add.

[00:11:57]To give an example of Ghazali Ghazali of course is a great figure in this Islamic Islamic world Islamic world recognized as one of the greatest minds that we have produced.

[00:12:06]But you will see that in the very first chapter Iqbal does show that he is not he is a bit critical of Ghazali because he thinks that Ghazali actually was we could call it Iqbal's Iqbal thought that he was too skeptical about what philosophy could do.

[00:12:21]And Iqbal is talking about you know with reference to the domain of reason.

[00:12:26]And he says that Ghazali could not find sufficient ground for faith within the domain of reason. Therefore he chose the divine will the concept of divine will.

[00:12:35]He chose to step out of this reason into the domain of mysticism pure intuition.

[00:12:39]He disagrees with he thinks that reason has a very important role to play. That is why not every people not everyone will have kind of mystical intuitive experience that can provide or convince that person of the truth of religion. He thinks that reason has a vital role to play in promoting the cause of religion. And he's critical of Ghazali also because Ghazali draws a sharp line of distinction between thought and intuition. Iqbal thinks that this sharp distinction cannot be made. In fact he thinks that when thought reaches its climax it in a way passes into intuition. And that's why he's drawn towards he's drawn drawn towards Bergson because in Bergson's philosophy he finds some kind of you know inspiration or impetus which he can use to construct his own or And there are many other things that he says about um other philosophers that like Immanuel Kant, although he says that Immanuel Kant was uh well, he has rightly been hailed as one of the great uh blessings of God to his country, Germany. And he brought down the that the rational construct of the German rationalists that they had created. But he also differs from from Kant in many important ways. And one of the ways could be that Kant again um restricts the domain of human the the the the ability of humans to know to this phenomenal world. And he does not have anything to say about intuition. He does not have anything to say about feeling or he dismisses that. And he creates a a system where religion appears more or less as as if as something which is subsidiary to morality, uh something that contributes to the final aim of creating a moral man. Iqbal thinks differently in these in these uh matters. So So that's very it's very interesting that things are going very sharply. And we have seen a new dimension of Iqbal here. So I can once again ask you if we are going to sum up the first chapter of the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam. Number one, how can we sum up the thing? And secondly, I ask you to say something about the critics. What were the arguments of critics against the concept of Allama Iqbal? There are critics. Now, first of all, let me let me continue with what I I wanted to you know finish.

[00:14:45]I wanted to say that Iqbal thinks that some modern writers and philosophers have opened a way which allows us to look at the the whole the complexity of the relationship between faith and philosophy in from a new perspective.

[00:14:58]From a new perspective.

[00:14:59]>> he talks about Bergson. And he says that Bergson has given us a new concept of time, new concept of human consciousness, new concept which is um very different from what uh modern science and philosophy because this is one thing that Bergson discusses in his book Time and Free Will. And Iqbal was drawn to Bergson because in Bergson there was that concept of the reality of time, which is not something um an aspect of space. So, Bergson's position was that modern philosophies and modern science has specialized time.

[00:15:32]It has reduced time to an aspect of space and that's why it calculates time or computes time dividing it into moments into seconds, hours.

[00:15:41]>> Yeah, relating it to the motion or some event then we say time has come into the being, right?

[00:15:45]serial time. He says that this serial time is not real time.

[00:15:49]Contrary to this, Bergson had given the concept of the real time or la durée or the duration, which is inner time, which is the real time in the sense that it cannot be, you know, divided into past, present, and future. It is one single flow. And this continuity of time. This continuity relates well to his idea of human consciousness and freedom.

[00:16:08]Bergson is critical of those philosophers who deny free will and he argues that because they have not understood the nature of time, so they also do not understand the nature of free will.

[00:16:16]>> Free will, exactly. Iqbal is drawn to this idea. Mhm. So, he was actually against the concept of determinism.

[00:16:21]>> Yes. So, Iqbal finds this indeterminism to which he he was himself drawn because he thought that the concept of takdir has been misunderstood within Islam and it is not something it's not a line already drawn.

[00:16:32]>> Drawn or already. That's why Julian Huxley also says the only problem with religion is that they believe in the theology of fixity. But here we see Iqbal presenting a new perspective.

[00:16:39]>> indeterminism and he finds inspiration from both Bergson and William James.

[00:16:43]William James was also an indeterminist.

[00:16:45]William James wrote a very famous article called The Dilemma of Determinism, in which he you know, attacks this idea of determinism.

[00:16:52]And Iqbal also finds when he goes on in the next section of the first chapter, when he goes on to explain what religious experience really is, he takes a lot of help from William James, his Varieties of Religious Experience. And in a nutshell, what Iqbal says is something that William James had already alluded to, that religious experience is cognitive in essence, that it reveals some kind of knowledge which which otherwise not available to us.

[00:17:17]And when he explains this religious experience, Iqbal says that it it is not difficult for us to understand that all knowledge that we have, we receive that knowledge or we arrive at that knowledge through an act where, you know, intuition also plays a very vital role.

[00:17:33]We understand the outer world within the domain or within the confines of our inner world. And religious experience is like a real experience.

[00:17:43]It's like seeing without eyes. And that's why he you know, when he talks about the prophetic experience of the prophet in Surah Najm, "Ma zagh al-basaru wa ma tagha." That his eyes did not waver, neither was he deceived.

[00:17:54]And all that that in Surah Najm we are given that experience of the prophet when he encountered the divine. It's it's a different thing what what actually he what he encountered. Because mufassirin would say that this is with relation to his encounter with Jibril.

[00:18:06]Some mystics would say that no, it is the encounter with the divine itself.

[00:18:09]Iqbal himself was of convict he was convinced that the prophet had experience of divine. Uh whether this was this or that, but the point that Iqbal wants to make is that humans have the capacity to experience the divine in the same way that they have the capacity to experience any empirical object.

[00:18:25]>> Empirical object. So, it is it is not it's not argumentative, it is not inferential, it is not adding 2 + 2. It is a direct uh experience of something which is vivid and which leaves a lasting impact on the soul of the person who experiences.

[00:18:40]>> Who experiences something.

[00:18:41]Then this becomes uh this becomes this, you know, it becomes a point where the divine intersect the the divine meets the human. And then this point of intersection between uh the divine between the transcendental and and the worldly, then it becomes that source according to Iqbal which becomes um source of guidance for humanity. So, this briefly I try to know Yes, some some of the some of the first chapter of Allama Iqbal. Inshallah, we We be dealing with all the chapters of the book, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. In our second meeting, we will be discussing the second chapter at length and also a certain, you can say, critic critical notions of orientalists which they say about Allama Iqbal that the reason and religion they cannot coexist in a very compatible manner. Thank you very much.