Religion Compass 8/2 (2014): 60–69, 10.1111/rec3.

12093

Muhammad Iqbal and the Immanence of God

in Islamic Modernism
Yaseen Noorani*
University of Arizona

Abstract
The Indian Muslim poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal is widely known for his influential
contribution to Islamic modernist thought. Iqbal’s metaphysical account of the nature of reality
has attracted a massive body of commentary and provoked substantial scholarly controversy.
One of the primary areas of scholarly debate is Iqbal’s conception of divine immanence and
how it is related to the Quran and to the Islamic theological tradition, particularly doctrines
associated with Sufism. This debate concerns question of how faithful Iqbal is to the God of
the Quran, whether or not Iqbal rejects traditional Islamic conceptions of God, and to what
extent Iqbal adopts Western philosophical notions of God. The present paper surveys this debate
in arguing that the tensions between Iqbal’s thought on God and traditional Islamic notions shed
significant light on the aims of Islamic modernism. The aspects of Iqbal’s conception of God that
have given rise to controversy are precisely those that make possible an evolutionary, progressive,
and human-centered depiction of the universe and of history. For this reason, the scholarly
debate over Iqbal’s conception of God provides a point of departure for understanding the
altered metaphysical assumptions behind the Islamic modernist project.

A characteristic feature of Islamic modernist thought, from the mid-19th century to the
present, is the adoption of the idea of human historical progress and the attempt to identify
Islam with the forces thought to underlie this progress. This applies as much to thinkers like
the Tunisian political reformer Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi (1822–1890), or the Egyptian
religious reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), who extolled European achievements
in the advancement of humanity, as it does to intellectuals like the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb
(1906–1966), or the Iranian Ali Shariati (1933–1977), who held that the West is a threat
to humanity. Taking up the notion of a unified, developmental human history that is
advanced by the collective agency of nations and civilizations required reimagining the
fundamental assumptions about God, humanity, and social order of premodern Islamic
thought. Among Islamic modernist thinkers, the celebrated colonial Indian poet, thinker,
and political figure Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) has been perhaps the only one to
elaborate an Islamic metaphysics that grounds these altered assumptions while endowing
the Muslim community with a distinctive place in human history.1 Examining the issues
raised by the nature and role of God in Iqbal’s metaphysical vision allows us to isolate a
key element in Islamic modernist thought – the need to identify an immanent, organizing
principle of human history that finds its full expression in an Islamic social order, and the
tension that thereby arises with traditional Islamic notions of God.
In this paper, I will outline the position of God in Iqbal’s metaphysics and survey the
various interpretations of Iqbal’s conception of God, with regard to its coherence as well as
its relation to ‘orthodox’ and ‘Sufi’ thought, that scholars have put forward. I will argue that
while many of the problems that arise from Iqbal’s metaphysical doctrine cannot be

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definitively resolved, what is perhaps of greater interest lies in identifying what distinguishes
Iqbal’s conceptual framework from those of premodern Muslim thinkers. This distinction
cannot be described merely in terms of Iqbal’s extensive reference to modern Western
philosophical and scientific concepts. The key distinction lies, I argue, in Iqbal’s conception
of God as an immanent, order-generating principle, that finds its material realization through
the evolution of the universe, and more specifically, through the activity of the collective
agent that embodies this principle in history and brings about an ultimate union of the
spiritual and the material. Iqbal’s God, therefore, in an important sense, is not a pre-existing
entity, but a potentiality within the universe that can only come fully into being through
human effort. This notion enabled Iqbal to depict individuals as self-ordering, creative agents
who give rise to a Muslim ‘nation’.

1. Issues Raised by Iqbal’s Metaphysics

In his Urdu and especially Persian poetry, as well as in his English work The Reconstruction of
Religious Thought in Islam (1934), Iqbal elaborated a doctrine of the self, or ego, which he
termed in Persian khudi, that formed the basis of his critique of the West and anti-colonial
political stance. Iqbal set out his metaphysical vision primarily during the period from 1915
(with the publication of the Persian work Secrets of the Self) to his death in 1938.2 During this
period, Indian political activism for independence from British rule reached its apogee. The
trajectory of Iqbal’s thought and public career cannot be properly understood in isolation
from his involvement in the politics of his native Muslim-majority Punjab, a topic which
cannot be explored here. His insistence on the separate identity of Indian Muslims, and his
call in 1930 for the establishment of a separate Muslim political entity upon independence,
were consistently justified by him on the basis of his metaphysical doctrines.3
The point of departure for Iqbal’s metaphysical thought is the notion that all existing
entities are instantiations of selfhood, which is a capacity for individuation and assimilation
of what is external, that is constitutive of ‘life’. The poem Secrets of the Self (Iqbal, 1985;
1940) describes the emergence of the world as ‘self’ (or ‘ego’) reaching self-consciousness
through its internal division and individuation within the resulting entities, characterized as
individual selves. Self seems to be a body or a field of energy that takes the form of
materialized entities through purposive individuation.4 In an earlier writing, Iqbal describes
the human self as ‘a unit of force, an energy, a will, a germ of infinite power, the gradual
unfoldment of which must be the object of all human activity’.5 In the much later
Reconstruction, he calls the ego ‘a controlling energy’, ‘a directive attitude’, ‘a free personal
causality’, whose ‘nature is wholly aspiration after a unity more inclusive, more balanced,
and more unique’, or in other words, ‘self-possession’.6 Selfhood grows through its power
of assimilation, which is termed ‘love’ (‘ishq’) or ‘desire’. Assimilation is the creation of an
external reality that is in accordance with the self’s desire. Reality thus consists in the conflict
of competing loci of assimilation, resulting in waste and violence, yet for the ultimate
purpose of ‘the creation and perfection of spiritual beauty’.7
This scheme diverges from Nietzsche’s will to power in that the units of force are
purposive and self-directive, hence regarded as egos, and similarly, ‘the ultimate Reality is
a rationally directed creative life’ (1934, p. 58). Iqbal describes God as ‘the Omnipsyche of
the universe’, ‘the Ultimate Ego’, and ‘the Absolute Ego’ among others. God is the infinite
ego, whereas all other egos issuing from God are finite. The relationship between God and
nature is one of immanence. ‘The Ultimate Ego that makes the emergent emerge is
immanent in Nature’ (1934, p. 101). Nature as we perceive it is ‘a partial expression’ of
the ‘infinite inner possibilities’ of God’s creativity. Nature is a ‘living organism’ whose

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growth has no external limit, but only the internal limit of the ‘immanent self which animates
and sustains the whole’ (1934, p. 54). The universe is not an object standing separate from
and outside of a divine subject, but the sensually perceptible, ‘measurable’ aspect of a divine
life. Nature has an ‘organic’ relationship to God; it is God’s ‘character’, or ‘habit’, just as the
human body is the ‘accumulated action or habit of the soul’ (1934, p. 100). God’s knowledge
of the universe, moreover, is not ‘reflective’ knowledge of a separate entity that he has
created. ‘From the standpoint of the all-inclusive Ego there is no “other”. In Him thought
and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical’ (1934, p. 73). Divine
knowing, therefore, is not cognition as we conceive it, but the very process of divine life.
‘The world, in all its details, from the mechanical movement of what we call the atom of
matter to the free movement of thought in the human ego, is the self-revelation of the
“Great I am”’ (1934, p. 68). God, therefore, is a total self whose self-expression takes the
form of subsidiary selves, which composed of all existing entities.
Iqbal distinguishes this outlook from the ‘pantheism’ (the doctrine of the unity of
existence) attributed to some Sufi thinkers, which he rejects. The infinitude of the
Ultimate Ego is not ‘extensive’, or all-pervasive, as pantheism would have it, but ‘intensive’
(1934, pp. 61, 112). This claim is obscure; I will come back to it later on. Another
formulation is that whereas pantheism posits a ‘vague, vast, and pervasive cosmic element’
or ‘a universal current flowing through all things’, the correct understanding is to conceive
Ultimate Reality as ‘an organic whole, a something closely knit together and possessing a
central point of reference’ (1934, p. 74). To understand God and ‘Reality’ as an ego,
according to Iqbal, even though this ego is ‘all-inclusive’, means to see that finite egos are
not absorbed into the divine, or emanations thereof, but are always distinct ontological
entities (1934, pp. 91, 104). The human ego, which is the highest development of the finite
ego, is even possessed of its own free, spontaneous volition, and a creative capacity that
participates in shaping the life of the universe, thus limiting divine freedom (1934, pp. 75,
102–103). Iqbal goes further, contrasting his view to the idea of absorption into God in
the following way: ‘The true person not only absorbs the world of matter by mastering it,
but also absorbs God Himself into his Ego’.8 The human ego reaches the climax of its
individuation ‘when the ego is able to retain full self-possession, even in the case of a direct
contact with the all-embracing Ego’ (1934, p. 111). Interpreters of Iqbal have differed on
how exactly how this doctrine differs from pantheism or monism.
This question involves the nature of the relationship and contact between the divine and
the human, and particularly, how human beings know the divine. Iqbal explains this in terms
of his Bergsonian account of time and of instinct/intuition. According to Iqbal, the human
self has two aspects. The ‘efficient self’, identified with ordinary consciousness, is directed
to get along in everyday life, for which it employs a mode of thought and perception
conducive to successfully manipulating the external world. The perspective of this self leads
to perception of experience as serial time, time as a succession of instants, which is an artificial
atomization of reality. This is the temporal framework that involves the subject/object
separation, the perception of matter, the cause-effect thinking, and the instrumental
rationality. The ‘appreciative self’, however, is the inward and underlying self which
experiences reality as a whole through intuition, a type of feeling. The temporality of the
appreciative self, of intuition, and of the underlying reality of existence is not serial time
but duration, which is ‘change without succession’. Duration is the divine realm, in which
time is a unified whole, and which Iqbal calls in his poetry, ‘eternity’. The intuition of
duration, which Iqbal calls ‘mystical intuition’ and which can be achieved in prayer, is an
experience of one’s own ego as well as of the divine ego, an experience that is not merely
cognitive but which produces desire and creative action. In other words, this experience is

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itself the ego and its process of individuation. The creative action, however, occurs within
the realm of serial time: it directs the progression of events and recreates the world that we
perceive. For this reason, the ego that achieves ‘self-possession’ is an agent that reshapes
the content of serial time in accordance with the immanent directive that is Ultimate
Reality or ‘divine destiny’. The duality of duration and serial time in Iqbal’s account raises
questions regarding the nature of their division – whether it is ontological or merely
perceptual – and regarding the compatibility of human freedom with the enaction of an
immanent universal will.

2. Scholarly Assessments of Iqbal’s Conception of God

Due to Iqbal’s fame as a Muslim revivalist intellectual, a defender of Islam from Western
modernity, and the ‘spiritual father’ of the nation of Pakistan, there has been a prodigious
amount of scholarship on his intellectual legacy, much of it laudatory.9 I will refer here to
some of the more significant discussions of Iqbal’s notion of God, and how they have
attempted to address the issues raised by Iqbal’s metaphysics. These issues have been taken
seriously because many scholars have felt that Iqbal’s thought is genuinely inspired by the
spirit of the Quran and is a plausible attempt to come to terms with that spirit. So eminent
a scholar as Fazlur Rahman has stated that Iqbal’s apprehension of the God of the Quran is
superior to that of medieval theologians. ‘My disagreement with Iqbal is therefore not over
his concept of God – as the ultimate source of creative energy that can be appropriated by
individuals and societies in certain ways – but with his formulation of this concept and the
method by which he attempts to deduce it from the Quran’ (Rahman 1982, p.154). A
defense of Iqbal along these lines has been made more recently by Mir (2006).
Wilfred Cantwell Smith asserted early on that the modernism of Iqbal’s thought lies in its
foundation on an immanent notion of God (1947, pp. 119, 120, 132). A fuller exposition
along these lines was developed by Noorani (2000) in a study of Iqbal’s appropriation of
the Persian ghazal. Nevertheless, the predominant view among scholars sympathetic to Iqbal
has been that Iqbal’s view of God is panentheist, meaning that God is both immanent and
transcendent.10 According to Enver for example, Iqbal’s God is immanent because he
encompasses the whole universe, but differs from the deity of ‘pantheists of the traditional
type’, because ‘He is a personal and not an impersonal Reality’ (1955, p. 73). Iqbal’s God
is transcendent because ‘His “I-am-ness” does not lie within the grasp of our experience’.
Yet, he is not ‘the God of the old theists’, but rather ‘the Absolute of philosophy’
(1955, pp. 81–82). It can be seen here that the idea that God is an ego leads Enver to assert
that Iqbal advocates a ‘personal’ God. This is a wide-spread view, shared for example by
Annemarie Schimmel and seen as distinguishing Iqbal from idealist as well as medieval
Islamic philosophers.11 The claim that God’s egohood is beyond our experience, however,
cannot be borne out by Iqbal’s writings,12 particularly considering that he uses the term
‘experience’ in a Hegelian sense, the process by which consciousness grasps its own essence.13
The commentator who seems to have introduced the term ‘panentheism’ into the discussion
of Iqbal, Whittemore, characterizes Iqbal’s view in the following manner: ‘It is panentheistic
because according to it God as individual, while not other than that universe which is His
physical being, is more than the sum of egos and sub-egos of which this universe is
composed’ (1956, p. 692). In other words, God is ‘a unity transcending its parts’ (691).
Whittemore, however, does not explain what this transcendence of the parts lies in.
Iqbal’s insistence on the distinction between the finite egos and the infinite ego, as well as
his insistent rejection of ‘pantheism’, have led some commentators, like the Italian orientalist
Bausani, to assert that Iqbal’s God is a wholly transcendent personal God, and that Iqbal

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reasserts a ‘Semitic’ and ‘prophetic’ conception against Sufism (1953, 1954). Other
commentators, however, who focus on the relationship between Iqbal and Sufism, down-
play statements by Iqbal that seemingly denigrate Sufi thought, and argue that his position
is not significantly different from those of a number of Sufi writers of the past.14 They argue
that Iqbal’s critique of Sufism is aimed only at the Neoplatonic and Persian influences on Sufi
thought. This view can seemingly find justification in Iqbal’s interpretation of certain figures,
such as Rumi and al-Hallaj, in terms of his own doctrines. Manzoor Ahmad, for example, has
argued that Iqbal’s position differs from the doctrine of ‘the unity of existence’ only in the
philosophical language in which it is expressed and its points of emphasis, rather than in
substantive issues (1983). Ahmad argues, for instance, that the God of the unity of existence
is transcendent as well as immanent. Moreover, he argues that the so-called ‘absorption into
God’ aims at the same result as Iqbal’s intuition – ‘complete identification of the will of the
individual with the Will of God’. These points bring out a dimension of similarity between
Iqbal’s notion of God and traditional monist thinking. Decisive points of divergence,
however, have been emphasized by S. Qaiser (2002) in his comparison of Iqbal’s thought
with that of the renowned Punjabi mystical poet Khawaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901).
According to Qaiser, whereas Iqbal posits a ‘man-God polarity’ that is ‘absolute’, for Khawaja
Ghulam Farid this polarity ‘is ultimately transcended by virtue of the Self, the Intellect or the
Spirit which is identical with the Divine Essence’ (2002, p. 81). While Iqbal’s starting point is
God as an ego, and for Khawaja Ghulam Farid, God as ‘the Supreme Principle’ is formless
and primordial ‘Reality’ is undifferentiated (2002, pp. 94, 98). In light of these points of
overlap and divergence between Iqbal and his Sufi predecessors, it is necessary to pose the
following questions: why does Iqbal feel the need to insist that God is an ego? Why are
selfhood and individuation so important for him? And how is this related to the evolutionary
process that he ascribes to nature and to human history?
In recent years, a number of commentators have subjected Iqbal’s thought to mild or
trenchant critiques, questioning its coherence as well as its conformity to the God described
in the Quran. M.S. Raschid, for example, in his work Iqbal’s Concept of God (1981), impugns
Iqbal’s argumentation as well as his understanding of the concepts he draws from Hegel and
Bergson. Raschid concludes that Iqbal has a ‘finite’ conception of God that does not accord
with the Quran. By a ‘finite deity’ he means ‘one which partakes, in some fundamental
respect, of the limited and imperfect character of the order of nature’ (1981, p. 111). This
applies to Iqbal because he regards nature as having an organic relationship to God. Although
Raschid characterizes Iqbal’s position as panentheistic, he asserts that Iqbal’s notion of the
universe as an ego is ‘incoherent’ and more like ‘straight-forward pantheism’ (1981, p. 59).
Raschid’s solution is an infinite God, wholly transcendent of finite entities and unknowable
to human cognition, such that no positive predication can be made of the term. This gets
Raschid into his own difficulties with coherence. The Iqbal scholar Mohammed Maruf
(1983) has also pointed out a number of contradictions and inconsistencies in Iqbal’s account
of God. He focuses primarily on the idea of duration as ‘change without succession’, on the
idea that an ego can contain other egos, and on Iqbal’s attempt to identify divine knowledge
with divine action while keeping God omniscient in some way. He also concludes that Iqbal
ends up with a finite God and thus his theory of God fails, as all such theories are bound to
do. More recently, Abdul Hafeez Fazli (2005) has taken Raschid’s position a step further in
critiquing Iqbal, rejecting any hint of immanence whatsoever as incompatible with divine
omniscience. This position nullifies Iqbal’s aims by eliminating any possible relation between
human beings and God aside from blind submission to the scripture of an unknowable entity.
A key issue in the debate over Iqbal’s fidelity to the Quranic depiction of God has been the
extent to which Iqbal’s God has been influenced by modern Western thought. The issue of

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Western influence in Iqbal’s doctrines has in itself produced an extensive bibliography.

Defenders of Iqbal’s Islamic authenticity do not deny strong parallels between Iqbal and
Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche and Bergson, as well as the British neo-Hegelians like McTaggart
with whom he studied. They attempt, however, to show that ideas shared in common derive
ultimately from the Islamic intellectual tradition, and that Iqbal, due to his reliance on the
Quran, differs with each of the Western thinkers in some definitive way. This mode of
argument appears in dozens of writers on Iqbal, most extensively in Qaiser, 2001. With
regard to Iqbal’s conception of God, M. M. Sharif has argued that Iqbal is indebted to the
British idealist philosopher James Ward (1843–1925), in that both advocated a panentheist
personal God that is absolute and infinite yet self-limiting through the creation of human
egos (1964, pp. 26–30). Annemarie Schimmel (1963) has pointed to parallels between Iqbal’s
thinking on the relationship between God and human beings as egos and the ideas of 20th
century German intellectuals like Rudolf Pannwitz and Paul Tillich. Javed Majeed (1993)
has argued that the contradictions in Iqbal’s conception of God arise from Iqbal’s attempt
to integrate a transcendent deity with the metaphysical apparatus of the British idealists
Bradley and McTaggart.

3. Modernism and Iqbal’s Conception of God

The contradictions in Iqbal’s thought are certainly real and most likely irresolvable.
Fundamentally, Iqbal’s scheme is based on the Hegelian problematic of the immanence of
the Absolute in the finite (see Min, 1976). This in itself gives rise to a set of philosophical is-
sues, in addition to the problem of transcendence and immanence. For Iqbal, the mechanism
by which the Absolute realizes itself in material reality is not fundamentally Hegel’s dialectic
of consciousness, but selfhood, a will to individuation. The entity or impulse that seeks
realization is not spirit in the sense of mind, but spirit in the vitalist and organic sense of ‘life’.
The telos of this process appears to be a state of absolute organization, perfectly realized form,
conceived as an absolute ego. Whether or not this scheme is ultimately coherent, it is
necessary to ask, why did Iqbal posit such a scheme and how is it related to the general aims
of Islamic modernist thinking? The overriding aim of Iqbal’s writings, as proclaimed
throughout, is the reform and vitalization of Muslim individuals, and by this means, of the
Muslim community as a whole, and particularly the Indian Muslim community. It is
necessary to understand, therefore, how his conception of God advances this aim.
The linkage between metaphysics and history in Iqbal’s thought lies in the evolutionary or
developing universe that his metaphysics posits. Herein lies a key aspect in which Iqbal’s
metaphysics differs from medieval Sufi thinking. Consider this statement in which Iqbal
contrasts his view to ‘pantheism’: ‘life is not a formless fluid, but an organizing principle of
unity, a synthetic activity which holds together and focalizes the dispersing dispositions of
the living organism for a constructive purpose’ (1934, p.58). It has been seen that the living
organism is the universe, and the ‘dispersing dispositions’ can only come from life, the
underlying principle of the universe. It only makes sense to say that life is subject to its
own dispersing dispositions that it must hold together, synthesize and focalize for some
purpose if life is not organized at the outset but contains an impulse to order that gradually
organizes its own entire compass. This process occurs through life’s manifestation and
individuation in material forms (‘finite egos’). God, therefore, is the organizing principle of
life, the ‘vital impulse’, ‘selfhood’. This organizing impulse is not realized until it fully
manifests itself in organized material form. In this way, reality is a process of struggle among
the multifarious instantiations of the organizing principle, in which the more highly
individuated forms assimilate those less organized, resulting in the development of

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progressively higher egos, furthering in this manner the organizing principle of life. ‘Every
atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is an ego. But there are
degrees in the expression of egohood. Throughout the entire gamut of being runs the
gradually rising note of egohood until it reaches its perfection in man’ (1934, p.68). Again,
the only possible reason that divine energy would take lower forms of egohood is that these
are the primary steps in its path of progressive self-realization. As one commentator describes
it, the progression of life occurs through perpetual struggle against resistances, which consist
of the previous forms that life has taken. This struggle is precisely what strengthens, or further
individuates, the self.15
The culmination of this process is the human ego, as can be seen in Iqbal’s definition of
matter: ‘A colony of egos of a low order out of which emerges the ego of a higher order,
when their association and interaction reach a certain degree of co-ordination. It is the world
reaching the point of self-guidance wherein the Ultimate Reality, perhaps, reveals its secret,
and furnishes a clue to its ultimate nature’ (1934, p.100). Here, Iqbal is describing the
emergence of consciousness or spirit, out of matter (a lower form of spirit), by which the
world reaches ‘self-guidance’. Herein lies the key point: it is now human consciousness that
is the medium for the advancement of life. Life is no longer simply a bio-vitalist evolution,
but will now advance through the human action that we know as world history. Human
beings are the final and most powerful instrument brought forth by life, charged with
bringing about the ends of life of their own accord. This is the nature of the creative action,
as an act of self-individuation, which transforms the world. It is for this reason that the person
who attains self-possession through mastery over matter absorbs God into himself, or in less
provocative language, enacts the will of God. The will to individuation is therefore the
meaning of what it is to be human and the ultimate criterion of human action. ‘There are
no pleasure-giving and pain-giving acts; there are only ego-sustaining and ego-dissolving
acts. It is the deed that prepares the ego for dissolution or disciplines him for a future career’
(1934, p.113). Morality, in other words, is nothing more than the enaction of self-
individuation. The agency and freedom of human beings belongs to them, but it is possible
only because they harbor within the will to selfhood. In this way, the capacity to attain moral
order is immanent to all human beings, and it is on this basis that they are to form a national
community that is itself an agent of individuation, or creative world-transformation.
Iqbal’s God, therefore, is an impulse to organization, to assimilate the world to form. It is a
unification of spirit and matter through the progressive assimilation of matter to spirit. God as
a universal will to form and egohood is not the God longed for by medieval Sufis. Iqbal
employs a panoply of Sufi terms in his poetry, but alters their meanings to fit his doctrine.
To take the most prominent, ‘love’ and ‘desire’ for Iqbal manifest themselves not as a desire
for union, but as creative assimilative action, the goal of which is the divine. Prayer for Iqbal
is not devotional, but a cognitive act of self-awareness that ‘rises higher than thought to
capture Reality itself with a view to become a conscious participator in its life’ (1934,
p.85). The effect of positing a universal impulse to order is that all existing entities, and
particularly human beings and social bodies, become self-regulating, order-generating
systems, like the universe as a whole. They are organisms whose purpose is to grow
ceaselessly in self-integration and power. A society so envisioned is radically different from
the static, hierarchical social orders imagined by medieval Muslim political thinkers. It is
the form of society known as the modern nation.
Iqbal’s evolutionary conception of God, therefore, has far-reaching implications on the
historical level. Like Hegel, Iqbal sets up an interpretation of human history based on his
metaphysical principles. This theory is a response both to Hegel himself, who subordinated
Islam historically to Christianity and to Spengler, who made Islam the culmination of the

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finite and static ‘Magian’ civilization. Iqbal divides history into two periods: the ancient
period, in which intuition and speculative, abstract thought was dominant and the
modern period, in which inductive, scientific thought is dominant. Islam stands as the
pivot of world history – the point at which antiquity gave way to the final, highest stage
of human development. The prophetic experience of the founder of Islam was the
catalyst that brought modernity into being. Iqbal casts these developments in terms of
the evolution of life. Intuition and speculative thought were primitive, instinctual stage
of human development, in which the human mind could only grasp material reality on
the basis of feeling. When the development of consciousness reached the limit of this
stage, the moment was prepared for a final, world-altering act of intuition, the prophecy
of Muhammad, which initiated a new mode of consciousness. ‘The world-life intuitively
sees its own needs, and at critical moments defines its own direction’ (1934, p.140). The
prophetic revelation was itself a supreme act of selfhood and for this reason had the
power to alter world-history. ‘A prophet may be defined as a type of mystic
consciousness in which “unitary experience” tends to overflow its boundaries and seeks
opportunities of redirecting or refashioning the forces of collective life’ (1934, p.119).
The Islamic revelation brought the necessity of prophecy to an end by establishing
‘inductive intellect’, the means for human self-guidance, through the Quranic
imperative to observe and study nature. This imperative does not abolish intuition,
but demands the unification of intuition with inductive intellect – the two moments
of the ego’s individuation.
The community founded by the final prophecy, designed to be ultimately universal, has
as its historical mission the unification of the spiritual and the material in a social form.
This unification is Iqbal’s interpretation of the Islamic doctrine of tawhid, the unity of
God. On the social level, tawhid is ‘equality, solidarity, and freedom. The state, from
the Islamic standpoint, is an endeavor to transform these ideal principles into space-time
forces, an aspiration to realize them in a definite human organization’ (1934, p.147). Iqbal
contrasts this Islamic internal imperative with both Christianity and the modern West.
Christianity, like Sufism, turns to intuition and the spiritual while shunning the material
world. It is an escape from individuation into passivity. The modern West, the product
of a revolt against Christianity, severs the material from the spiritual by relying on
inductive intellect only, thus abandoning moral purpose. The result is that the West
fetishizes materiality – territorial nationalism and conquest, material acquisition, racism,
and amoral knowledge. Instead of assimilating material reality to a higher principle of
organization, the West accumulates material possessions through exploitation. The Islamic
community, however, based on the principle inherent to life rather than on territory
and race, is the true future of human development. This principle is embodied most
fully in Islamic law, which synthesizes and focalizes the community and establishes the
ideal framework for the individuation of the human ego. Islam, therefore, is the supreme
means of creating a community as a self, which possesses collective agency and advances
human civilization.
The prime effect of Iqbal’s theory of divinity is the type of historical framework it can
motivate and the type of community it can posit. It is able to make Islam the key element
of an ideal nationhood and the axis of a developmental world history. The values that inhere
in this ideal nationhood – equality, solidarity, and freedom – arise from the innate and
necessary capacity of all human beings to attain political agency. These are precisely the values
and capacities that humanism invests in human beings, but Iqbal has endowed them with an
Islamic etiology. Many versions of Islamic modernism have had the same aim, without
explicating and pursuing the assumptions underlying it to the degree that Iqbal has done.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Religion Compass 8/2 (2014): 60–69, 10.1111/rec3.12093
68 Muhammad Iqbal

Short Biography

Yaseen Noorani’s research centers on the representation of normative ideals including virtue,
nationality, equality, and freedom in literary texts and political discourses in the Middle East.
His research examines how changing depictions of the human self and its internal order
contributed to the modern transformation of political and social ideals. His co-edited
collection, Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony (2007), addresses the question of
how resistance emerges in hegemonic contexts. His book Culture and Hegemony in the
Colonial Middle East (2010) argues that the rise of the ideal of nationality in the Middle
East, and associated modern political ideals, was affected through the linkage of nationality
with pre-existing ideals of virtue and self-mastery. Noorani’s current research focuses on
the formation of these pre-existing ideals in early Islamic culture and their relation to
political and social order. Noorani is currently an Associate Professor in the School of
Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and formerly
taught at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from
the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Virginia.

Notes
* Correspondence: Yaseen Noorani, University of Arizona, Middle East and North African Studies, Marshall Bldg. 440, 845
N. Park, Tucson, Arizona, United States 85721. Email: [email protected].
1
Fazlur Rahman stated that ‘[i]n modern times, Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is the only sys-
tematic attempt’ to construct a coherent Islamic metaphysics (1982, 132).
2
Iqbal’s first clear statement of his philosophy of selfhood seems to be his 1909 article, ‘Islam as a Moral and Political
Ideal’, in Iqbal (1977).
3
For Iqbal’s 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League in which he first proposed the creation of an independent
Indian Muslim polity, see Iqbal (1977). The political dimension of Iqbal’s thought and activity has been the topic of an
extensive body of studies. Some good examples are Jalal (2000), Esposito (1983), S. Iqbal (1984), Smith (1947).
4
See chapter one of Secrets of the Self in Iqbal 1985.
5
Iqbal 1977, 90.
6
Iqbal 1934, 93; 98; 102; 111.
7
‘Asrar’, 13.
8
Iqbal, 1940, xix. This statement is from Iqbal’s synopsis of his work Secrets of the Self that he sent to Nicholson, and
which Nicholson included in the introduction to his translation of that work. In the Reconstruction Iqbal calls this ‘the
Infinite passing into the loving embrace of the finite’ (1934, p.104).
9
For a recent bibliographical compilation, see Taillieu (2000).
10
For some examples, see Vahid 1959, pp. 54–55; Schimmel 1963, p. 98; Sharif 1964, p. 28; Dar 1970, pp. 307–311;
Khanum 1982, p. 57. Dar explicitly addresses Smith’s assertion.
11
See Schimmel 1963, pp. 96–97; Bausani 1954, p. 184; Whittemore 1956, pp. 694–696.
12
Enver provides no text for his claim.
13
See Ahmad 1983, p. 59; Iqbal 1934, p. 30.
14
Schimmel takes this view. See also Khan, 2010, and Kamali, 1971.
15
See Rafiuddin 1983. This article also provides a substantial body of Iqbal’s Urdu verse delineating the evolutionary process.

Works Cited
Ahmad, A. (1983). The Hegelian Key to Understanding Iqbal. In: Selections from the Iqbal Review, pp. 57–68. Lahore:
Iqbal Academy Pakistan.
Bausani, A. (1953). Modern Religious Trends in Islam, East and West, 4, pp. 12–18.
—— (1954). The Concept of Time in the Religious Philosophy of Mu ammad Iqbāl, Die Welt des Islams, 3, pp. 158–186.
Dar, B. A. (1970). A Study of Iqbal’s Philosophy. Lahore: Sh. Ghulam Ali.
Enver, I. H. (1955). The Metaphysics of Iqbal. Lahore: Sh. M. Ashraf.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Religion Compass 8/2 (2014): 60–69, 10.1111/rec3.12093
 Muhammad Iqbal 69

Esposito, J. L. (1983). Muhammad Iqbal and the Islamic State. In: Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. J.L. Esposito, pp. 175–190.
New York, NY: Oxford UP.
Făzli, A. H. (2005). Iqbal’s View of Omniscience and Human Freedom, The Muslim World, 95, pp. 125–145.
Iqbal, M. (1934). The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. London: Oxford University Press.
—— (1940). The Secrets of the Self (asrár-I-Khudí) a Philosophical Poem. Translated by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson. Lahore:
Sh. M. Ashraf.
—— (1977). Speeches, Writings, and Statements of Iqbal. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan.
—— (1985). Asrar-i Khudi (“Secrets of the Self”) in Kulliyat-i Iqbal Farsi. Lahore: Shaykh Ghulam Ali.
Jalal, Ayesha. (2000). Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850. London; New York:
Routlege.
Kamali, Hafeez. (1971). “The Heritage of Islamic Thought.” In Iqbal, Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan, 211–242. Studies in
Oriental Culture, No. 7. New York: Columbia University Press.
Khan, S. (2010). Iqbal and Sufism, The Dialogue, 5, pp. 330–348.
Khanum, S. A. (1982). Iqbal as a Philosopher. Hyderabad, India: Abul Kalam Azad Oriental Research Institute.
Majeed, J. (1993). Putting God in His Place: Bradley, McTaggart, and Muhammad Iqbal, Journal of Islamic Studies, 4,
pp. 208–236.
Maruf, M. (1983). Iqbal’s Concept of God: An Appraisal, Religious Studies, 19, pp. 375–383.
Min, A. K. (1976). Hegel’s Absolute: Transcendent or Immanent? The Journal of Religion, 56, pp. 61–87.
Mir, M. (2006). Iqbal. London: I.B. Tauris.
Noorani, Yaseen. (2000). Islamic Modernity and the Desiring Self: Muhammad Iqbal and the Poetics of Narcissism, Iran,
38(January 1), pp. 123–135.
Qaiser, N. (2001). Iqbal and the Western Philosophers: A Comparative Study. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan.
Qaiser, S. (2002). Iqbal and Khawaja Ghulam Farid on Experiencing God. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan.
Rafiuddin, M. (1983). “Iqbal’s Concept of Evolution” in V. Quraishi (ed.), Selections from the Iqbal Review. Lahore: Iqbal
Academy Pakistan, 1–24.
Rahman, F. (1982). Islam & Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Raschid, M. S. (1981). Iqbal’s Concept of God. London and Boston: Kegan Paul.
Schimmel, A. (1963). Gabriel’s Wing: A Study on the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Leiden: Brill.
Sharif, Mian. (1964). About Iqbal and His Thought. Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture.
Smith, W. C. (1947). Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis. Lahore: Minerva Book Shop.
Taillieu, D. (2000). A Descriptive Bibliography of Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938). Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters en
Departement Oosterse Studies.
Vahid, S. A. (1959). Iqbal, His Art and Thought. London, England: Murray.
Whittemore, R. (1956). Iqbal’s Panentheism, The Review of Metaphysics, 9, pp. 681–699.

Further Reading
Arberry, A. J. (1955). Notes on Iqbāl’s “Asrar-i-Khudi”. Lahore, Pakistan: Ashraf.
Malik, H. (ed.) (1971). Iqbal, Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press.
Maruf, M. (1977). Iqbal’s Philosophy of Knowledge. In: Contributions to Iqbal’s Thought, pp. 1–16. Lahore: Islamic Book
Service.
Shah, M. (2007). Iqbal’s Appropriation of Evolution in Islam: A Critique, Iqbal Review: Journal of the Iqbal Academy
Pakistan, 48.
Shah, M. (2011). Is Religion Compatible with Modern Science? an Appraisal of Iqbal’s Modernist Compatibility Thesis,
European Journal of Science and Theology, 7, pp. 29–46.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Religion Compass 8/2 (2014): 60–69, 10.1111/rec3.12093