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Fu'ad and qalb (the heart as insight)

الفؤاد والقلب

Two Qur'anic words, fu'ad and qalb, used for an inner faculty of insight that sees and understands and through which a person reaches aspects of reality that the senses alone do not reach. Muhammad Iqbal places it beside sense-perception in Lecture I, and reads it as a way of dealing with reality rather than a special hidden faculty.

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Region
Global / Diaspora
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Spirituality and SufismPhilosophy and logic

Overview

The Qur'an uses fu'ad and qalb (heart) for an inner faculty of insight that sees and understands, through which a person reaches aspects of reality the senses alone do not reach. Muhammad Iqbal places it beside sense-perception in Lecture I and holds that it is a way of dealing with reality, not a special hidden faculty, with no part played by physiological sensation. 1 2

His reading

Iqbal holds that what the fu'ad reports is not false when properly interpreted. This is his reading of the text, not a ruling of the museum. 2

Connections

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Mentioned in
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

People and things also explored

Religious experience· Tests of religious experience: intellectual and pragmatic· Tasawwuf· Ibn Khaldun· The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam· Seeking knowledge· Abu Hamid al-Ghazali· ابن رشد الحفيد

Sources

  1. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Muhammad Iqbal (edition not verified) , p.11
  2. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Muhammad Iqbal (edition not verified) , p.12
Cite this page

islam.museum contributors. “Fu'ad and qalb (the heart as insight)”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/concept/fuad-heart-as-insight/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-10-18.

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Wing

Ideas

Beliefs, concepts, sciences and schools, explained in plain words. Related

Religious experience

The inner experience on which faith rests, in the view of Muhammad Iqbal. In Lecture I he treats it as one of the data of human experience, not reducible to the data of natural science, whose claims must be tested by the standards of knowledge in general.