Religious experience

For Muhammad Iqbal, religious experience is the inner experience on which faith rests. In Lecture I of his book he treats it as one of the data of human experience, not reducible to the data of natural science, and holds that its claims must be tested by the general standards of knowledge. ¹

Iqbal describes the mystical state as having objective content, an unanalysable wholeness, an encounter with a Unique Other Self that momentarily transcends the person, and a content that cannot be communicated, only its interpretation. This is his reading, not a ruling of the museum. ^{2 3}

He argues that religion interprets a region of experience that physics and chemistry do not, and that the conflict between religion and science comes from confusing the two regions. ⁴