The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam by Muhammad Iqbal: a preface and seven lectures, delivered at the request of the Madras Muslim Association at Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh. Iqbal sets out to reconstruct Muslim religious philosophy in the light of its philosophical tradition and of modern knowledge. This is the author's own reading, offered as a critical and revisable effort. ^{1 2}

Edition note: this record is a draft from a machine-read copy. The edition, year and publisher are not verified.

Iqbal holds that the Qur'an stresses deed more than idea, that the modern mind has become less capable of the inner experience on which faith rests, and that the scientific form of religious knowledge is a natural demand. He treats the Sufi orders of his time as unable to draw on modern thought. ²

The lecture asks questions shared by religion, philosophy and poetry, and separates them: poetry gives individual, figurative knowledge; religion aims at a direct vision of reality; philosophy, in spirit, is free inquiry. Iqbal holds that religion has a cognitive side and needs a rational basis, and that rationalising faith does not make philosophy superior to religion. ^{3 4}

He reads Ghazali as founding religion on philosophical scepticism, a basis he does not consider fully safe or wholly in the spirit of the Qur'an, and compares Ghazali with Kant: both limited reason, but Ghazali moved to mystical experience to find religion an independent content. Iqbal argues that thought and intuition are organically related and that thought is not essentially finite. ^{4 5 6}

He proposes a view of the universe as dynamic and open to extension, of man as a being with a trust and a capacity to shape his destiny, and of knowledge as naming and conceiving things. The Qur'an, in his reading, directs attention to the observable, and he adds the fu'ad or qalb as an inner insight (see fu'ad and qalb). ^{7 8 9}

He treats religious experience as a fact among the facts of experience. He reports the Prophet ﷺ's observation of a Jewish youth, Ibn Sayyad, as the first critical observation of psychic phenomena in Islam, and credits Ibn Khaldun with the first critical reflection on mystical consciousness. He lists four features of mystical experience: an objective content, an unanalysable wholeness, an encounter with a Unique Other Self, and incommunicability. He reads Freud's account of the satanic as lacking adequate evidence. ^{10 11 12 13}

He ends by proposing two tests for the claims of religious experience, an intellectual test (critical interpretation) and a pragmatic test (judging by fruits), and says he will apply the intellectual test in Lecture II (see the two tests). ¹⁴

The contents list names Lecture II (the philosophical test of the revelations of religious experience), III (the conception of God and the meaning of prayer), IV (the human ego, its freedom and immortality), V (the spirit of Muslim culture), VI (the principle of movement in the structure of Islam) and VII (is religion possible?). These are not covered in this record. ¹