The Living Tradition: Muhammad Iqbal and the Architecture of Modern Faith

An essay for Iqbal’s birthday

Today, 9 November, is the 149th anniversary of the birth of Muhammad Iqbal, who was born in Sialkot in 1877 to Sheikh Noor Muhammad, a tailor of modest means, and Imam Bibi. Nothing about that household suggested that its son would become one of the most studied figures of the twentieth-century Muslim world. He lived only sixty years, dying in Lahore in April 1938, yet universities across several continents have produced an enormous body of scholarship on him, with theses at every level and academic chairs and departments in his name. His books have been translated into dozens of languages. The figures quoted for these achievements vary from source to source, and some of the grander claims, such as precise global rankings of the world’s most-read poets, are hard to verify. What no one disputes is the scale of the afterlife.

For most people in South Asia, Iqbal is first a voice in the ear. Children learn his couplets in school, politicians quote him from podiums, and his Urdu verse is sung at gatherings of every kind. This is how Urdu made him the beloved poet of the subcontinent, and the affection is deserved. But it also hides something. Most of his poetry is in Persian, perhaps as much as two-thirds of it by volume, in books such as Asrar-e-Khudi, Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, Payam-e-Mashriq, Zabur-e-Ajam and Javed Nama. Persian was the language in which Iqbal addressed the wider Muslim world, from Iran to Central Asia, and it carried his most sustained philosophical ideas. Someone who knows only Bang-e-Dara and Bal-e-Jibril has met the door of the house and perhaps the courtyard, but not the rooms where the thinking was done.

The foundation of that house is a modest book in English. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam grew out of lectures that Iqbal delivered in the late 1920s in Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh. The first edition appeared in 1930 with six lectures, and a later edition added a seventh. It is not an easy read, and it was never meant to be a popular one. It was addressed to educated Muslims who had been taught that faith and modern learning were enemies, and to Western readers who assumed the same thing from the other side. Iqbal’s purpose was to show that this quarrel rested on a mistake.

He had the training to make the attempt. After schooling in Sialkot, where his teacher Mir Hasan encouraged his poetry and his mind, he took his master’s degree in philosophy at Government College, Lahore, in 1899. He then went to Europe, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, qualified as a barrister, and took a doctorate at Munich in 1908 with a dissertation on the development of metaphysics in Persia. He was equally at home in Rumi and in Bergson, in the Quran and in Kant, and the lectures draw freely on all of them. This is why scholars as different as Annemarie Schimmel, who devoted years of her life to him and translated the lectures into German, and the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati argued that Iqbal deserves to be read as a philosopher no less than as a poet. If the poetry is the heart, as the saying goes, the lectures are the mind that governs it.

The central diagnosis in the lectures is blunt. Iqbal believed that the Muslim world had fallen behind not because Islam was weak but because Muslim thought had stopped moving. While science, philosophy and the social sciences were being remade in Europe, much of the Muslim world remained absorbed in inherited debates, repeating the conclusions of earlier centuries as if the questions had been permanently closed. He did not reject the tradition. He wanted it brought back to life, and the lectures are an attempt to show how.

The first lecture argues that religious experience is a legitimate form of knowledge alongside observation and reason, and that the Quran itself repeatedly calls on believers to reflect on nature, so that the scientific habit of mind is not foreign to the faith. The second takes this into the philosophical arena, testing the claims of religious experience against modern thought, with Bergson and Whitehead as important interlocutors. Iqbal’s position is that such experience is not an illusion but a direct awareness that goes beyond reasoning without contradicting it.

The third lecture, on the idea of God and the meaning of prayer, rejects the remote and static deity that he associated with Greek philosophy. The God of the Quran, for Iqbal, is living and creative, active in the universe at every moment, and prayer is not the recitation of formulas but the self’s reaching toward that greater reality. The fourth turns to the human being, and here the lectures meet the poetry most directly. This is the philosophical source of the doctrine of khudi, selfhood, which Iqbal had already set out in verse in Asrar-e-Khudi. A person is not simply clay shaped by fate but a free and responsible self, who makes his own destiny and grows through effort, and death is not the end of that growth but a stage in it.

In the fifth lecture Iqbal turns to the spirit of Muslim culture, arguing that its foundation is tawhid, the oneness of God, which is not only a creed but a principle with consequences. If God is one, human beings stand equal before Him, and the barriers of race, colour, territory and nation lose their final authority. The sixth lecture, on the principle of movement in the structure of Islam, is the most practically important. The Quran and the Sunnah, Iqbal says, are fixed, but jurisprudence is human work, and every generation has both the right and the duty of ijtihad, fresh reasoning on new problems. He went on to make a proposal that was daring for its time, that in a modern Muslim state an elected legislature could serve as the vehicle of collective ijtihad, rather than leaving that task entirely to individual scholars. The seventh lecture closes by asking whether religion is possible in the modern age at all. His answer is that science has given humanity power but not peace, and that a living faith, rooted in an awakened self, is what can restore the missing balance.

It is common to say that Pakistan’s idea was born in these lectures, and the claim needs a little care. The clearest public statement of Iqbal’s political vision is his presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad in December 1930, where he argued for a consolidated Muslim state in the north-west of the subcontinent. The lectures are not a political programme. What they provide is the intellectual setting: a conviction that Islam is a social and ethical order as well as a private belief, that its principles must be capable of renewal, and that Muslims need the freedom to work out their own institutions. Pakistani institutions have since invoked his idea of ijtihad in debates about law and legislation, and arguments continue over how faithfully they have done so. Iqbal himself would probably have been the first to insist that a living tradition is argued over rather than simply obeyed.

Any honest portrait of Iqbal has to deal with the questions his critics raise. He accepted a knighthood from the British Crown in 1923, and he served as a member of the Punjab Legislative Council. Admirers point out that a professor’s salary and a legislator’s role are not secret favours, that his poetry sharply criticized European imperialism and its civilization, and that he used the platforms available to him to speak for Muslim interests. Critics see compromise. The fair reading is probably that he worked inside the possibilities of his time, as most public figures under colonial rule had to, while his most important writing was consistently critical of the order that granted him the title. The Nobel Prize question, which comes up often in Pakistan, is murkier than defenders sometimes allow. Tagore won in 1913 for Gitanjali, which he had translated himself, whereas Nicholson’s English version of Iqbal’s Persian masterpiece appeared in 1920, and translated poetry has always struggled to travel. Why no prize followed is a matter of speculation, not record.

What is certain is that Iqbal was never content to be admired passively. His entire message is a call to action: to know oneself, to reason freely and to build. Poets in his tradition were expected to console, but Iqbal wanted to unsettle his readers into growth. The famous lines in which he asks God what His will is, and speaks of the self so strengthened that God Himself asks the servant what he desires, are not mere ornament. They compress the argument of the fourth lecture into a single image, the human being as a participant in creation, not a spectator.

That is perhaps the best reason to read the lectures today. The questions Iqbal raised have not gone away. Can a faith tradition remain itself while engaging honestly with science? How can inherited law respond to circumstances its authors never imagined? What happens to a society that has acquired technical power but lost its inner compass? These are as pressing for Muslim societies now as they were in 1928, and for many non-Muslim ones too. Iqbal’s answers are not beyond criticism, and several of his claims have been vigorously contested by theologians, philosophers and historians. But he asked the questions seriously, and he did so in a spirit of confidence rather than defensiveness, which is rarer than it should be.

On his birthday, then, the most fitting tribute may be a change of habit. Memorize the couplets by all means, since they are a treasure. But take down the English lectures too, and perhaps one of the Persian mathnavis in a good translation, and read them slowly and critically, as Iqbal wanted to be read. A reader who stops at the verse has met the music. A reader who goes on to the lectures begins to meet the mind.