IQBAL'S METAPHYSICS – I

(19.4.1968)

Most intellectuals who discuss the ideological problems of the Muslims in the context of modern times, of necessity arrive at the Iqbalian revolution in Islamic thought. And all those who arrive there, of necessity ask themselves two questions: (a) what kind of a revolutionary Iqbal was? (b) in what did he differ from those who call themselves "exponents of Islam" and who, in my opinion, ought to be called neo-obscurantists and perverters of his thought?

Neo-obscurantists are divided into many schools, but in one thing they are all united; namely in their attempt to use the authority of Iqbal's name to defeat Iqbal's purpose. They failed to effectively oppose the mighty movement for self realisation and self-determination which his thought initiated; so the next best thing that they have chosen to undertake is to debase that thought, to cover up its essential features and to reclaim Iqbal for the purpose of orthodox reaction and enlist him into the ranks of the unthinking mullahs, who in his life time dubbed him as a kafir for his unorthodox opinions about the Quran, the Sunnah and the Shariat.

Some intellectuals say that Iqbal had nothing to do with any kind of modernism in thought, that he believed in turning back the clock, that it is falsifying his thought to attribute to him any kind of modern ideas on religion, society, economy, polity or culture. As a proof they put forth Iqbal's total commitment to Islam, his complete faith in the Quran, his unqualified love for the personality of the Holy Prophet (peace be on him).

Considering that all other arguments have been exhausted, it was only to be expected that this kind of emotional playing to the gallery would be resorted to. But what exactly does that argument mean? Islam certainly is the essence of Iqbal's thought. But which Islam"? Is it the same which he characterised thus: "Nor can the concepts of theological systems, draped in the terminology of a practically dead metaphysics be of any help to those who possess a different intellectual background." (Lectures. Page 97). It is the Quran which forms the source of Iqbal's view of reality and the possibility of the knowledge of that reality. But does the Quran mean the same thing to Iqbal as it meant to the followers of the "theological systems" referred to in the above quotation? What is most true is that Iqbal had the love of the Prophet Mohammad (Peace be upon him) in his heart as the supreme motive power of his personality, and that he gave 'the same importance to the guidance of the Sunnat as to the Quran. But how has this been taken to mean that the Sunnat meant the same thing to Iqbal as it did to the orthodoxy?

If Islam and the Quran and the Sunnat meant the same to him as to the orthodox obscurantist crowd who had become a dead weight on the body politic of Islam, creating ever new sects and rifts in the Ummat on the basis of its endless hair-splitting about unimportant secondary issues of the, faith, what was the purpose of his life's work, and why was he such a red rag to the bulls of orthodoxy?

The fact of the matter is that Iqbal's view of Islam is radically different from that of prevailing theological schools of his (and our) times. Where the devotees of the "dead metaphysics" stressed the ritualistic or the dogmatic part of I religion, for Iqbal its real value was its capacity for giving to modern Man the strength to tide over the crisis that had overtaken him and to prepare him for responsible action in the revolutionary times that we are living through. "And religion, which in its higher manifestation is neither dogma, nor priesthood, nor ritual, can alone ethically prepare the modern man for the burden of the great responsibility which the advancement of modern science necessarily involves, and restore to him that attitude of faith which makes him capable of winning a personality here and retaining it hereafter." (Lectures p. 187).

Being a Muslim horn he could not dispense with the forms of religious ritualistic behaviour patterns. They were necessary for maintenance of the identity of his people. But they were not the essence of religion to him. Islam, as far as he was concerned, was not a dogma opposed to other religious dogmas. It was the most dynamic view of Reality and of Man's participation in it that he knew of. It was the driving intellectual force which had given form to the history of the world civilisation of which Iqbal formed a part, and which had given to the West the methodology of its modern culture. On the ritualistic forms of Islam depended the continuity of our religious culture and the personal and collective identity and integration of our people in a world of aggressive conflicting nationaisms, but the essence which has been lost in the decadence of the last centuries was the dynamic spirit and outlook of the Quran and the Sunnat. And it is this that Iqbal tried to revive and reestablish.

There were two forces which were eating into the body politic of Islam. The first was cultural invasion of imperialist Europe which made the modern Muslims into superficial copies of Europeans without giving them any inkling of the real basis of the vitality and power of Europe --the scientific, objective, concrete view of reality and the urge to conquer nature thereby. It had turned the Muslims away from their history and culture without giving them any but the most superifical trappings of Western culture in return.

The other -- the subjective -- cause of decadence was an anti-rational blind pursuit of various schools of traditional thought, rejecting every thing that was foreign, afraid of scientific attitude in all things, spiritual and material, and guiding the Millat into the changeless grooves of a deadly orthodoxy. "The pure brow of Tauhid has received more or less an impress of heathenism, and the universal and impersonal character of the ethical ideals of Islam has been lost through a process of loalisation. The only alternative open to us thus is to tear off from Islam the hard crust which has immobilised an essentially dynamic outlook on life, and to rediscover the original varities of freedom, equality and solidarity with a view' to rebuilding our moral, social and political ideals out of their original simplicity and universality." (Lectures. p. 156).

How to get back to the "original simplicity"? How to recover the "dynamic outlook on life?" There were two sources of the degradation which had overtaken the people; the cure was also to be two-fold. Leaving the "practically dead metaphysics" on one side Iqbal looks to the task ahead: "The task before the modem Muslim is, therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past." (Lectures p. 97). This is in view of the immobilising effect of the orthodox theology. As for the alluring glitter of European imperialist culture," the only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us." (Lectures p. 97)

This was the objective of Iqbal in his poetry as well as in his lectures, essays and letters. In the course of his work he came into conflict with all those who wished the Muslims to rest content with the traditional modes of thinking about Islam and about Reality, and with those who tried to foist new-fangled messianic sectarian creeds on a people already divided into a myriad of warring schismatic groups and splinter groups. The irony is that the very forces which opposed him tooth and nail during his life time are now trying to take him over and adopt him as a champion of their divisive reactionary points of views.

The way out of the confusion that is being created by these obscurantist forces regarding Iqbal's objectives and views is simply to read him, and not to read his interpreters. Especially fruitful is a study of his Lectures. This is necessary because here he has tackled in a comprehensive and connected manner, in cold prose rather than in emotionally charged verse loaded with allusion and metaphor, the fundamentals of Islamic thought on which the political, economic, social and cultural forms of a renascent Muslim collective can be based in the times that we are living through: "What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live: Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that benefits the place we occupy?" (Lectures p.1) These opening lines of the Lectures clearly point out that Iqbal recognised the necessity of going afresh into the epistemology; ontology, ethics and politics of the Islamic faith. For the orthodox theologian these questions were settled. The universe was the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian universe which the Mutakallimin of the early centuries had taken over from the Greeks; the permanent element was the artificer God that the commoners or the sufis or the philosophers had evolved; our relation to Him was of the nature of passively determined or absolutely irresponsible beings; dependent by the thread of a Christian-like grace which would ultimately wash away our sins if only we made the Prophet (Peace be upon him) our intercesscr and intermediary; the place we occupied in the universe was destined to be that of a chosen people, who were superior to humanity just because we belonged, not because we understood the necessities of the faith we pretended to profess; "the conduct that befits the place we occupy" was to talk often of the glorious deeds our fathers wrought, without bothering to understand why or how they performed those miracles.

This was the way of those who refused to recognise the facts. It continues to be their way.

Iqbal's way was different. He could not shut his eyes to the destruction and disintegration that had overtaken his people. He applied the light of reason to everything. He followed the Sunnat in its essence when he recalled the constant prayer of the Man he followed: "God! grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things".

Iqbal had realised that the modem educated youth of our times is not to be satisfied with mere emotional appeals to be good. Religious doctrine must be based on reason and not on dogma. True that religious experience in its highest form is intuitive, reason and intuition "spring up from the same root and complement each other. The one grasps! Reality piece-meal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the temporal aspect of reality ... Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation ... in fact intuition, as Bergson rightly says, is only a higher kind of intellect." (Lectures p. 2-3).

This much will suffice about the instruments of investigation that Iqbal preferred in opposition to those to whom "Iman Bil Ghaib" meant a blind anti-rational attitude to Reality. Religious experience was a necessary part of human life and it was as empirical as the content of the scientific method. God was not an anthropomorphic reality and yet He was not a mere concept. He can be object of direct and immediate experience. "We know God just as we known other objects." (Lectures p. 18).

A great part of the Lectures is devoted to the re- evaluation of Islamic thought regarding the relationship of the ultimate and temporal reality, of the absolute and the relative. The dichotomy that had been created between the world of spirit and the world of matter necessitated that this should be so. Iqbal's concept of the deity does not concern us here, but it is well to point out that though he believes in a personal God, it is not by any chance the enlarged image of the human person that he means and which our theologians imply. Nor does he place God outside of the universe either, as the first Cause. For him the Deity touches in a mysterious way every particle of the universe. "The infinite does not exclude the finite, it embraces the finite without effacing its finitude, and explains and justifies its being." (Lectures p. 29).

The real purpose, however, of the criticism of theology that Iqbal undertook was to bring the Muslims back to (a) their empirical attitude of early centuries, and (b) the realisation of the concreteness of the phenomenon. The first is well known enough for me to elaborate on it here. Suffice it to say that Iqbal rejects the speculative aspect of philosophical knowledge, inherent in the deductive method of reasoning indulged in by our schoolmen, old and new, as a barren pursuit, and calls on the Muslims to appreciate the inductive method on which modem science is based, and which is the peculiar contribution of Islam to the culture of humanity.

More important, however, though related, aspect of Iqbal's thought is his stress on the concreteness, the reality and the materiality of phenomena. This is in direct opposition to the theologian's concoction of a "purely spiritual" world as the real object of thought. "It is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which trains us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal. Reality lives in its own appearances; and such a being as man, who has to maintain his life in an obstructing environment, cannot afford to ignore the visible. The Quran, opens our eyes to the great fact of change, through the appreciation and control of which alone it is possible to build a durable civilisation. The cultures of Asia , and in fact of the whole ancient world, failed because they approached Reality exclusively from within and moved from within outwards. This procedure gave them theory without power, and on mere theory no durable civilisation can be based". (Lectures p. 14-.15)

The critics will object that this is materialism. Yes it is materialism, though Iqbal spoke often against the materialist view of life. But what he meant by his criticism is again not the same as the point of view of the theologian who in any case is talking not about the philosophical entity called materialism but rather the love of wealth. Observable phenomenon of nature are real. "The physicist begins and ends with sensible phenomenon Physics studies the material world; that is to say, the world revealed by the senses". (Lectures Page J2) But the traditional theory of matter known as, mechanical materialism is wholly untenable; because of its subjectivism it "reduces one half of nature to a dream and the other half to a conjecture": (P 33). "Objects, then are not subjective states caused by something imperceptible called matter, they are genuine phenomena which constitute the very substance of Nature and which we know as they are in nature". (P. 34) Iqbal's attack on mechanical materialism is not on the basis of its holding matter as the supreme reality but on the basis of its reducing it to isolated sense data, to subjective solipsist states, and thus taking away from life and nature its concreteness and reality. "Knowledge", however, "must begin with the concrete. It is the intellectual capture of, and power over, the concrete that makes it possible for the intellect of man to pass beyond the concrete". (Lectures p.131) That is why Iqbal characterised the peculiar spirit of Islamic culture in these words, "the first important point to note about the spirit of Muslim culture is that for purposes of knowledge it fixes its gaze on the concrete, the finite". (Lectures Page 131).

What is the nature of the concrete phenomena? In the light of the above we can safely say that Iqbal is in no sense negating the prevailing .modern scientific, materialistic attitude to finite material reality, transformed in the light of the new macrocosmic view of Relativity physics and the new microcosmic view of Quantum physics. He is rather affirming it. Only the orthodox theologian continues to labour under the outmoded Aristotelian categories of Matter and Spirit, as understood by the Greeks and the neo- Platonists.

NOTES:

1. Published in The Pakistan Times. 19.4.68