Reconstruction Of Religious thoughts of Islam
By
Introduction:
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is a compilation of lectures delivered by Muhammad Iqbal on Islamic philosophy; it was published in 1930. These lectures were delivered by Iqbal in Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh. The last chapter, "Is Religion Possible", was added to the book from the 1934 Oxford Edition onwards.
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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 befits the place we
occupy? These questions are common to religion, philosophy, and higher
poetry.
The
teaching of the Qur'an that life is a process of progressive creation
necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of
its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.
since
God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God
virtually amounts to man's loyalty to his own ideal nature. The
ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam,
is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change. A society based
on such a conception of Reality must reconcile, in its life, the
categories of permanence and change. It must possess eternal
principles to regulate its collective life, for the eternal gives us a
foothold in the world of perpetual change. But eternal principles
when they are understood to exclude all possibilities of change which,
according to the Qur'ān, is one of the greatest `signs' of God, tend
to immobilize what is essentially mobile in its nature. The failure of
the Europe in political and social sciences illustrates the former
principle, the immobility of Islam during the last five hundred years
illustrates the latter.
What then is the principle of movement in the structure of Islam? This is known as Ijtihād.
What then is the principle of movement in the structure of Islam? This is known as Ijtihād.
The teaching of the Qur'ān that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.
Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as
something focal in the process of reflective synthesis. Nor is there any
reason to suppose that thought and intuition are essentially opposed
to each other. They spring up from the same root and complement each
other. The one grasps Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the
temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole
of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly
specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for
exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual
rejuvenation. Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals
itself to them in accordance with their function in life.
Some Quotes from the book
- ...To have a succession of identical thoughts and feelings is to have no thoughts and feelings at all. Such is the lot of most Muslim countries today. They are mechanically repeating old values...
- ...space, time, and matter are interpretations which thought puts on the free creative energy of God.
- If the aim of religion is the spiritualisation of the heart, then it must penetrate the soul of man, and it can best penetrate the inner man . . . We find that when Muhammad Ibn Tumart—the Mahdi of Muslim Spain—who was Berber by nationality, came to power and established the pontifi cal rule of the Muwahhidun, he ordered for the sake of the illiterate Berbers that the Quran should be translated and read in the Berber language and that the call to prayer should be given in Berber.
- Such is the attitude of the modern Turk, inspired as he is by the realities of experience, and not by the scholastic reasoning of jurists who lived and thought under different conditions of life. To my mind these arguments, if rightly appreciated, indicate the birth of an International ideal, which forming the very essence of Islam, has been hitherto overshadowed or rather displaced by Arabian Imperialism of the earlier centuries in Islam.
- The republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that were set free in the world of Islam.
- The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in important respects, from our own
- Hard his lot and frail his being, like a rose leaf, yet no form of reality is so powerful, so inspiring, and so beautiful as the spirit of man.
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