Table of contents;

Allam Muhammad Iqbal and Religion

Iqbals concept of God God as, The Perfect Individual The Uniqueness of God God as Light;

Iqbals Love of the Prophet(SAW) The Possibility and Necessity of Religion Religion and Spiritual Value Religion and Change Iqbals concept of ijtihad Iqbal and the Sufi Tradition

In the name of Allah, the Creator of the universe, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful. Peace and blessings be upon His last messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him), his companions and those who follow him up to the Day of Judgment

Allam Muhammad Iqbal and Religion;

Religion, for Iqbal, was not a finished set of propositions dictated by a deity, mandating total and blind submission to its will. It was an attitude of open and objective empiricism resulting in constant renewal and innovation of its precepts. Iqbal was a great religious person. He has highlighted the importance of religion in many ways.His six English lectures were published first from Lahore in 1930 and then by Oxford University press in 1934 in a book titled The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Which were read at Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh. Justice Javed Iqbal in his commentary on Iqbals lectures has written that it is useless to try to understand Iqbals poetry without understanding his views as described in his prose, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. These lectures dwell on the role of Islam as a religion as well as a political and legal philosophy in the modern age. In these lectures Iqbal firmly rejects the political attitudes and conduct of Muslim politicians, whom he saw as morally misguided, attached to power and without any standing with Muslim masses. Iqbal expressed fears that not only would secularism weaken the spiritual foundations of Islam and Muslim society but that India's Hindu-majority population would crowd out Muslim heritage, culture and political influence. In his travels to Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, he promoted ideas of greater Islamic political co-operation and unity, calling for the shedding of nationalist differences. In the preface of Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he wrote:

It must be remembered that there is no such thing as finality in philosophical thinking. As knowledge advances and fresh avenues of thought are opened, other views, and probably sounder views than those set forth in these Lectures, are possible. Our duty is carefully to watch the

progress of human thought, and to maintain an independent critical attitude towards it.
The main objective of Iqbals poetry and prose was a constructive critique of traditional Islamic doctrines and jurisprudence which he thought had been static for more than 500 years. His book Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam a compilation of his lectures, calls for radical reinterpretation of Islamic theology, highlighting that the canonical schools of Islamic thought were based on human interpretations of the QURAN and traditions of the Prophet made in the Abassid period. He stressed the need to formulate human laws in keeping with the necessities of modern times through democratically elected legislative assemblies unfettered by the traditions of earlier generations. None of the Islamic doctrines including those pertaining to Prophethood, God, afterlife, destiny or prayer were too sacred for him to reinterpret, a process he called reconstruction.

Iqbals concept of God;

Iqbal expressed the ideas about his concept of God in his poetry. In Baal-e-Jibreel, Iqbal wrote: Destroyed is the first and last, destroyed is the hidden and manifest. Whether a pattern is old or new, its ultimate destination is destruction. But eternal is the pattern that has been perfected by a man of God. Iqbal did not believe in the idea of God of monotheism. He often used the terms God and Universe synonymously implying that they were practically the same. He described the relationship between God and man on the analogy of whole and part and expressed it frequently in his poetry using a wide range of metaphors which included ocean/wave, ocean/pearls, garden/fragrance and QURAN/Seepara among others. In Reconstruction he wrote: Like pearls do we live and move and have our being in the perpetual flow of Divine life. (The Conception Of God And Meaning Of Prayer, Reconstruction).

Iqbal used terms such as Nature, Universe, Truth and Realty with the word God but imbued them with new meanings rejecting the traditional meanings associated with these words. He also used the terms Ultimate Ego and all inclusive Ego to express his concept of God which he said was an all inclusive whole comprised by the whole of creation.

! If God was a totality of which creation was part and humanity the most advanced among the creation with a sophisticated and complex consciousness, Divinity essentially resided in humanity. Thus even though there is a conception of God in Iqbals work, his philosophy is not theistic in its practical implications. Iqbal rejected orthodox religious views about the creation of the universe. He did not believe in the personal God of monotheism who dictated laws. According to Iqbal, God did not exist as a distinct entity outside the universe; instead, He was a Creative Force inherent in the universe that resulted in creation. God, in his view, was organically related to the creation forming the ground of created objects.

God as, The Perfect Individual;

There is Iqbals sense that God is the Perfect Individual in His having a real personality which humans can recognize and which we can address in prayer and worship. Because His personality is real, we may have a truly personal relationship with Him, though without His being limited thereby. Gods personality remains qualitatively other than ours, for it is perfect and our personalities are subject to all kinds of imperfection. So the relationship we have with God, the Perfect Individual, provides the ground of hope that, through prayerful participation in the life of Reality.

The Uniqueness of God;

Iqbals this point follows from the surah IKHLAS of this Quranic chapter: He begetteth not, and He is not begotten, and there is none like unto Him.

He rejects the concept of trinity of christanity.

God as Light;
Light Verse in Surat al-nur, The Chapter of Light. I rehearse the well-known verse in English,

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and with it a Lamp: The Lamp enclosed in Glass: The Glass as it were a brilliant Star: Lit from a blessed Tree, An Olive neither of the East nor the West, Whose Oil is well nigh luminous Though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light!
Light gives life, Iqbal reminds us, recalling other Beautiful Names of God in the Quran: al-hayyul-qayyum. But it is again in physics that he finds his key to interpreting the Quranic metaphor of God as Light.

Iqbals Love of the Prophet;(SAW)

Without a doubt, his love of and for the Prophet ran deeply through the piety of his own life, throughout which he meditated upon the beauty (jamal) and majesty (jalal) of what he held to be the perfection of Muhammads humanity as the Chosen One (almustafa), the Seal of the Prophets (khatim al-nabiyyin). In his nat poetry, in his poetic stanzas that he expressed most sonification of fulfilled human potentiality.Iqbal recall the Prophet merely as a hero of the past, but relates to him as a living inspiration in the lives of devout Muslims through all ages. In the great Javidnama, for example, he captures the Quranic mystery of spiritual intimacy between the believers and the Prophet who is nearer to them than their own souls (33, 6): A beloved is hidden in your heart; in the Muslims heart there is Muhammads home; all our glory is from his name. His use of pronouns in this stanza skillfully underscores the inseparability of individual and community which, as we have seen, inheres his understanding of the polity of Islam, and which now we see to be animated by the spiritual reality of the Prophet. Hidden in the heart of the believer, the

glory of the entire community derives from his name; or as Iqbal expressed it on another occasion: love for the Prophet runs like blood in the veins of his community.

The Possibility and Necessity of Religion;

Is religion possible? asked Iqbal in the last of the lectures on The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. He asked the question in face of the challenge of modern science and philosophy which has grown immeasurably more powerful in our own times. Like Iqbal we want to say yes, The reality of religion, and that which makes it not only possible but necessary, is a search for a larger life. In this search religion is not against the discoveries of modern science or the discussions of modern philosophy, but must seek to penetrate through them in the certainty that the essence of all reality is spiritual. For Iqbal this in no sense meant that religion is a spiritual escape from reality. He saw religion as necessary.

Religion and Spiritual Value

Iqbal says that Religion is necessary to restore three essential facilities to humanity: I. II. III. A spiritual interpretation of the universe the spiritual emancipation of the individual; And basic principle of a universal import to direct the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis.

Iqbal says that nationalism and communism cannot provide the solution for the ethical problems of human beings.islam is only way to provide the solution.

Religion and Change;

Iqbal says that Prophetic religion is by nature dynamic in that it stands for social change, by time and motion. Iqbal saw reality as being ever in a state of movement from which religion cannot be exempted. To the reality of change, indeed, religion must relate its own self-understanding, itself engaging in a constant process of inner evolution in order to give spiritual and ethical direction to the movement of change in the rest of human society.

 Iqbals concept of ijtihad;

Iqbal expressed this concept in the classical Islamic juristic word ijtihad, which he elaborated in his memorable lecture on The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam. Ijtihad means to exert oneself with a view to forming an independent judgements, and as a fundamental principle of Islamic thought Iqbal drew his understanding of it from the Quran and the hadith. To those who exert themselves We show Our Path, God is heard to say in the Quran; and on many occasions in his ministry the Prophet .Muhammad encouraged his followers to exercise their own judgment over a wide range of issues after giving careful consideration to the guidance of the Quran and his own example (sunnah).

Iqbal and the Sufi Tradition;

In his mature thought Iqbal emphatically chose Sufi tradition. From this position he could be stridently critical of ibn `Arabi and the so called wujudis whom he accused of propounding a world-denying spirituality which undermined human energy, responsibility and activity. There are moments, indeed, when Iqbal seems to reject the entire mystical tradition for this reason, opposing it with the alternative of what he termed prophetic religion which gives full and firm place to ethical dynamism. But we must recognize here an element of hyperbole, characteristic of the way Iqbal frequently expressed himself. He certainly subjected aspects of Sufism to searching criticism, but he never renounced the validity of the spiritual, psychological and ethical concerns. Nowhere in his writing does he make the point more forcefully than in the opening paragraph of his lecture on The Spirit of Muslim Culture: Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest heaven and re-turned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned. These are the words of the great Muslim saint, `Abdul Quddus of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will probably be difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of `unitary experience. The Prophets return is creative. He returns to insert himself into the sweep of For the mystic the repose of unitary experience is something final; for the prophet it is the awakening, within him, of world-shaking psychological forces, calculated completely to transform the human world.