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An Interesting Islamic Philosopher: Allama Iqbal
Allama Iqbal is a very interesting Islamic philosopher of the Indian Subcontinent. From the early 1900s, the national poet of Pakistan, and the only philosopher I know of who has an international airport named after him. Esteemed by–oh, I don’t know–maybe only half a billion people. Maybe more. Or maybe just a quarter-billion. I don’t know.
I can’t pretend to have the Quran-reading skills, the Rumi skills, the Urdu skills, the Persian skills, the history skills, or any of various other talents I’d need to be able to introduce Iqbal properly. But there’s one thing I can do better than just about anyone: I can read a neat little book and explain some of what its sentences mean.
Just some. Not all–good Heavens, no! Do I look like I have that kind of time, or that kind of brain, or all those skills? But then–no one does anyway. The perfect Iqbal scholar does not exist, and an imperfect philosophy reader like me can still help with his book.
Specifically, I’m talking about The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Here’s the Rumble channel where I explain it (and here’s where you can subscribe to me on Rumble), and here’s the YouTube playlist. New Iqbal videos–a series of 34 of them!–have been coming out every Thursday on Rumble since May. YouTube is lagging behind; the new series will start there in September.
Here are a few tips on some interesting stuff in this book.
Iqbal is one of those guys (like C. S. Lewis, the Dalai Lama, William James, and others) who explains that religion is empirical–meaning that religion is about getting knowledge from experience. A good first step in understanding his account is this definition of knowledge: experience + reflection. Knowledge is what happens when we carefully interpret experience.
Religious belief is also empirical; it’s a reflection on experience:
There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional. The facts of religious experience are facts among other facts of human experience and, in the capacity of yielding knowledge by interpretation, one fact is as good as another.
But obviously not every interpretation of experience is equally good. And our interpretations ought to be tested. That’s what we do with science, and we’re supposed to do it with religion too:
Nor is there anything irreverent in critically examining this region of human experience.
But do we have tests for religious belief? Yes, Iqbal says–two of them. There’s the intellectual test: Does the religious picture of the world fit with everything else we know about the world? And there’s the pragmatic test: Does a religion lead to good results? Iqbal spends a chapter of his book on each test.
And that’s still barely scratching the surface. There are whole layers to Iqbal’s empiricism that it’s easy to miss out on. For example, we aren’t supposed to just know about reality, but also interact with it. Here is my attempt to chart the connections between some of Iqbal’s ideas in this book. (I hope the letters aren’t too small!)
Now for two things in this book I enthusiastically agree with.
“All is holy ground,” he says. Everything created by G-d is good. Amen!
And human beings are the image of G-d, meaning that we are the representatives of G-d on earth with the responsibility to cultivate creation in G-d’s name–to join in G-d’s creative work. Amen!
Not that I can agree with Iqbal on everything. I disagree on redemption. Iqbal doesn’t believe in it. I do.
Anyway, this stuff is interesting. It’s not as important as the Bible, probably not as important as Augustine or Confucius. But it is kind of important, maybe much more so than my philosophical homeboys John Dewey and Seneca. And now you can even talk to your Pakistani friends about Iqbal!
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Actions may be more important that concepts in some cases but actions without concepts amount to thrashing around.
(I was going to go over the mind map until I found something to quibble with, and there it is.)
I’m pretty sure Iqbal agrees with that.
I know this flow chart isn’t a traditional, upper-middle-management-trying-to-justify-its-existence picture…but does it have a starting point? “Empirical account of religion”? “Religious experience is a real thing”? I will guess that “Matter is not independent of mind” is not a starting point, but rather feeds into a layer or two. Although that dotted line is an organizational no-no.
What I am guessing is the endpoint, down in the far southeast, has an exclamation point. That worries me. Well, the Pakistan part too. Maybe in Pakistan, the lack of a time horizon for experience + reflection is perfectly understandable. Meanwhile, thank you for the post, and thank you for encouraging me to think of other international airports named after philosophers! (So far: I can’t. It bothers me that the first few names that do come to mind that aren’t of politicians or of soldiers but of singers.)
Mind maps (and I take this as an example of one) may be structured but frequently aren’t. Sometimes the structure if there is one is added during refinement. There’s this whole gestalt thing going on.
There was no simple way to chart the connections of the ideas! I think it has about six starting points.
Those are three of the starting points. At least as far as this chart is concerned–meaning only that they feed into the other main ideas here, not so much vice versa.
But “Matter is not independent of mind” and “The human being is the image of G-d” do have their own supporting arguments from science, philosophy, and the Quran.
Oh. Well, oops, I guess.
I think Iqbal is happy with all of the insights he’s arriving at, but they do tend to lead to others, until we get to the last big ones–meaning that one, but also the one about human equality.
What about that big one worries you?
I’m not following you here.
Singers are the popular philosophers of the age, aren’t they? (Not my line; I forget who said it; maybe it was Ravi Zacharias.)
Yep.
The part of India which was to become Pakistan I think was in a very different place religiously around 1900 or so than it is today. Because of distance, history and the lack of a very interconnected dominant instantaneous worldwide media we have today , places like Pakistan then could stray far from the strict Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalism we see today. I believe the people of the steppes, which Pakistan had contact with for thousands of years and had a strong influence in that part of the world, had a very lax Sufi kind of Islam that was open to interpretations of Islam that would greatly displease the Wahhabi.
So it would not surprise me then that Islamic scholars then in that part of the world could question the strict tenets of Islam in a way that would get them killed today.
Well, there’s an airport named after Leonardo da Vinci in Fiumicino, Italy. Does that count at all? By the way, polymaths can’t sing. I’ve noticed that.
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “We win, They lose” is one hell of a philosophy.
John Wayne is a close runner-up: “Life is tough. It’s tougher if you are stupid.”
Helps to make it clickable and biggable:
Nicely done.
Interesting. I watched the first (latest) of your videos on the subject and will probably watch the others, too.
One suggestion: When reading an actual passage from the book, don’t drop your voice and read so fast. (Not that you did it all the time.) Maybe it’s just my old brain that no longer is able to do a sudden acceleration to keep up with a change of pace like that.
Do you have any information about what modern Islamic teachers make of this Iqbal. Is he considered too contaminated by the west? (Also, is there anyone in Pakistan who is not named Iqbal?)
Gee, thanks!
So more even volume and even pace, eh?
Yeah, I probably really suck at that sort of thing. I especially tend too talk to fast.
Most are not named Iqbal. “Butt” is a common surname, incidentally.
Iqbal is venerated like . . . George Washington or Thomas Jefferson used to be in America. I think few even in Pakistan have studied him, but some have, and everyone has heard something in history class or been assigned some of his poetry or something. Nearly everyone in Pakistan knows his poetry better than I do. Many do love him, and I don’t think I ever heard anyone complain about him being too western.
Some probably think he was too hardcore Islam! This is a plausible criticism. I vaguely remember reading him say something about the Ahmadis that I didn’t approve of. (In some other writing.)
One thing I’d kinda like to know more about is how many Muslims in India dig Iqbal. I know some do, but I’m not sure if it’s more like 50 million or more like 150 million.
Maybe. Our pastor does that in his sermons (lowers his voice and talks quickly in an aside) . Other people that he is facing seem to understand him (they laugh at his aside jokes) but I have no idea what he is saying at those times. I didn’t want you to start a habit like that, too. I’ve not watched a huge number of your videos, but I had never noticed you doing it before. There is a possibility that the problem is me and not you.
I wouldn’t rule it out.
However, I’m sure I have a problem! That’s exactly the sort of thing I would annoyingly do.
I was thinking about that some yesterday. I heard someone saying “It’s a religion” meaning that people who subscribed to the idea he was discussing were unthinking adherents and probably in it for status signaling rather than any sincere belief. Thinking about that I don’t think it judges religion aright. The church lady who goes primarily because that’s where the good gossip is at could be said to be in it for status signaling and perhaps be an unthinking adherent because her beliefs aren’t so much about what she holds to be true as what won’t get her gossiped about in turn. The martyr singing hymns on the way to the headsman’s block probably has a different motivation.
From a basic economic definition the martyr has to see more value in holding to his religion than he sees in losing his life. If he isn’t brainwashed into it entirely then somewhere along the way he’s got to look at his career path like Gru in the fourth panel of the meme and wonder if maybe “get executed for my beliefs” isn’t the hottest retirement plan.
I could see the gossip not having a good reason to follow her religion; the tenets of the faith have very little to do with what she’s getting out of it. I can’t see the martyr becoming a martyr without one; he’s got to have had the experience and the reflection.
Yes!