Philosophy
Iqbal reconstructs Islamic ideas of self, time and revelation through sustained engagement with modern philosophy and science.
Each natural science studies one slice of reality: matter, life, or mind. None of them alone can say how those slices relate to each other. Iqbal likens the sciences to vultures, each running off with a piece of nature's body, which leaves room for a view that tries to take in the whole.
Mystical or religious experience cannot be traced back to the senses. Iqbal argues it is no less real or concrete as experience for that, and calling it psychic or supernatural takes nothing away from it. For the purposes of knowledge, it is a region of experience that cannot be ignored.
Iqbal holds that scientific and religious inquiry use different methods but share one final aim: to reach what is most real. A religion that claims all of reality therefore has no reason to fear any partial, specialist picture of it.
Iqbal grants that philosophy has the right to judge religion, and that giving faith a rational form does not make philosophy the higher authority. What is being judged, he argues, will only submit to philosophy on its own terms.
Iqbal argues that if a single, all-inclusive self creates and sustains every individual self, then all of humanity is fundamentally one. In practice, belief in one God means equality, solidarity, and freedom. Making the highest-ranked stand shoulder to shoulder with the outcast would bring a sudden spiritual revolution.
Iqbal argues that the experimental method did not originate in Europe. He traces it to the Muslim universities of Spain, and to the Qur'an's respect for the observable world, which he says made its followers founders of modern science. Europe, he says, was slow to admit this origin.
Iqbal warns that a culture drawn to a more powerful one may copy its dazzling exterior and never reach its inner substance. He urges going back to one's own roots and engaging the other culture critically rather than simply imitating it.
Iqbal argues that a religion's core beliefs need not change, but the thought people build from its sources must be revisited and sometimes rebuilt. Without that work, the thinking stops moving. He holds that his own tradition's religious thought sat largely still for five hundred years.
Physics explains events by causes that come before their effects and act on them from outside. Iqbal argues that this concept fits only the narrow activity physics studies. Living and conscious beings call for ideas of end and purpose, which work from within.
Iqbal rejects the nationalist theory of the state because it assumes religious and political life are separate realms, a split he says Islam does not recognise. He argues that a civilisation torn between religious and political values loses its spiritual unity. Such a society slides into inhuman competition.