Chapter One - Sir Muhammad Iqbal: The Dialectician of Muslim Authenticity

Summary

Muhammad Iqbal, who was knighted by the British in 1922, was one of the most important intellectual architects of the Islamic revival in the twentieth century. While he wrote most of his considerable output as Persian poetry, he neither considered himself a poet, nor could he easily engage in a conversation in Persian. By his own admission, his thought was vastly influenced by European philosophy, and yet his discourse is one of the largest and most profound bodies of work attempting to construct a Muslim selfhood ever produced. To be sure, Iqbal's discourse is replete with tensions and contradictions, but as I will try to show below, these contradictions are not primarily the result of his mixing European philosophy and Islamic thought, and therefore he should not be accused of bad eclecticism. As with many other social and political philosophers, some of these contradictions were the consequences of the development of his thought in their different stages. But many other contrarieties in his writings, as I argue below, were caused by his attempt to construct an Islamic subjectivity that he wished to build by invoking the monotheistic Godhead. Like many of his Islamist cohorts, Iqbal insisted that human agency is possible only if it is derived from the Divine Agency; and this, I will argue, is at the core of some of the most elemental tensions in his thought. However, this is not to dismiss the significance of his discourse in the creation of Muslim selfhood and agency. In the history of Western modernity, a very similar process of projecting the desired attributes of human empowerment and agency onto an image of a powerful omniscient God and then re-appropriating these attributes for humans has laid the foundations of the modern world in the West. A very analogous process has been at work in the Islamic world since mid-nineteenth century, producing dialectical tensions in the discourses of most of its prominent modernist thinkers, and the work of Iqbal is no exception in this regard. In fact, this type of contradiction is a source of dynamism in the Islamic world, which carries within itself the seeds of major changes in the cultures and polities of the Muslim regions involved.