Tadreej edition

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Muhammad Iqbal · 1930

Seven lectures arguing that Islam's own epistemological tradition demands a reconstruction of religious philosophy. With section summaries and interactive demos to help the modern reader engage with Iqbal’s arguments.

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How to read the Reconstruction

A reader's guide — what makes it hard, the vocabulary you need, and a path through the seven lectures

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Preface

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Lecture I

Knowledge and Religious Experience

1. The Opening Problem 2. The Anti-Classical Revolution 3. Ghazali and Kant 4. Five Hundred Years 5. The Qur'anic Universe 6. The Heart as Knowledge 7. Against Reductionism 8. The Two Tests

Lecture II

The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

1. The Three Proofs Demolished 2. The Nature of Matter 3. Space, Movement, and Zeno 4. Einstein, Relativity, and Time 5. Life, Consciousness, and Mechanism 6. Bergson and the Appreciative Self 7. Taqdīr: Destiny as Creative Time 8. Teleology and Freedom 9. The Ultimate Ego and the Reality of Time 10. Divine Life and the Concluding Synthesis

Lecture III

The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer

1. The individuality of God 2. The infinity of God 3. Creativeness — God's relation to the world 4. Ash'arite atomism and the method of creation 5. Motion, accidents, and the spiritual nature of reality 6. The problem of time and divine eternity 7. Divine knowledge and the open universe 8. Divine omnipotence and the problem of evil 9. The Qur'anic legend of the Fall — method and comparison 10. The meaning of the Fall — self-consciousness, freedom, and personality 11. The meaning of prayer — from conception to participation 12. Congregational prayer and the unity of mankind

Lecture IV

The Human Ego — His Freedom and Immortality

1. The Qur'anic view of man and the modern Muslim's task 2. Bradley and the reality of the ego 3. The characteristics of the ego 4. The soul-substance theory and its critique 5. William James, the directive ego, and Amr 6. The emergence of the ego and the mind-body problem 7. Freedom and determinism 8. Prayer as escape from mechanism 9. Destiny, fatalism, and Spengler's misreading 10. Immortality — metaphysical and ethical arguments 11. Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence 12. Three Qur'anic foundations for immortality 13. Barzakh, resurrection, and the afterlife

Lecture V

The Spirit of Muslim Culture

1. The prophetic and mystic types of consciousness 2. Prophecy, Waḥy, and the rise of rational consciousness 3. The finality of prophethood and the birth of inductive intellect 4. The Qur'anic appeal to the concrete — nature and history 5. The revolt against Greek logic 6. The Islamic origins of scientific method 7. The problem of space, time, and the infinite 8. The idea of evolution in Islam 9. ʿIrāqī on space and the limits of Sufi metaphysics 10. History as a source of human knowledge 11. The foundations of historical criticism 12. The unity of human origin 13. Time, creative movement, and the anti-classical spirit 14. The critique of Spengler's 'Magian' thesis

Lecture VI

The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam

1. Islam as a dynamic cultural movement 2. The definition of ijtihād and the three causes of stagnation 3. Ibn Taymiyyah and the Wahhābī movement 4. Turkey's Nationalist Party and the Church–State question 5. The separation of Church and State — a Christian import 6. The Religious Reform Party and the Caliphate question 7. Ziya Gökalp's poetic vision and the international ideal 8. Ziya on women's rights and family law 9. The dangers of unchecked liberalism 10. Is the law of Islam capable of evolution?11. The Qur'an as legal source and the question of women's rights 12. The ḥadīth and Shāh Walī Allāh's theory of prophetic method 13. Ijmāʿ — from idea to legislative assembly 14. Qiyās, the fiction of closure, and the call to reconstruction

Lecture VII

Is Religion Possible?

1. Three periods of religious life 2. Kant reversed — other levels of experience 3. Why this question now — the scientific case 4. The crisis of modernity — evolution and despair 5. The failure of medieval mysticism and its false substitutes 6. Religious experience as cognitive fact 7. The limits of modern psychology 8. The ego's true aim and Sirhindī's technique 9. Nietzsche as failed mystic 10. Purification of experience — science and religion as parallel 11. The three witnesses (Jāvīd Nāmah)

About this edition

Iqbal's Reconstruction is one of the most important works of Islamic philosophy in the modern period. Written in 1930, it argues that the intellectual tradition of Islam — properly understood — demands engagement with modern science, philosophy, and lived experience.

The text of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is reproduced from the 1930 edition.
Summaries and reader challenges are original to Tadreej and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.