←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Section 7 of 10

Taqdīr: Destiny as Creative Time

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal reverses the meaning of taqdīr: it is not an external fate imposed from without but the inward reach of a thing — its unrealised possibilities waiting to be actualised from within. Destiny is not the closure of the future but its openness, and fatalism is the exact opposite of what the Qur'an teaches.

This is the section the entire Reconstruction has been building towards — and the one most catastrophically misunderstood. Having established that time is real and not spatial (Section 4), that mechanism cannot account for life (Section 5), and that pure duration is an organic whole in which the past operates in the present and the future is genuinely open (Section 6), Iqbal now arrives at the concept that sits at the intersection of his metaphysics, his theology, and his civilisational argument: taqdīr.

The word has been translated as 'destiny' or 'predestination' for centuries, and in popular Muslim piety it has calcified into a doctrine of fatalism — the belief that everything is already written, that human effort is ultimately futile, and that submission to God's will means passive acceptance of whatever happens. Iqbal's move in this section is to reverse the valence of the term entirely. Taqdīr, he argues, is not an external fate imposed from without but the inward reach of a thing — its realizable possibilities, which lie within its own nature and actualize themselves from within. Destiny is not the closure of the future but its openness. It is not the script already written but the creative capacity not yet exercised.

The section advances through four connected moves. First, Iqbal defines taqdīr as time experienced as an organic whole — 'time as felt and not as thought and calculated.' Second, he redescribes destiny as the inward unfolding of a thing's own possibilities, explicitly rejecting the 'taskmaster' model of external fate. Third, he deploys two Qur'anic verses to anchor this reinterpretation: 'God created all things and assigned to each its taqdīr' (25:2) and 'Every day He is upon some affair' (55:29). Fourth, he draws the consequence for science: if every moment is genuinely novel, then the mechanistic search for uniform laws can describe life's surface but never comprehend its creative depth.

The philosophical and civilisational stakes are immense. If taqdīr means fatalism, then the Qur'an teaches resignation. If taqdīr means creative self-unfolding, then the Qur'an teaches the exact opposite: that every entity — and by extension every nation, every civilisation — carries within it unrealised possibilities that demand to be actualised through effort, choice, and creative action. The entire Tadreej project rests on this reinterpretation.

Original text

It is time regarded as an organic whole that the Qur’an describes as Taqdīr or the destiny — a word which has been so much misunderstood both in and outside the world of Islam. Destiny is time regarded as prior to the disclosure of its possibilities. It is time freed from the net of causal sequence — the diagrammatic character which the logical understanding imposes on it. In one word, it is time as felt and not as thought and calculated. If you ask me why the Emperor Humāyūn and Shāh Ṭahmāsp of Persia were contemporaries, I can give you no causal explanation. The only answer that can possibly be given is that the nature of Reality is such that among its infinite possibilities of becoming, the two possibilities known as the lives of Humāyūn and Shāh Ṭahmāsp should realize themselves together.

Time regarded as destiny forms the very essence of things. As the Qur’an says: ‘God created all things and assigned to each its destiny.’²⁹ The destiny of a thing then is not an unrelenting fate working from without like a task master; it is the inward reach of a thing, its realizable possibilities which lie within the depths of its nature, and serially actualize themselves without any feeling of external compulsion.

Thus the organic wholeness of duration does not mean that full-fledged events are lying, as it were, in the womb of Reality, and drop one by one like the grains of sand from the hour-glass. If time is real, and not a mere repetition of homogeneous moments which make conscious experience a delusion, then every moment in the life of Reality is original, giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable. ‘Every day doth some new work employ Him,’³⁰ says the Qur’an. To exist in real time is not to be bound by the fetters of serial time, but to create it from moment to moment and to be absolutely free and original in creation. In fact, all creative activity is free activity. Creation is opposed to repetition which is a characteristic of mechanical action.

That is why it is impossible to explain the creative activity of life in terms of mechanism. Science seeks to establish uniformities of experience, i.e. the laws of mechanical repetition. Life with its intense feeling of spontaneity constitutes a centre of indetermination, and thus falls outside the domain of necessity. Hence science cannot comprehend life. The biologist who seeks a mechanical explanation of life is led to do so because he confines his study to the lower forms of life whose behaviour discloses resemblances to mechanical action. If he studies life as manifested in himself, i.e. his own mind freely choosing, rejecting, reflecting, surveying the past and the present, and dynamically imagining the future, he is sure to be convinced of the inadequacy of his mechanical concepts.

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6. Bergson and the Appreciative Self

8. Teleology and Freedom

Original text