Loading
Iqbal asks what it means to call God an individual — and argues, against every pantheistic temptation, that God is the one being whose individuality is not compromised by any tendency toward fragmentation. Without genuine divine individuality, the creative will of the rest of the lecture would have nothing to stand on.
Lecture III opens with a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to say that God is an individual? Iqbal has spent two lectures establishing that the ultimate ground of all experience is a 'rationally directed creative will' which he has described as an ego. Now he must clarify what kind of ego this is — and what individuality means when attributed to the Absolute.
The section advances through three connected moves. First, Iqbal deploys Bergson's biological analysis of individuality to establish that in the natural world, individuality is always compromised: every organism contains within itself the tendency to reproduce, which is the tendency to fragment, to detach a part of itself and build something new from it. The more perfectly individual a being is, the more completely it resists this dispersal — but no biological organism resists it entirely. Second, Iqbal argues that the Qur'anic insistence that God 'begetteth not' is not primarily a polemic against Christianity but a philosophical statement about perfect individuality: God is the only entity whose individuality is not compromised by an internal tendency toward fragmentation. Third, he confronts the pantheistic temptation — the pull toward conceiving God as a diffuse cosmic element rather than a definite individual — by reinterpreting the Qur'anic Light Verse (24:35) and recruiting modern physics to argue that light, properly understood, suggests Absoluteness rather than Omnipresence.
The philosophical stakes are high. If God is not genuinely individual — if the Ultimate Reality is a formless, pervasive element — then the entire structure of the Reconstruction collapses. An impersonal Absolute cannot be a creative will. It cannot be an ego. It cannot enter into the kind of relationship with finite egos that Iqbal's theology of prayer (the subject of the rest of Lecture III) requires. The individuality of God is therefore the foundation upon which everything else in this lecture is built.
‘Say: Allah is One: All things depend on Him; He begetteth not, and He is not begotten; And there is none like unto Him’ (112:1-4).
‘In particular, it may be said of individuality’, says Bergson: ‘that while the tendency to individuate is everywhere present in the organized world, it is everywhere opposed by the tendency towards reproduction. For the individuality to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is reproduction but the building up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old? Individuality, therefore, harbours its own enemy at home.’
‘God is the light of the Heavens and of the earth. His light is like a niche in which is a lamp — the lamp encased in a glass, — the glass, as it were, a star’ (24:35).