←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 4: The Human Ego — His Freedom and Immortality

Section 1 of 13

The Qur'anic view of man and the modern Muslim's task

Section summary

In brief

Lecture IV opens with Iqbal laying out a Qur'anic anthropology of the human being as chosen, vicegerent, and trustee of a free personality — and diagnosing why this vision was never developed in Muslim intellectual history. Reinterpreting Ḥallāj's 'I am the Creative Truth' as the supreme affirmation rather than the dissolution of the self, he names the task before the modern Muslim: to rethink the whole system of Islam in the light of modern knowledge without completely breaking with the past.

Lecture III completed a sustained arc from the metaphysics of divine individuality through the attributes of God's creative will to the meaning of prayer as communion between finite and infinite egos — culminating in the argument that congregational prayer is the social expression of the unity grounding all mankind. Having established what kind of being God is, Iqbal now turns to the other term of the relation: what kind of being is man? Lecture IV opens with a section that functions simultaneously as a Qur'anic anthropology, a diagnosis of Muslim intellectual failure, and a manifesto for the task ahead.

The section advances through four tightly connected movements. First, Iqbal establishes the Qur'anic view of man through three verses that together define a complete anthropology: man is chosen by God (20:122), appointed as God's representative on earth (2:30, 6:165), and entrusted with a free personality accepted at his own peril (33:72). The conjunction of these three points yields a specific consequence: the rejection of vicarious redemption. If each individual bears only their own burden and is entitled only to the fruit of their own effort, then no one can be saved by another's sacrifice. The Qur'anic human being is radically and irreducibly individual.

Second, Iqbal registers surprise — and the surprise is itself an argument — that this robust Qur'anic anthropology of the individual was never adequately developed in the history of Muslim thought. The Mutakallimūn reduced the soul to a material accident. The falāsifa imported Greek categories that did not fit. The cultural contexts of newly converted populations — Nestorians, Jews, Zoroastrians — brought with them a 'Magian' dualistic soul-picture that distorted Islamic theology's handling of consciousness. The one tradition that did take the unity of inner experience seriously was devotional Sufism.

Third, the Sufi tradition's engagement with consciousness reaches its climax in the figure of Ḥallāj, whose declaration Anā al-Ḥaqq ('I am the Creative Truth') has been universally misread as pantheistic self-dissolution. Iqbal, drawing on the textual recovery work of the French Orientalist Louis Massignon, insists on the opposite reading: Ḥallāj's cry is the supreme affirmation of the human ego's reality and permanence, not the drop slipping into the sea but the bold assertion of the self's enduring significance within a deeper personality. This reinterpretation is pivotal: it transforms the most famous utterance in Sufi history from evidence for pantheism into evidence for Iqbal's own philosophy of the ego.

Fourth, Iqbal acknowledges the difficulty. Mystical experience points to levels of consciousness that neither Ibn Khaldūn's prescient methodological call nor modern psychology's recent efforts have yet managed to investigate scientifically. The theological vocabulary of the past is dead. The task before the modern Muslim is therefore immense: to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past. Iqbal names two predecessors who saw the need — Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi, who first felt the stirring of a new spirit, and Jamāluddīn Afghānī, who fully grasped the scale of the task but whose energies were too divided to accomplish it. The section closes with Iqbal's own methodological statement: to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude.

This section is the portal to Lecture IV's entire argument. Everything that follows — the philosophical analysis of the ego's freedom, the problem of immortality, the engagement with modern biology and psychology — depends on the anthropological foundation laid here. If the Qur'anic human being is not genuinely individual, not genuinely free, not genuinely entrusted with a personality accepted at peril, then the questions of Lecture IV do not arise. And if the history of Muslim thought has failed to develop this anthropology, then the task Iqbal names in his closing sentences is not optional — it is the defining intellectual obligation of the modern Muslim world.

Original text

The Qur'an in its simple, forceful manner emphasizes the individuality and uniqueness of man, and has, I think, a definite view of his destiny as a unity of life.¹ It is in consequence of this view of man as a unique individuality which makes it impossible for one individual to bear the burden of another,² and entitles him only to what is due to his own personal effort,³ that the Qur'an is led to reject the idea of redemption. Three things are perfectly clear from the Qur'an:

(i) That man is the chosen of God: 'Afterwards his Lord chose him [Adam] for himself and turned towards him, and guided him' (20:122).

(ii) That man, with all his faults, is meant to be the representative of God on earth:

'When thy Lord said to the angels, "Verily I am about to place one in my stead on Earth", they said, "Wilt Thou place there one who will do ill therein and shed blood, when we celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy holiness?" God said, "Verily I know what you know not"' (2:30).

'And it is He Who hath made you His representatives on the Earth, and hath raised some of you above others by various grades, that He may prove you by His gifts' (6:165).

(iii) That man is the trustee of a free personality which he accepted at his peril:

'Verily We proposed to the Heavens, and to the Earth, and to the mountains to receive the "trust", but they refused the burden and they feared to receive it. Man undertook to bear it, but hath proved unjust, senseless!' (33:72).

Yet it is surprising to see that the unity of human consciousness which constitutes the centre of human personality never really became a point of interest in the history of Muslim thought. The Mutakallimūn regarded the soul as a finer kind of matter or a mere accident which dies with the body and is re-created on the Day of Judgement. The philosophers of Islam received inspiration from Greek thought. In the case of other schools, it must be remembered that the expansion of Islam brought within its fold peoples belonging to different creed-communities, such as Nestorians, Jews, Zoroastrians, whose intellectual outlook had been formed by the concepts of a culture which had long dominated the whole of middle and western Asia. This culture, on the whole Magian in its origin and development, has a structurally dualistic soul-picture which we find more or less reflected in the theological thought of Islam.⁴

Devotional Sufism alone tried to understand the meaning of the unity of inner experience which the Qur'an declares to be one of the three sources of knowledge,⁵ the other two being History and Nature. The development of this experience in the religious life of Islam reached its culmination in the well-known words of Ḥallāj — 'I am the creative truth.' The contemporaries of Ḥallāj, as well as his successors, interpreted these words pantheistically; but the fragments of Ḥallāj, collected and published by the French Orientalist, L. Massignon, leave no doubt that the martyr-saint could not have meant to deny the transcendence of God.⁶ The true interpretation of his experience, therefore, is not the drop slipping into the sea, but the realization and bold affirmation in an undying phrase of the reality and permanence of the human ego in a profounder personality. The phrase of Ḥallāj seems almost a challenge flung against the Mutakallimūn.

The difficulty of modern students of religion, however, is that this type of experience, though perhaps perfectly normal in its beginnings, points, in its maturity, to unknown levels of consciousness. Ibn Khaldūn, long ago, felt the necessity of an effective scientific method to investigate these levels.⁷ Modern psychology has only recently realized the necessity of such a method, but has not yet been able to go beyond the discovery of the characteristic features of the mystic levels of consciousness.⁸ Not being yet in possession of a scientific method to deal with the type of experience on which such judgements as that of Ḥallāj are based, we cannot avail ourselves of its possible capacity as a knowledge-yielding experience. Nor can the concepts of theological systems, draped in the terminology of a practically dead metaphysics, be of any help to those who happen to possess a different intellectual background.

The task before the modern Muslim is, therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past. Perhaps the first Muslim who felt the urge of a new spirit in him was Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi. The man, however, who fully realized the importance and immensity of the task, and whose deep insight into the inner meaning of the history of Muslim thought and life, combined with a broad vision engendered by his wide experience of men and manners, would have made him a living link between the past and the future, was Jamāluddīn Afghānī. If his indefatigable but divided energy could have devoted itself entirely to Islam as a system of human belief and conduct, the world of Islam, intellectually speaking, would have been on a much more solid ground today. The only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us. This I propose to do in regard to the subject of the present lecture.

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2. Bradley and the reality of the ego

Original text

(i) That man is the chosen of God: 'Afterwards his Lord chose him [Adam] for himself and turned towards him, and guided him' (20:122).

(ii) That man, with all his faults, is meant to be the representative of God on earth:

'And it is He Who hath made you His representatives on the Earth, and hath raised some of you above others by various grades, that He may prove you by His gifts' (6:165).

(iii) That man is the trustee of a free personality which he accepted at his peril: