←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 4: The Human Ego — His Freedom and Immortality

Section 13 of 13

Barzakh, resurrection, and the afterlife

Section summary

In brief

The culminating section of Lecture IV works out the concrete shape of Iqbal's doctrine: there are only ego-sustaining and ego-dissolving acts, death is the first test of the ego's synthetic power, Barzakh is an active state of struggle toward resurrection, and heaven and hell are states of character, not localities. The lecture closes with Iqbal's final vision — man 'marches always onward to receive ever fresh illuminations from an Infinite Reality which every moment appears in a new glory.'

Section 12 established the three Qur'anic foundations of personal immortality: the ego begins in time (no pre-existence), there is no return to this earth (no reincarnation), and finitude is not a misfortune (individuality is preserved before the Infinite). It then grounded immortality in action — the ego grows through deed and becomes worthy of persistence through the quality of its directed activity. Section 13 now completes the lecture by working out the concrete implications of this doctrine: what happens at death, what Barzakh is, what resurrection means, how the argument from biological evolution supports the case for re-emergence, and what heaven and hell actually signify on Iqbal's reading of the Qur'an.

The section is the longest and most architecturally complex in Lecture IV, advancing through four connected movements. First, Iqbal redefines the moral criterion: there are no 'pleasure-giving and pain-giving acts,' only 'ego-sustaining and ego-dissolving acts.' Death is the first test of the ego's synthetic activity — the shock of physical dissolution either shatters the unprepared ego or opens a passage to Barzakh for the ego that has been sufficiently fortified by its deeds. Barzakh, drawing on Sufi experiential reports and on the physiology of time-perception (Helmholtz), is not a passive waiting-room but an active state in which the ego encounters 'fresh aspects of Reality' and struggles toward resurrection.

Second, resurrection itself is reinterpreted as 'not an external event' but 'the consummation of a life-process within the ego' — a stock-taking of past achievements and future possibilities. The Qur'an argues for re-emergence by analogy with first emergence: the God who created man from nothing can surely create him again. This argument, Iqbal notes, opened the door for Muslim evolutionary thinkers — al-Jāḥiẓ, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā, Ibn Miskawayh — and reached its most magnificent expression in Rūmī's verses on the soul's passage through successive kingdoms of being.

Third, Iqbal addresses the contested question of whether re-emergence involves a physical medium. Most Muslim theologians, including Shāh Walī Allāh, believed it does. Iqbal regards this as a reasonable intuition (the ego requires 'some kind of local reference') but declines to specify its nature, noting that the Qur'anic analogies 'suggest it as a fact; they are not meant to reveal its nature and character.'

Fourth and finally, Iqbal offers his reading of heaven and hell. They are 'states, not localities' — internal conditions of the ego, not geographical destinations. Hell is 'the painful realization of one's failure as a man' and serves as a corrective experience, not everlasting torture; the Qur'an itself explains 'eternity' in this context as a period of time. Heaven is not a holiday but the ego's continued creative unfolding — 'man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illuminations from an Infinite Reality which every moment appears in a new glory.'

This is the culminating section not only of Lecture IV but of the Reconstruction's entire anthropological argument. It brings together the ego's reality (Sections 2–3), its nature as directive act (Sections 4–5), its emergence from the physical order (Section 6), its freedom (Sections 7–9), and its earned persistence (Sections 10–12) into a single, coherent, forward-looking vision of human destiny as continuous creative development.

Original text

Life offers a scope for ego-activity, and death is the first test of the synthetic activity of the ego. There are no pleasure-giving and pain-giving acts; there are only ego-sustaining and ego-dissolving acts. It is the deed that prepares the ego for dissolution, or disciplines him for a future career. The principle of the ego-sustaining deed is respect for the ego in myself as well as in others. Personal immortality, then, is not ours as of right; it is to be achieved by personal effort. Man is only a candidate for it.

The most depressing error of Materialism is the supposition that finite consciousness exhausts its object. Philosophy and science are only one way of approaching that object. There are other ways of approach open to us; and death, if present action has sufficiently fortified the ego against the shock that physical dissolution brings, is only a kind of passage to what the Qur'an describes as Barzakh. The records of Sufistic experience indicate that Barzakh is a state of consciousness characterized by a change in the ego's attitude towards time and space. There is nothing improbable in it. It was Helmholtz who first discovered that nervous excitation takes time to reach consciousness.⁵⁸ If this is so, our present physiological structure is at the bottom of our present view of time, and if the ego survives the dissolution of this structure, a change in our attitude towards time and space seems perfectly natural. Nor is such a change wholly unknown to us. The enormous condensation of impressions which occurs in our dream-life, and the exaltation of memory, which sometimes takes place at the moment of death, disclose the ego's capacity for different standards of time. The state of Barzakh, therefore, does not seem to be merely a passive state of expectation; it is a state in which the ego catches a glimpse of fresh aspects of Reality, and prepares himself for adjustment to these aspects. It must be a state of great psychic unhingement, especially in the case of full-grown egos who have naturally developed fixed modes of operation on a specific spatio-temporal order, and may mean dissolution to less fortunate ones. However, the ego must continue to struggle until he is able to gather himself up, and win his resurrection.

The resurrection, therefore, is not an external event. It is the consummation of a life-process within the ego. Whether individual or universal it is nothing more than a kind of stock-taking of the ego's past achievements and his future possibilities. The Qur'an argues the phenomenon of re-emergence of the ego on the analogy of his first emergence:

'Man saith: "What! After I am dead, shall I in the end be brought forth alive?" Doth not man bear in mind that We made him at first when he was nought?' (19:66–67).

'It is We Who have decreed that death should be among you. Yet We are not thereby hindered from replacing you with others your likes, or from producing you in a form which ye know not! Ye have known the first creation: will you not reflect?' (56:60–62).

How did man first emerge? This suggestive argument embodied in the last verses of the two passages quoted above did in fact open a new vista to Muslim philosophers. It was al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 A.H.) who first hinted at the changes in animal life caused by migrations and environment generally.⁵⁹ The association known as the 'Brethren of Purity' further amplified the views of al-Jāḥiẓ.⁶⁰ Ibn Miskawayh (d. 421 A.H.), however, was the first Muslim thinker to give a clear and in many respects thoroughly modern theory of the origin of man.⁶¹ It was only natural and perfectly consistent with the spirit of the Qur'an, that Rūmī regarded the question of immortality as one of biological evolution, and not a problem to be decided by arguments of purely metaphysical nature, as some philosophers of Islam had thought.

However, according to the teaching of the Qur'an the ego's re-emergence brings him a 'sharp sight' (50:22) whereby he clearly sees his self-built 'fate fastened round his neck.'⁶⁵ Heaven and Hell are states, not localities. Their descriptions in the Qur'an are visual representations⁶⁶ of an inner fact, i.e. character. Hell, in the words of the Qur'an, is 'God's kindled fire which mounts above the hearts'⁶⁷ — the painful realization of one's failure as a man. Heaven is the joy of triumph over the forces of disintegration.

There is no such thing as eternal damnation in Islam. The word 'eternity' used in certain verses, relating to Hell, is explained by the Qur'an itself to mean only a period of time (78:23). Time cannot be wholly irrelevant to the development of personality. Character tends to become permanent; its reshaping must require time. Hell, therefore, as conceived by the Qur'an, is not a pit of everlasting torture⁶⁸ inflicted by a revengeful God; it is a corrective experience⁶⁹ which may make a hardened ego once more sensitive to the living breeze of Divine Grace.

Nor is heaven a holiday. Life is one and continuous. Man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illuminations from an Infinite Reality which 'every moment appears in a new glory'.⁷⁰ And the recipient of Divine illumination is not merely a passive recipient. Every act of a free ego creates a new situation, and thus offers further opportunities of creative unfolding.

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12. Three Qur'anic foundations for immortality

Original text

'Man saith: "What! After I am dead, shall I in the end be brought forth alive?" Doth not man bear in mind that We made him at first when he was nought?' (19:66–67).