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Iqbal argues that the Qur'an gave the Muslim world one of the most fundamental principles of historical criticism — evaluate the reporter before accepting the report (49:6) — and that the ḥadīth sciences systematically operationalised this principle into the first large-scale methodology of testimonial evaluation. He then distinguishes history as art (narrative that fires the imagination) from history as genuine science, previewing the two foundational ideas without which the latter is impossible.
Section 10 established history as the third Qur'anic source of knowledge and identified five verses that constitute the Qur'an's philosophy of history — the rise and fall of nations as 'the days of God,' subject to discoverable patterns and moral analysis. Section 11 now moves from the philosophy of history to the methodology of history, arguing that the Qur'an provided not only the orientation toward history but 'one of the most fundamental principles of historical criticism': the evaluation of testimony based on the reporter's personal character.
The section advances through two movements. First, Iqbal identifies a single Qur'anic verse — 'O believers! if any bad man comes to you with a report, clear it up at once' (49:6) — as the seed from which the entire apparatus of Islamic historical criticism grew. The principle is deceptively simple: before accepting any report, assess the character and reliability of the person reporting it. From this principle, applied systematically to the reporters of the Prophet's traditions (aḥādīth), the Muslim world 'gradually evolved the canons of historical criticism' — the science of ʿilm al-rijāl (evaluation of transmitters), isnād criticism, and the classification of reports by reliability. This was not merely a religious exercise; it was the development of a general methodology for evaluating testimonial evidence that constitutes, in Iqbal's reading, a genuine contribution to the science of history.
Second, Iqbal names three historians — Ibn Isḥāq, al-Ṭabarī, and al-Masʿūdī — as products of the forces that the Qur'anic orientation unleashed, and then draws a distinction between history 'as an art of firing the reader's imagination' and history 'as a genuine science.' The art of history produces compelling narrative; the science of history discovers laws governing collective human life. The transition from art to science requires 'a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time' — ideas that the section's closing sentence identifies as two in number and 'the foundation of the Quranic teaching.' These two ideas — the unity of human origin and the reality of time — will be developed in the sections that follow.
This is a transitional section that connects the Qur'anic philosophy of history (Section 10) to the specific methodological achievements that philosophy generated, and that previews the foundational ideas on which a genuine science of history must rest.