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Iqbal presents the first foundational idea required for a genuine science of history: the unity of human origin, grounded in the Qur'anic concept of nafs wāḥidah. Where Christianity left human unity as an abstract theological principle and European nationalism eroded it altogether, Islam made it 'a living factor in the Muslim's daily life' — treating humanity as a single organism whose common history could be studied as one.
Section 11 traced the development of Islamic historical criticism from the Qur'anic principle of source evaluation (49:6) through the ḥadīth sciences to the great historians — Ibn Isḥāq, al-Ṭabarī, al-Masʿūdī — and concluded by identifying two foundational ideas, rooted in Qur'anic teaching, without which a genuine science of history is impossible. Section 12 now presents the first of these ideas: the unity of human origin.
The section is brief but makes a claim of immense scope. The Qur'an declares that all humanity was created 'from one breath of life' (nafs wāḥidah) — a statement of common origin that implies the organic unity of the human species. Iqbal argues that this idea, while present in other traditions (Christianity proclaimed the equality of all people before God), achieved a qualitatively different status in Islam. In Christianity, the idea of human unity remained 'a general and abstract conception' — a theological principle that did not reshape social reality. In Europe more broadly, the growth of territorial nationalism 'tended rather to kill the broad human element.' In Islam, by contrast, 'the idea was neither a concept of philosophy nor a dream of poetry' but 'a social movement' whose aim was to make human unity 'a living factor in the Muslim's daily life.'
The argument has two dimensions. The philosophical dimension is that a science of history requires the concept of humanity as a single organism — without it, there can be tribal histories, national histories, civilisational histories, but not a universal history that treats the human species as a single subject undergoing a common developmental process. The sociological dimension is that Islam, through the rapid expansion of a vast empire that incorporated diverse peoples, languages, and cultures under a single religious and legal framework, provided the practical experience of human unity that made the philosophical concept concrete. The idea was not merely asserted but lived — in the pilgrimage (ḥajj), in the universal application of Islamic law, in the absence of a racial or ethnic priesthood, in the principle that any Muslim, regardless of origin, could hold any position.
This section is the shorter of the two foundational-idea sections, but its argument carries forward into the final movement of Lecture V: the concept of human unity, combined with the concept of time as creative process (Section 13), provides the intellectual foundation on which Ibn Khaldūn built and on which any future science of history must rest.