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Iqbal presents the second foundational idea and the philosophical climax of Lecture V: the Qur'anic sense of time as real and creative, which finds its consummation in Ibn Khaldūn's view of history as 'a genuinely creative movement' whose path is not already determined. Against Greek cyclic time, Iqbal insists that 'eternal recurrence is not eternal creation; it is eternal repetition' — and in Ibn Khaldūn the anti-classical spirit of the Qur'an 'scores its final victory over Greek thought.'
Section 12 presented the first foundational idea required for a science of history: the unity of human origin, grounded in the Qur'anic concept of nafs wāḥidah and made concrete through Islam's social programme. Section 13 now presents the second foundational idea — 'a keen sense of the reality of time, and the concept of life as a continuous movement in time' — and in doing so delivers the philosophical climax of Lecture V: the demonstration that the anti-classical spirit of the Qur'an finds its 'final victory over Greek thought' in Ibn Khaldūn's conception of history as a genuinely creative movement.
The section advances through three connected arguments. First, Iqbal presents Ibn Khaldūn's view of history as 'a continuous, collective movement, a real inevitable development in time' — and insists that this conception could only have arisen within the cultural orientation that Islam created. The 'infinite importance' of Ibn Khaldūn's conception lies in its implication: history is not merely a record of events but a 'genuinely creative movement' whose path is not already determined. The future is genuinely open; the historical process produces real novelty. Ibn Khaldūn is, on this reading, 'a forerunner of Bergson' — he grasped the creative character of temporal process centuries before Bergson formalised it in philosophical terms.
Second, Iqbal traces the intellectual genealogy of Ibn Khaldūn's conception through the Islamic cultural history he has been documenting throughout Lecture V: the Qur'anic view of the 'alternation of day and night' as a symbol of divine creative renewal ('appears in a fresh glory every moment'), the tendency in Muslim metaphysics to regard time as objective, Ibn Miskawayh's evolutionary orientation, and al-Bīrūnī's approach to nature as a process of becoming. Ibn Khaldūn did not invent his conception ex nihilo; he gave 'systematic expression to the spirit of the cultural movement of which he was a most brilliant product.'
Third, and most decisively, Iqbal states the anti-classical thesis in its ultimate form. For the Greeks, time was either unreal (Plato, Zeno) or cyclic (Heraclitus, the Stoics). A cyclic conception of time destroys the possibility of genuine creativity: 'eternal recurrence is not eternal creation; it is eternal repetition.' If history moves in circles, then nothing genuinely new can emerge; the future merely repeats the past. The Qur'anic conception of time — dynamic, creative, forward-moving — breaks the circle and opens history to the genuinely new. In Ibn Khaldūn's work, this Qur'anic orientation 'scores its final victory over Greek thought.'
The section's closing sentences draw the conclusion of the entire lecture's argument: the intellectual revolt of Islam against Greek philosophy was not an accident but the inevitable self-assertion of the anti-classical spirit of the Qur'an, which 'asserted itself in spite of those who began with a desire to interpret Islam in the light of Greek thought.' The revolt was not planned by any individual thinker; it was the working-out of a cultural logic inherent in the Qur'an itself.