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Iqbal turns from inner experience to the two remaining Qur'anic sources — Nature and History — and argues that the Qur'an's insistent appeal to concrete natural phenomena is not optional but a religious duty. He then states the anti-classical thesis in its sharpest form: the spirit of the Qur'an is 'essentially anti-classical,' and the failure of the attempt to read it through Greek categories was the precondition for Islam's genuine intellectual achievement.
Section 3 completed the finality argument: prophecy perfects itself by discovering the need of its own abolition, the shahādah desacralises nature, and the channels of knowledge — inner (Anfus) and outer (Āfāq) — remain open but now demand active inquiry rather than passive reception. Section 4 now pivots from inner experience to outer experience, turning to the two remaining sources of knowledge that the Qur'an identifies — Nature and History — and arguing that it is 'in tapping these sources of knowledge that the spirit of Islam is seen at its best.'
The section advances through two connected movements. First, Iqbal catalogues the Qur'an's appeal to concrete natural phenomena — sun, moon, shadows, the alternation of day and night, the diversity of human colours and languages — and insists that this appeal constitutes a duty: the Muslim who passes by these signs 'as if he is dead and blind' is failing a religious obligation, not merely missing an intellectual opportunity. The Qur'an does not merely permit the study of nature; it demands it.
Second, Iqbal introduces the pivotal historical narrative that will structure the rest of Lecture V: the collision between this Qur'anic empiricism and Greek speculative philosophy. Muslim thinkers, encountering the impressive systematisations of Aristotle and Neoplatonism, initially tried to 'understand the Qur'an in the light of Greek philosophy.' This attempt was 'foredoomed to failure' because the two orientations are fundamentally incompatible: the Qur'an appeals to the concrete, demands engagement with fact, and presents the universe as dynamic, finite, and capable of increase; Greek philosophy 'enjoyed theory and was neglectful of fact,' assumed an eternal and static cosmos, and sought knowledge through abstract deduction rather than empirical observation. The crucial claim is compressed into the section's final sentence: 'it is what follows their failure that brings out the real spirit of the culture of Islam, and lays the foundation of modern culture in some of its most important aspects.' The failure of the Greek synthesis, in Iqbal's telling, was the precondition for Islam's genuine intellectual achievement — the development of the empirical spirit.
This section is the hinge between the doctrinal argument of Sections 1–3 (finality, the prophetic-mystic distinction, the shahādah) and the cultural-historical argument of Sections 5–14 (Muslim scientific contributions, the revolt against Greek thought, the development of historical consciousness). It connects the idea of finality to its consequences in intellectual history, and it states the anti-classical thesis in its most explicit form.