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Iqbal adds biological thought to the list of domains in which Muslim intellectual culture moved away from Greek fixity toward process, reproducing Ibn Miskawayh's evolutionary scheme from minerals through plants and animals to the ape and the civilised human. He is explicit about his purpose: he offers the scheme 'not because of its scientific value' but because of the light it throws on the direction in which Muslim thought was moving.
Section 7 extended the anti-classical thesis from empirical method to pure mathematics, arguing that Muslim thinkers' engagement with space, time, and the infinite moved 'in a direction entirely different to the Greeks' — from the Greek ideal of proportion to the Muslim ideal of infinity, from static magnitude to dynamic relation, from being to becoming. Section 8 now turns from mathematical to biological thought, presenting the 'idea of evolution gradually shaping itself' in Islamic intellectual history through the work of al-Jāḥiẓ and, more substantively, Ibn Miskawayh.
The section is structured around a single extended exhibit: Ibn Miskawayh's evolutionary scheme as presented in his theological work al-Fauz al-Aṣghar (The Lesser Triumph). Iqbal reproduces the scheme in full — from the lowest plant-life through progressively more complex vegetable and animal forms, culminating in the ape 'which is just a degree below man in the scale of evolution' and finally in the development of human civilisation itself. The scheme describes a continuous gradient from minerals through plants through animals to humans, with each stage emerging naturally from the one below it.
What makes this section particularly noteworthy is Iqbal's explicit methodological caveat. He reproduces Ibn Miskawayh's hypothesis 'not because of its scientific value, but because of the light which it throws on the direction in which Muslim thought was moving.' This is a moment of intellectual honesty that distinguishes Iqbal from the apologetic tradition: he is not claiming that Ibn Miskawayh anticipated Darwin, nor that the Qur'an contains modern evolutionary theory. He is claiming something more modest and more interesting: that the cultural orientation of Islam — its dynamic cosmology, its emphasis on process and becoming — disposed Muslim thinkers toward evolutionary modes of thought centuries before Europe developed the theoretical and evidential framework to make evolution a scientific theory.
The section is brief and primarily descriptive, but its argumentative function within Lecture V is clear: it adds biological thought to the list of domains — empirical method, logic, mathematics, physics — in which Muslim intellectual culture departed from the static, fixed, proportionate Greek ideal and moved toward a dynamic, processual, evolutionary understanding of reality.