Loading
Iqbal examines the thirteenth-century Sufi ʿIrāqī's remarkable hierarchy of spaces — from gross bodies through air, light, and immaterial beings to the divine space that is 'the meeting point of all infinities.' He reads ʿIrāqī diagnostically: his mind 'moved in the right direction,' reaching intuitively toward a dynamic, relational conception of space, but his inherited Aristotelian and Neoplatonic prejudices blocked him from reaching the essentially Islamic idea of continuous creation.
Section 8 presented Ibn Miskawayh's evolutionary scheme as evidence of the Islamic intellectual orientation toward process and development. Section 9 now turns from biological thought to 'religious psychology' — Iqbal's term for the higher Sufi tradition's philosophical engagement with the nature of space and time — through an extended exposition and critical assessment of the medieval Persian Sufi Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī's theory of multiple, hierarchically ordered spaces.
The section advances through three movements. First, Iqbal introduces ʿIrāqī's starting point: three Qur'anic verses that establish God's intimate presence to all things (58:7, 10:61, 50:16) and the philosophical problem they generate — how can God be 'closer than the neck-vein' without being spatially located? ʿIrāqī's answer draws on the analogy of the soul's relation to the body: the soul is neither inside nor outside the body, yet its contact with every atom is real. This requires positing 'some kind of space which befits the subtleness of the soul.'
Second, ʿIrāqī develops a remarkable hierarchy of spaces of ascending subtlety: the space of gross bodies (in which objects resist displacement and movement takes measurable time), the space of subtle bodies like air and sound (in which resistance exists but time is compressed), the space of light (in which time is 'reduced almost to zero' and bodies intermingle without displacement), the space of immaterial beings (in which distance is not entirely absent but stone walls pose no barrier), and finally the divine space — 'absolutely free from all dimensions,' constituting 'the meeting point of all infinities.' Each ascending level of space is more subtle, less resistant, and less bound by the constraints of spatial distance and temporal duration.
Third, and most importantly, Iqbal delivers his critical assessment. ʿIrāqī was 'really trying to reach the concept of space as a dynamic appearance' and was 'vaguely struggling with the concept of space as an infinite continuum' — achievements that anticipate, in intuitive form, certain features of modern mathematical physics. But ʿIrāqī's progress was blocked by two limitations: he was not a mathematician (and so could not formalise his intuitions), and he retained the 'Aristotelian prejudice in favour of a fixed universe.' Most critically, his view that 'Divine Time is utterly devoid of change' — a standard Sufi-Neoplatonic position — prevented him from discovering the relation between Divine Time and serial time, and thereby from reaching 'the essentially Islamic idea of continuous creation which means a growing universe.' ʿIrāqī's mind 'moved in the right direction,' but his Aristotelian and Neoplatonic inheritance blocked the very destination the Qur'anic orientation should have led him to.
This section exemplifies Iqbal's distinctive method throughout the Reconstruction: he does not simply celebrate or dismiss the Islamic intellectual tradition; he reads it diagnostically — identifying what was genuinely achieved, what was blocked, and why. The diagnosis is always the same: Aristotelian and Neoplatonic categories, imported into Islamic thought, obstructed the full development of the Qur'anic orientation toward dynamism, process, and creative becoming.