←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 6: The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam

Section 1 of 14

Islam as a dynamic cultural movement

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal opens Lecture VI by restating his foundational thesis — that Islam is a dynamic cultural movement grounding human unity in spiritual rather than blood kinship — and sets up the structural problem that will govern everything to come: how can a society built on eternal principles remain genuinely alive in time? The answer he names is ijtihād, the principle of movement in the structure of Islam.

Lecture V traced the anti-classical spirit of the Qur'an through its concrete expressions in Muslim intellectual culture — empirical science, experimental method, historical consciousness — and closed by confronting Spengler's denial that any of this anti-classical energy was transmitted to Europe. Section 1 of Lecture VI now pivots from the content of Muslim culture to the principle that governs its structural movement. Having demonstrated what Islam produced, Iqbal now asks: what mechanism ensures that this cultural energy does not freeze into dogma?

The section advances through four connected movements. First, Iqbal restates the foundational thesis that has governed the entire Reconstruction: Islam is a dynamic cultural movement that rejects static conceptions of the universe and grounds human unity not in blood-relationship ('earth-rootedness') but in the spiritual origin of all human life. Second, he diagnoses the failure of Christianity — originally a monastic order — to serve as a system of civilisational unification when Constantine attempted to repurpose it, a failure so complete that Julian tried to revive the old Roman gods and give them philosophical reinterpretations. Third, Iqbal introduces, through a long quotation from a historian of civilisation, the specific historical moment into which Islam emerged: a world where tribal sanctions had lost their power, imperial methods had failed, and Christianity was producing 'division and destruction instead of unity and order.' Fourth, and most critically, he identifies the structural problem that any society based on Tawḥīd must solve: the reconciliation of permanence and change. Eternal principles are necessary ('the eternal gives us a foothold in the world of perpetual change'), but eternal principles misunderstood as excluding change 'tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile in its nature.' Europe's failure illustrates the danger of change without permanence; Islam's five-hundred-year immobility illustrates the danger of permanence without change. The section closes by naming the principle that Islam developed to solve this structural problem: ijtihād.

This opening section is architecturally essential to Lecture VI in the same way that Section 1 of Lecture V was essential to that lecture. It does not merely introduce a topic; it establishes the problem-space within which every subsequent section will operate. The question 'what is the principle of movement in the structure of Islam?' is not a question about legal technique (though ijtihād has a legal dimension); it is a question about civilisational architecture — about how a society constituted by eternal principles can remain genuinely alive in time. Every subsequent section of Lecture VI, from the discussion of Sunnah and Ijmāʿ to the analysis of the Turkish reforms, will be an elaboration of this foundational problem.

The section also marks a shift in the Reconstruction's centre of gravity. Lectures I–V were primarily diagnostic and constructive in the philosophical sense: they rebuilt the metaphysical, epistemological, and cultural foundations of Islamic thought. Lecture VI is where these foundations are tested against the question of institutional design and historical practice. The shift from 'what does Islam think?' to 'how does Islam move?' is the shift from philosophy to jurisprudence, from metaphysics to political theology — and it is the shift that makes the Reconstruction a practically urgent text rather than a merely interesting philosophical exercise.

Original text

As a cultural movement Islam rejects the old static view of the universe, and reaches a dynamic view. As an emotional system of unification it recognizes the worth of the individual as such, and rejects blood-relationship as a basis of human unity. Blood-relationship is earth-rootedness. The search for a purely psychological foundation of human unity becomes possible only with the perception that all human life is spiritual in its origin.¹ Such a perception is creative of fresh loyalties without any ceremonial to keep them alive, and makes it possible for man to emancipate himself from the earth.

Christianity which had originally appeared as a monastic order was tried by Constantine as a system of unification.² Its failure to work as such a system drove the Emperor Julian³ to return to the old gods of Rome on which he attempted to put philosophical interpretations.

A modern historian of civilization has thus depicted the state of the civilized world about the time when Islam appeared on the stage of History:

'It seemed then that the great civilization that it had taken four thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where every tribe and sect was against the next, and law and order were unknown . . . The old tribal sanctions had lost their power. Hence the old imperial methods would no longer operate. The new sanctions created by Christianity were working division and destruction instead of unity and order. It was a time fraught with tragedy. Civilization, like a gigantic tree whose foliage had overarched the world and whose branches had borne the golden fruits of art and science and literature, stood tottering, its trunk no longer alive with the flowing sap of devotion and reverence, but rotted to the core, riven by the storms of war, and held together only by the cords of ancient customs and laws, that might snap at any moment. Was there any emotional culture that could be brought in, to gather mankind once more into unity and to save civilization? This culture must be something of a new type, for the old sanctions and ceremonials were dead, and to build up others of the same kind would be the work of centuries.'⁴

The writer then proceeds to tell us that the world stood in need of a new culture to take the place of the culture of the throne, and the systems of unification which were based on blood-relationship. It is amazing, he adds, that such a culture should have arisen from Arabia just at the time when it was most needed. There is, however, nothing amazing in the phenomenon. The world-life intuitively sees its own needs, and at critical moments defines its own direction. This is what, in the language of religion, we call prophetic revelation.

It is only natural that Islam should have flashed across the consciousness of a simple people untouched by any of the ancient cultures, and occupying a geographical position where three continents meet together. The new culture finds the foundation of world-unity in the principle of Tawḥīd.⁵ Islam, as a polity, is only a practical means of making this principle a living factor in the intellectual and emotional life of mankind. It demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. And since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man's loyalty to his own ideal nature. The ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of Reality must reconcile, in its life, the categories of permanence and change. It must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life, for the eternal gives us a foothold in the world of perpetual change. But eternal principles when they are understood to exclude all possibilities of change which, according to the Qur'an, is one of the greatest 'signs' of God, tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile in its nature. The failure of the Europe in political and social sciences illustrates the former principle, the immobility of Islam during the last five hundred years illustrates the latter. What then is the principle of movement in the structure of Islam? This is known as Ijtihād.

← Back

Table of Contents

2. The definition of ijtihād and the three causes of stagnation

Original text

A modern historian of civilization has thus depicted the state of the civilized world about the time when Islam appeared on the stage of History: