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

Section 6 examined the Religious Reform Party's diagnosis of deislamisation through localisation and applied ijtihād to the Caliphate question, concluding that the republican form of government is 'thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam' and that Turkey has legitimately shifted from treating the Caliphate as divinely mandated to treating it as a matter of expediency. Section 7 now deepens the Turkish case study by turning to the figure who gave these political and theological arguments their most powerful cultural expression: the poet Ziya Gökalp, whose Comtian-inflected vision of Islam as a 'League of Nations' and whose programme of linguistic nationalisation (replacing Arabic with Turkish in worship and education) Iqbal presents as the most ambitious — and most problematic — exercise of ijtihād in the modern Muslim world.

The section advances through four movements. First, Iqbal draws from Gökalp's poetry the vision of an 'International Islam' — a federation of independent Muslim nations, each strengthened through self-determination, eventually ranging themselves under a common spiritual aspiration. This is the constructive face of the Turkish nationalist programme: not the abandonment of Muslim unity but its reconstitution on a basis of genuine strength rather than 'merely symbolical overlordship.' Second, Iqbal articulates his own reading of this vision in one of the most quoted sentences of the Reconstruction: 'Islam is neither Nationalism nor Imperialism but a League of Nations which recognizes artificial boundaries and racial distinctions for facility of reference only, and not for restricting the social horizon of its members.'

Third, Iqbal presents Gökalp's poem 'Religion and Science,' which adapts Auguste Comte's three-stage theory of intellectual development (theological, metaphysical, scientific) to an Islamic framework — arriving at the conclusion that 'Religion is positive science, the purpose of which is to spiritualize the heart of man.' Fourth, Iqbal addresses the most controversial implication of Gökalp's programme: the displacement of Arabic by Turkish in religious worship and Qur'anic education. Iqbal acknowledges that this reform will be condemned by 'most people in India,' flags that 'the poet's ijtihād is open to grave objections' (which he will develop later), but notes the historical precedent of Ibn Tūmart's Berber-language programme under the Almohads — a reminder that linguistic adaptation in religious practice is not without precedent in Islamic history.

This section is structurally important because it shows ijtihād operating at the level of culture and language, not merely law and politics. The question of whether the Qur'an can be read in translation, whether the call to prayer can be given in a language other than Arabic, and whether religious understanding requires access to the original Arabic or can be mediated through the mother tongue — these are questions that go to the heart of the relationship between the universal message of Islam and its particular linguistic and cultural vehicle. Iqbal's handling is characteristically nuanced: he neither endorses Gökalp's position wholesale nor dismisses it, but presents it as a serious exercise of ijtihād that demands serious engagement.