←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 7: Is Religion Possible?

Section 1 of 11

Three periods of religious life

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal opens the final lecture by mapping religious life into three periods — Faith, Thought, and Discovery — and declaring that the lecture is concerned only with the third: religion as direct experiential contact with Ultimate Reality. He immediately rescues this 'higher religion' from the unfortunate name of mysticism, insisting that it is essentially experience and was as committed to empirical foundations as science itself, long before science learned to be.

Lecture VI concluded the Reconstruction's extended engagement with the institutional structure of Islam — tracing the principles of movement embedded in ijtihād, ijmāʿ, and qiyās, and closing with Iqbal's call for the Muslim world to 'courageously proceed to the work of reconstruction' toward a 'spiritual democracy.' Lecture VII now shifts register entirely. Where Lecture VI asked how Islam's institutional structure should evolve, Lecture VII asks a prior question: is religion itself possible? — not as social organisation or legal system, but as a mode of experience that yields genuine knowledge of the Ultimate Reality. This is the final lecture of the Reconstruction, originally delivered to the Aristotelian Society in London in 1932, two years after the Madras lectures that comprise Lectures I–VI, and its philosophical register is correspondingly more condensed and more directly engaged with contemporary European thought.

Section 1 opens the lecture by mapping the developmental arc of religious life into three periods: Faith (unconditional obedience to discipline), Thought (the rationalisation of that discipline into metaphysics), and Discovery (the displacement of metaphysics by direct experiential contact with Ultimate Reality). This tripartite scheme is not merely descriptive — it is Iqbal's way of defining which sense of 'religion' the lecture will investigate. The lecture is concerned exclusively with religion in the third sense: religion as personal assimilation of life and power, as direct experiential discovery, not as social discipline or metaphysical system.

The section advances through two movements. First, Iqbal lays out the three periods and identifies the third — where 'the individual achieves a free personality, not by releasing himself from the fetters of the law, but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness' — as the sense of religion at stake. Second, he immediately rescues this third-period religion from its 'unfortunate name' of Mysticism and its reputation as a life-denying, fact-avoiding attitude. On the contrary, Iqbal insists, higher religion is 'essentially experience' and recognised the necessity of experience as its foundation 'long before science learnt to do so.' The section closes by positioning higher religion not as the opposite of empiricism but as its deeper fulfilment — 'as critical of its level of experience as Naturalism is of its own level.'

The philosophical stakes are considerable. By defining religion as experience rather than metaphysics, Iqbal sidesteps the entire Kantian critique of rational theology (which will be addressed directly in Section 2) and opens the question that will govern the rest of the lecture: whether there are levels of experience beyond the normal level that yield genuine knowledge. The tripartite scheme also carries an implicit developmental argument: the movement from Faith through Thought to Discovery is not merely historical but normative — the third period represents what religion ought to become, and a community arrested at the first or second period has not yet realised what religion demands.

Original text

Broadly speaking religious life may be divided into three periods. These may be described as the periods of ‘Faith’, ‘Thought’, and ‘Discovery.’ In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command. This attitude may be of great consequence in the social and political history of a people, but is not of much consequence in so far as the individual’s inner growth and expansion are concerned. Perfect submission to discipline is followed by a rational understanding of the discipline and the ultimate source of its authority. In this period religious life seeks its foundation in a kind of metaphysics — a logically consistent view of the world with God as a part of that view.

In the third period metaphysics is displaced by psychology, and religious life develops the ambition to come into direct contact with the Ultimate Reality. It is here that religion becomes a matter of personal assimilation of life and power; and the individual achieves a free personality, not by releasing himself from the fetters of the law, but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness. As in the words of a Muslim Sufi — ‘no understanding of the Holy Book is possible until it is actually revealed to the believer just as it was revealed to the Prophet.’¹

It is, then, in the sense of this last phase in the development of religious life that I use the word religion in the question that I now propose to raise. Religion in this sense is known by the unfortunate name of Mysticism, which is supposed to be a life-denying, fact-avoiding attitude of mind directly opposed to the radically empirical outlook of our times. Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so. It is a genuine effort to clarify human consciousness, and is, as such, as critical of its level of experience as Naturalism is of its own level.

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2. Kant reversed — other levels of experience

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