Allama Iqbal: religion as refutation of mysticism

Nawaz A. Raheem

“Faith is not merely a passive belief in one or more proposition of a certain kind; it is living assurance begotten of a rare experience. Strong personalities along are capable of rising to this experience” Iqbal (Reconstruction P. 109).

Religion is beset with great difficulties and has got to face many problems. The older ways of understanding and interpreting religion seem to have lost their hold on the modern man who, reared in the scientific culture of our age as he is, has begun to doubt the validity of revelation as a source of knowledge. He needs something more certain and more in accord with the spirit of the age than the cut and dried formulate of the theologians as proof of the postulates of religion. The disbelief of the modern man, which he cannot help, is making him anxious. He desires to return to faith - a faith which cannot be torn by doubt and perplexity. How can this faith be regenerated?

Sir Muhammed Iqbal, the poet - philosopher of Pakistan has attempted the task in his book 'The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam'. It is by no means a completed task nor Iqbal meant it to be so. It is simply an initiation of a process which is to be continued along the lines he suggested, namely the reconstruction of religious thought on the basis of human experience, in place of the Aristotelian Law of Contradiction which the scholastics adopted.

True Iqbal did not leave a well-knit system of philosophy. Like all pioneers he left certain 'new' points of vision as legacy for mankind.

Understanding religion

Before passing on to Iqbal's approach to religion, let us discuss an oft-repeated and significant attempt to understand religion. This is a certain type of mysticism, which is based upon the idea that religion is a personal relation of man and God and that God can be disclosed in personal experiences of human beings. This experience opens for the individuals a bliss, which shuns from articulations. Hence those who have this vision cannot say what it is. They can assert only this much, that it is and nothing more. But even the is-ness is a conceptual mode of expression, and hence this also cannot be affirmed of the Being which they know. Now this type of mysticism which abhors any articulation can render but little service to the cause of understanding religion. The in communicability of such experience makes any discourse impossible.

The result of this approach towards understanding religion if accepted would be tantamount to those of the orthodox dogmatics and could be subjected to the same criticism. Iqbal believes the truth on which this type of mysticism is based is indisputable, namely that religious truths are immediately known, yet the assertion that this immediate knowledge is necessarily incommunicable is unwarranted.

Rationalism and mysticism

There is no basic difference between an everyday experience and a mystic experience as such. Every experience has its two sides i.e. - thought and intuition. The more intensive experiences have thought implicit in them, while in every rational judgment intuition is implicit. There is no basic contradiction between the two. The difficulty arises only when the one is singled out as a criterion at the cost of the other. Rationalism and mysticism have been victims of this exaggeration.

According to Muhammed Iqbal the highest type of intuition is one which has the greatest possibilities of articulation. In its-inward movement it remains intuition while in its outward thrust it expresses itself into a system; The higher and the more profound the intuition is, more complete and perfect the system would be. This is the type of intuition which Iqbal names as religious. The possibility of religion as well as its force and meaning depend upon the possibility of having such an experience.

Iqbal says, that this type of experience is possible cannot be doubted. There is nothing strange or illogical about it. We can only know God and we do know Him, through such an immediate yet communicable experience, though the degree of communicability may differ in various cases. The intellectual formulations of the existence of God and the confidence in its pragmatic worth, are all rooted in such experience. This experience however, differs from the classical empiricism in as much as it admits that it is not limited to the clear cut and simple deliverances of the five senses and that it is not a passive affair. Moreover it is possessed of an intensive quality.

Philosophic relevance

Iqbal is of the view that adequate analysis of this experience would reveal that religion is immediately and innately given, and that a religious experience is a universal experience. On the basis of such an experience a philosophy and a system can be constructed which will have all the vigour of rationalism, and a confidence of its truth and workability. To Iqbal therefore, religious experience is an emotional conative attitude with, cognitive element in it, towards the whole of being. Nevertheless it would remain groundless, and irrational unless a psychical life answering to it as its appropriate object really pervades and controls the universe including the individual who feels it.

Iqbal argues, besides the difficulties that might be encountered and the objections that might be raised on the plausibility of translating such experience in formal language, it is certain that it carries with it a conviction in proportion to its comprehensiveness, intensity and persistence. It is not tantamount to saying that the cogency of religious experience depends upon a particular feeling of human beings, hence there is God. The cogency actually lies in the experience itself and in its enjoyment must be sought the ground which has actually led mankind to believe in God.

For the sake of philosophic relevance of such experience let us briefly examine the type of evidence supplied by religious experience. Obviously every inquiry in this connection will begin with self itself and its knowledge. How do we obtain knowledge of our own self? It is certain that self is neither known by acquaintance nor by inference. It is known rather in immediate experience.

Primary demand

But then if the individual knows himself only through his subjective states, in his immediate experience, the question would arise. “How he knows other selves?” One answer to this question is that it is by inference that he obtains the knowledge of the existence of other selves or other minds. A much more adequate way of the knowledge of other selves is suggested by William James. His criteria are not physical. Our fellows are known to be real because they respond to our signals. Response is, no doubt, the best of the presence of a conscious - self. The holy Quran also takes the same view:

And your Lord saith, Call me and I respond to your call' (40.62) 'And when my servants ask thee concerning me, then lam nigh unto them and answer the cry of him that crieth unto me' (2:182)

But whether we take a physical or a non-physical criterion the position is logically the same. It is still inference of another based on analogy. The individual still remains primarily with his own self without any actual experience of a sell beyond his own. This situation seems to turn towards solipsism.

Fortunately the case is quite different. We cannot start from an assumption of a self only, without any reference to the other. On the contrary we constantly presuppose that there are other minds. It is our own self-awareness which rather seems to be an inference from a physical existence other than our own as an indispensable basis of our knowledge. It is the essential incompleteness of the finite individual, on which the existence of the mind is based. In other words, an idea of self remains incomplete and inadequate without involvement of other mind.

If this be the case, Iqbal concludes the primary demand arising from the incompleteness of the self can also prescribe what is required to satisfy it. The essential incompleteness of the self cannot be satisfied by incomplete individual or even by a group of them; for its fulfillment it must reach for a universal and eternal self it does so in religious experience.

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