Why ʿAllāmah Muhammad Iqbal Failed

Studying the Failures of Forefathers Is Necessary for Building on Their Successes

It was Iqbāl’s death anniversary yesterday. I didn’t have time to pen something then; so here are my thoughts a day late.

Introduction

When I began my dissertation on the thought and reception of the influential philosopher-poet, ʿAllāmah Muhammad Iqbāl, I started with a kind of wide-eyed excitement. I believed that I was diving into a lake of pearls, looking with excitement to find the truth that resides at the end of my dive. As my project continued, however, reality gradually revealed itself to me like the sun gradually rises above the veil of the horizon: this is not a discover; it is an autopsy. We did not fail Iqbāl; Iqbāl’s entire project – like the projects of Mawdudi, Shariati, Qutb – was always destined to fail.

Iqbāl’s project, for all its brilliance, was infected with a core moral failure that I have found part and parcel of the vast majority of Muslim intellectuals of the last 200 years: bravado that borders on arrogance borne when humility is overpowered by ignorance.

Iqbāl’s Project

Whenever we speak of Iqbāl, we have to be careful about what we mean by “Iqbāl.” Like any person, Iqbāl changed and morphed through his life. Additionally, the eclectic nature of his writing – and his scathing critique of every tradition to which he was an heir, including the western philosophical and Sufi traditions – made his writings infinitely malleable to those who received him. As my research continuously shows, there are as many Iqbāl’s as there are those who read him because his writings uniquely lend themselves to essentializing, decontextualization, and weaponization towards disconnected ideological objectives.

This, too, in a sense, is one of Iqbāl’s core failures: that he was not forceful enough in his own project which was hidden behind so many layers of obfuscation that it became easier to appropriate him for competing projects than to recover his own.

In a sense, however, Iqbāl’s project is one of “reconstruction,” as he himself might have called it. In Iqbāl’s understanding of Islam, the religious tradition underwent a series of reconstructions, the latest of which took place in the late 14^th century with the codified systemization of the madhahib, the Platonic turn in Sufism with Ibn ʿArabi, and the loss of vitality within Islamic natural philosophy. I tend to share the Iqbāl’s critiques of Islamic natural philosophy and the platonic turn, but Iqbāl was entirely inadequate in his understanding of fiqh and uṣūl.[1]

To Iqbāl, then, Islam required another reconstruction – one which took the epistemic methods as well as the exponential expansion in knowledge through the scientific exploration of the natural world as a matter of fact. This was perhaps Iqbāl’s greatest contribution, and the one that is least understood. Iqbāl was not an anti-modernist at all; indeed, to him, as is the case with me, anti-modernism is imbecility masquerading as moral purity.

While modern Muslim thinkers might see secularism or individualism or liberalism or any other -ism as central to modernity as a category, Iqbāl did not. To him, the core of modernity was the consequence of science as it unfolded in the ego’s thought of himself – that is, a core belief that a thing could be studied, it could be controlled towards ends decided by humans rather than nature. Modernity is a complete transformation of the way man conceives of man, and that transformation is so radical that it has reverberating consequences across disciplines.

In this, Iqbāl is entirely correct. Imperial Japan and Germany were cutting edge modern states. They were neither secular nor liberal nor individualistic. What they were, however, was obsessed with control – control over nature, control over knowledge, control over man. This is also why freedom becomes a core question in modern discourse: when the essential belief of man is that all things, if studied and controlled, can be directed towards good outcomes, what role does freedom even have?

Iqbāl’s project was a project of Islamic modernity, one in which he deeply respected and held to high regard the contributions of modern empirical methods of knowledge construction and control of nature but held control of man with deep suspicion. Man is viceregent of the world, not each other. The world can be shaped and transformed; man cannot except if he chooses to do so by his own will to himself.

This is perhaps the greatest success and greatest profundity of Iqbāl as a philosopher and thinker. He is not simply a Muslim obsessed with the Islam and modernity; he is a true philosopher who is, in a rather unsystematic way, attempting to solve the greatest methodological conundrums and ethical dilemmas facing man because of the transformation of his reality. Of all major Muslim thinkers I have read, Iqbāl is unique in this sense.

To be sure, Iqbāl’s method is intriguing as well. He is deeply entrenched in and conversant with the greater Islamic tradition. He is as much a student of Goethe, Kant, and Nietzsche as he is Rumi, Iraqi, and Ibn ʿArabi. He is as much their inheritor as he is their critic; his sword is drawn not just on the West but the East as well. Iqbāl views the post-classical tradition as deeply problematic (something I agree with him on), though he also uses the symbols and images created during this period for his own purposes.

Like many reformers and revivalists in his period, Iqbāl was salafi-stic in some of his method. That is, he imagined the period of the salaf as perfect and all that followed as defective versions of it. Unlike other, much less sophisticated reformers, however, Iqbāl is what I would call a philosophical salafi. This, too, is something I have decided to take from his. That is, his core question to every theory that comes out of the post-classical tradition is to compare it to the lives and events of the Rasul (SAW) and Sahabah (RA) and ask, if your theory is correct, how do you explain these counter-factuals?

In this sense, there is a lot to take from Iqbāl – as there is from any genius. He is also someone who exposes the midwit intellectual, the type I call “The Fool’s Genius.”

How Iqbāl Exposes the Fool’s Genius

Iqbāl was followed by many thinkers in the Muslim world, but each of them was less capable than the next. Each turned Islam into an ideology or governmental methodology. Each tried to expound on Islamic economic theories or Islamic politics or Islamic medicine or Islamic psychology – and each failed more miserably than the next. The last 100 years of Islamic thought has been a series of fools crowning themselves king, ruling with all the ineptitude that comes with imbecility, then being overthrown and replaced by the next idiot.

Even a cursory reading of Iqbāl and comparing him to thinkers like Mawdudi, Qutb, etc exposes the sheer idiocy of those who followed him. Iqbāl’s areas of expertise were philosophy and poetry, and he had such complete mastery over the disciplines that he could speak extensively over both eastern and western iterations of those disciplines at length.

For those who wrote on Islamic economics or politics or psychology or whatever, they had little understanding of the “Islamic” and even less of the economics or politics or psychology or whatever. There was no methodology of bringing Islam into conversation with modern forms and methods of knowledge; there were only crude attempts at apologetics of an essentialized Islamic law in ways that could possibly satisfy debates but had no practical use to building and revitalizing Islamic societies.

The objective was apologetics, not advancement.

For Iqbāl, on the other hand, apologetics was almost never the objective. Rather, his was an attempt to try to create a methodology that allowed for the integration of modern knowledge and its methodologies into a greater tapestry of Islamic thought. This, however, was also Iqbāl’s core failure: he began the project but left it incomplete, heirless, and so buried under rhetoric that his thought has few heirs and many usurpers.

Iqbāl’s Core Failures – Khudi and the Reconstruction

Ironically, Iqbāl’s two greatest failures were what he believed to be his two greatest contributions: khudi and the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Highlighting the failures of both these requires much longer discussions – full academic article length at the least – but a small note here will suffice for the time being.

Iqbāl was correct in understanding that pre-modern notions of the self were entirely incompatible with the consequences of modern knowledge. He was also correct in assessing that an ethic of individualism tied with a greater communal expression was necessary in any reconstructed Islamic discourse on selfhood. His proposed solution, khudi, however, was a complete mess – a hodgepodge of mixed and contradictory elements that bordered on such blasphemy that even the muʿtazliah may have difficulty excusing it. In its least generous interpretation, man becomes a demi-god through khudi. In the most generous interpretations, Iqbāl just doesn’t know what khudi is other than man having a will that he exerts – which is neither profound nor important.

Iqbāl considered the Reconstruction, however, which was as series of lectures compiled into a book, one of, if not his most important contribution. Unfortunately, however, it is possibly his least. The answers offered therein hardly stand the test of time, and whatever can be understood as a methodology is confused and scattered across the work. His epistemological answer to Kant, for example, is at best wanting and at worst opens so many conundrums and contradictions that it can scarcely be considered serious philosophy. His argument for God is not even an argument in a proper sense, and, if its basic premises were to be accepted, it would pose a serious threat to Islam’s general truth claim.

In a single sentence, however, the Reconstruction’s main failure is that it tries to do what would require many men many years to accomplish. And, that, is also the core failure of Iqbāl as a man.

Iqbāl and the Arrogance of the Hero

The major failure of the Iqbāl is the arrogance of the hero. It can tempting for the genius to believe that he has all the answers, that he sees farther and better than his peers, that everyone else’s mistakes are a prelude to his successes. But this is nothing more than arrogance. No matter how genius the genius, he is still a human – and humans are incomplete in and of themselves.

Iqbāl needed mutakallimīn; he needed fuqahāʾ, he needed philosophers and political scientists and theorists and statemen and politicians. Iqbāl needed to be the intellectual kind in the same way that the nobles of the Magna Carta addressed their king: a first amongst equals. The true genius of a genius begins in his ability to admit his incapacity, his incapability, his limitation in inadequacy. Iqbāl’s core failure was the failure of arrogance – and, because of that arrogance, he neither leaned on others as he should have nor trained others to be his heir.

And, because of his failure, we are left with an incomplete project buried under a mountain of rhetoric, appropriated by idiots, and articulated by the idiot-kings of Islamic intellectualism.

Next Article: Muslim anti-intellectualism masquerading as mysticism or piety

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[1] Given the rigidity and sometimes outright stupidity of the ʿulamāʾ of his era, he might have been excused had Iqbāl not been a veritable genius – but geniuses are held to a higher standard than others because of their ability to grasp realities from the smallest amount of evidence. The fact that Iqbāl often praised wahhābism as a break from “taqlid” (blind imitation) is an unfortunate reality, and his time might have been better spent studying fiqh, uṣūl, and kalam rather than engaging in tirades against the ulama.