Dualism & Unity in Muhammad Iqbal's Thought

Dualism & Unity
in Muhammad Iqbal’s Thought
By Dr Soumaya Ghanoushi*

A theologian, philosopher, jurist and poet, Muhammad Iqbal is the expression of the synthetic organic nature of the Islamic system of ideas, which knows no chasm separating the ideal and the real, the life within and the one that abides without, the spiritual and the temporal. Whether in prose or in verse form, the writings of Iqbal are permeated by the illumination of the Quranic spirit of unity through and through, such that each of his thoughts mirrors all the others and the whole all at once. The idea of unity is, indeed, the bane of Iqbal’s system of thought around which all-else falls. The traditional dualisms plaguing human thought since the time of the Greeks are denounced by him as spurious, merely serving to shatter the organic wholeness of reality, bifurcating what is in fact a unity into painful oppositions between a subject that entertains thoughts, knows, speaks and acts and an object contemplated, known, spoken and acted upon. In the relation between the human and the divine, such dualisms dictate the vision of an estranged God, which the universe confronts as its other independently standing in opposition to Him within the void receptacle of infinite space. The ultimate being is thus either a passive spectator who, having manufactured his article, motionless gazes upon it from afar -creation being but an accidental event in his life history, or a domineering tyrant who sways over the human world stifling it whenever it rears its head with a faint desire of coming to its own. Any victory the human scores over the forces of nature obstructing his march is a blow to the authority of the oppressive supra-mundane sovereign.

In response to its self-fashioned dualisms the Western mind sought refuge either in a philosophy of salvation that preached world abnegation, thereby casting the believer in a permanent state of tension with the external world, or in a philosophy of materialism that dissolved the individual and the divine alike into the determinism of an over-mechanised cosmos. It thereby abolished the reign of transcendence, to inaugurate that of immanence. To the elimination of all transcendental referents from knowledge and ethics and the perception of the human situation as purely temporal is traceable the crisis of nihilism and relativity of values characteristic of our times. Only with the admittance of the unity of reality can a scheme of human existence aspiring at meaning be conceivable. Such is the greatest service Islam may render human thought, one the essence of which is embodied in what is in fact its foundation stone: the idea of Tawheed that affirms the radical monotheism of this religion. This is the recognition that “reality is essentially spirit”. All the immensity of matter that is the universe down to its smallest details is the expression of the ultimate reality as it reveals itself to the sense perception of man. As Iqbal puts it, “the world, in all its details from the mechanical movement of what we call the atom of matter to the free movement of thought in the human ego, is the self revelation of the ‘Great I am’”. Talk of ‘the profane’ as opposed to ‘the spiritual’ becomes wholly redundant, since the material is nothing but the revelation of the spiritual within the conditions of sensory experience. The Prophet of Islam puts it so beautifully when he says: “The whole of this earth is a mosque”. The ‘religious’ and the so-called ‘secular’ are so intensely intermingled as to render even the suggestion that the two are sides of the one same object utterly absurd.

The religious as such is as current and extended as the soil of this earth, recognising no restrictions, or the monopoly of an official institution or hierarchy. It is in this context that Iqbel repudiates the model of the theocratic state founded on the institutionalisation of the religious and the sacralisation of politics. Equally objectionable is the secular instrumental Hobbesian state that admits of no moorings or categorical imperatives outside itself, motivated by nothing but a blind unrestrained pursuit of power and national, or tribal glory. This Iqbali vision of the nature of the state has its roots in the works of his forefather the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun who deems the sphere of the political one of ijtihad anchored on the balancing of religious interests and detriments, and also one of consensus established on the legitimacy which the ummah bestows upon it. Indeed, although Ibn Khaldun views politics as intrinsic to Islam itself - as opposed to Christianity which, he maintains, is structured around spiritual redemption, and as such is alien to the political which, under the sway of historical developments, it was compelled to espouse, he declares its realm one of free interpretation or ijtihad, but one which receives its guidance from two limits, horizontally from the consensus of the wide community of believers and vertically from the spiritual directives of Islam or the shari’ah, which is itself immanent within the ummah.

Neither a sacred religious vocation, nor a secular instrumental affair, politics is the terrain of a historically embodied reason shepherded by the light of God. Though it is superior to its natural counterpart that rests on the sole element of force, the rational state sees itself incorporated within the revelational state (dawlat al-shar’’) and elevated to the level of spiritual activity with reason receiving its illumination from the glorious light of God. This is indeed the political order Muslims must aspire at realising, one the essence of which is the synthesis of the revelational state and the rational state. For this, it would seem, is their sole way out of a one-way road that ends either in secularism or in theocracy. And this is without a doubt truest to the spirit of their
Islamic religion.

* Soumaya Ghanoushi (PhD) is a Writer and Researcher, London, England
Source: http://www.islam21.net/