FREEDOM AND LAW
Sheila McDonough

Muhammad Iqbal’s “Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam” is concerned directly with the question of how it is possible for a rational person to be religious in the twentieth century. As a highly educated man, Iqbal knew that much twentieth century knowledge in the social and physical sciences tended to undercut earlier forms of confidence in religious authority. He had attended lectures by Alfred North Whitehead while he was a student at Cambridge early in the century, and he had learned from that famous mathematician that skepticism was advisable in terms of any claims to certain knowledge form any discipline. Iqbal says Professor Whitehead when he is referring to this intellectual mentor in his Reconstruction lectures, thus indicating that he continued to think of himself as a student to the professor.

Whitehead as a young man had endured the shock of discovering that everything he had been taught in physics was wrong. He was convinced by the experience that not only were most human claims to authoritative knowledge in the past wrong, but that present and future claims to certain knowledge would be equally problematic. As Whitehead’s subsequent career as one of the most significant mathematicians and philosophers of this century indicates, he became a leading thinker because he was not inhibited in his thinking by pre–existing fixed ideas. Whitehead’s position is that we can learn to think better when we give up being emotionally attached to our notions and theories. We need to become ready to abandon old ideas if the evidence suggests we should do so. We should learn to let the data from the outside world impinge directly on us, instead of trying to force it to fit with our assumptions. Thus requires the development of a mental stance wherein ideas are held tentatively, ready to be challenged by experience.

Iqbal thought that this new skepticism would be good for the development of new ways for Muslims to think about past, present and future. His preface to these lectures reads:[1]

I have tried to meet, even though partially, this urgent demand…And the present moment is quite favorable for such an undertaking. Classical Physics has learned to criticize its own foundations.

The reference to physics is directly related to Iqbal’s experience of listening to Whitehead’s lectures at Cambridge. The Muslim Philosopher-poet felt that his community needed to begin rethinking Islamic religious thought by insisting on skepticism towards past theories. He argues that the present moment is favorable precisely because the intellectual enterprise of physics has gone beyond the more simplistic mechanical theories of the universe which had developed in the 18^th century following Newton. The skepticism Iqbal had learned from whitehead included skepticism about the external world as measurable and readily intelligible.

Eighteenth century science had tended to give western man the illusion that he could understand, control and manipulate the eternal world by his thinking processes. The newer physics destroyed that illusion by demonstrating that external reality was much more complex than had been imagined by earlier scientists. Iqbal thought that this loss of a mechanistic theory of the universe meant that it became easier to understand religious experience and practice ads meaningful for a modern person. Thus, Iqbal believed that it was now possible to be skeptical about science as the final source of truth about existence. Throughout his writings, he constantly urges Muslims to be way of matter the only source of knowledge as a reliable basis for clear thinking. He wanted to create a new method of Muslim thinking that would go forward beyond the materialism of those who held a mechanistic theory of nature.

Iqbal’s critique of materialism, however, did not mean that he thought Muslims could ignore modern science, and retreat to the emotional certainties of their past. A good understanding of the methods of science was very much needed for all forms of modern thought. These methods included careful observation, reasoned deductions, and readiness to be challenged by new data and new insights. One could be religious as a modern person, he thought, but only if that religiousness would have a different basis than the religiousness of past ages. In chapter seven of the lectures, which is entitled, Is Religion Possible?[2] He argues that earlier forms of religious trust and certainty are no longer possible. Modern knowledge in the physical and social sciences means that people have to be aware that no simple picture of the cosmos is possible. The social sciences have made us aware of how much of traditional thinking has been shaped by the political and social contexts of past eras. For example: medieval Muslim political thought was shaped by the possibilities and limitations of feudal societies. The past cannot be taken as finally authoritative because new and different contexts require new thinking. It is necessary to reflect upon how to relate basic values to new problems.

This need for a new way of thinking applies to all the religious traditions. Iqbal usually thinks about the history of human religious life as a whole, somewhat in the manner of the academic discipline of History of Religion. Questions as to the psychology of religious experience can be asked of persons in all religious traditions. The list of books in Iqbal’s library indicates that much of his reading was concerned with the topic of psychology of religion. All his life he wanted to keep up with the latest thinking about the nature of the human mind and human claims to religious experience and knowledge. However, he had also a particular concern to reconstruct Muslim thinking about this particular topic.

In the first Islamic centuries, he says, trust in the foundational religious experience of the Prophet and the first Muslims was enough to engender a form of discipline by which the whole community accepted orders, an unconditional command, without seeking for rational basis for their faith. They did work out what they thought to be a rational basis for their metaphysics which was logically consistent. This metaphysics served as a rational foundation for religious faith for several centuries. However, modern knowledge makes such a foundation to longer possible. The difficulty for the twentieth century Muslim, as Iqbal sees it, is that neither the unquestioning trust of the first centuries, nor the logical metaphysics of the Middle Ages is any longer adequate as a basis for faith. Contemporary knowledge as to the vastness and complexity of the cosmos makes medieval cosmological thinking outdated. Something new is requested.

In a way, Iqbal is using himself as a guinea pig to experiment with in order to discover how a modern Muslim person could justify being a serious religious person. He finds the key to the direction of his thought in the experience of freedom and spontaneity. He hated servility and self-contempt, the kind of degradation of spirit which the experience of imperialist domination had imposed on his people, the Indian Muslims. Iqbal was born just twenty years after revolt failed.

Revolt against the British in 1857 which had led to much greater British domination over India, and the final collapse of the Mughal Empire. He went to a school run by missionaries, in a town which contained the presence of the British Army camp. The British were there to defend North West India against the possibility of invasion from Afghanistan. It was necessary to conform to British rules in order to get education, and to get jogs. Iqbal was convinced that the kind of servility caused by this condition of eternal control led to the collapse of self respect and moral responsibility. Subservience led to the development of meanness of spirit among his people. Repression tended to make spontaneity difficult. Servility made for self-hate, and self-hate led to moral corruption.

Iqbal was clear in his insistence that most medieval theology and philosophy would not help with this problem. In his words:

Nor can the concepts of theological systems, draped in the terminology of a practically dead metaphysics, be of any help to those who happen to possess a different intellectual background. The task before the Modern Muslim is therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past.[3]

His way of rethinking the problem of how to be religious in the modern world is to concentrate on personal experience. It is his knowledge of the complexity of his inner life that convinces him that materialism is not adequate as an explanation for existence. He thinks he has a soul, and he wants to understand how that soul functions. Iqbal says that the more we consider the soul, the more we recognize that the forces of our inner life are not capable of being conceptualized. We cannot have a simple theory of what the soul is and how it works. What can be understood is that the soul is directive. Iqbal uses the terms soul and ago interchangeably. He writes:

The life of the ego is a kind of tension caused by the ego invading the environment and environment invading the ego. The ego does not stand outside this arena of mutual invasion. It is present in it as directive energy and is formed and disciplined by its own experience.[4]

The distinctive character of Iqbal’s understanding of human consciousness is precisely this aspect of ‘directive energy’ he insists that our inner lives are formed through interaction with all that impinges on us from outside.

Thus my real personality is not a thing. It is an act. My experience is only a series of acts, mutually referring to one another, and held together by the unity a of a directive purpose. My whole reality lies in my directive attitude. You cannot perceive me like a thing in space, or set of experience in temporal order; you must interpret, understand, and appreciate me in my judgments, in my will-attitude, aims and aspirations…. It is the mind’s consent which eventually decides the fate of an emotion or a stimulus…. Thus system of experience we call soul or ego is also a system of acts…. The characteristic of the ego is spontaneity”.[5]

A significant recent book by Thomas Moore The Care of the Soul makes a similar point about the link between spiritual authenticity and spontaneity. Moore has been reviving the ideas of the Italian Renaissance thinker, Ficino, about the link between creativeness and the soul. Each soul is unique, and potentially creative. The soul is nourished by a particular environment: all that is seen, heard, smelled, touched, and experienced enter into the making of a unique consciousness is that which consciousness is most effective when it is spontaneous. The crippled consciousness is that which consciousness is that which is so subservient to control by others than it no longer feels and expresses it self spontaneously. Spontaneity can be effectively creative. The servile obey orders but they do not make the world a better place. Freedom of spirit is necessary for gaining insight into what changes might be possible in order to transform the conditions of existence, individual and corporate. We need to be able to feel freely and to express our feelings in constructive action. Feeling enables to us judge the bad and he good.

Iqbal stresses the link between spontaneity and purpose.

Careful study of intelligent behaviour discloses the fat of ‘insight’ over and above the mere succession of sensations. This ‘insight’ is the ego’s appreciation of temporal, spatial and causal relations of things-the choice, that is to say of data in a complex that’s in view of the goal or purpose which the ego has set before itself for the time being. It is this sense of striving in the experience of purposive ends and the success which I actually achieve in reaching my ‘ends’ that convince of my efficiency as a personal cause. The essential feature of a purposive act is its vision of a future situation which does riot appears to admit any explanation in terms of physiology.[6] ….

Indeed in interpreting Nature in this way the ego understands and masters its environment, and thereby acquires and amplifies its freedom.[7]

Iqbal knows that free persons can change the world because he has done so. As an artist, he has brought into being forms of expression which did not exist before, and which have changed other lives. We know that we are free when we have created something significant. One past Muslim culture which Iqbal admired was that of Ummayad Spain in which intellectual and artistic creativeness had flourished. His poem “the Mosque of Cordoba” is one of his masterpieces. Iqbal saw the Mosque on a visit to Spain in 1931. It represents to him an awe-inspiring statement of the intentions of the builders to create an effective witness to their love for, and gratitude to, their Creator.

Yet, in this frame of things, gleams of immortal life
    Show where some servants of God wrought into some high shape
    Work whose perfection is still bright with the splendor of Love
    Love, the well-spring of life; love, on which death has no claim.
    Swiftly its tyrannous flood time’s long current may roll:
    Love itself is a tide, stemming all opposite waves.
    Shrine of Cordoba! From Love all your existence is sprung….
    Yours the soul-quickening pile, mine the soul-kindling verse,
    Yours to knock at men’s hearts, mine to open their gates,
    Not less exalted than high Heaven is the human breast…
    Fervently sounds my voice, ardently sounds my lute,
    God is God, like a song, thinking through every vein!
    Outward and inward grace, witness in you for him,
    Prove your builder like you fair of shape and of soul….
    Light such as Moses beheld gleams on those walls, that roof,
    High on that minaret’s top Gabriel sits enthroned...
    Warmed by no blood from the heart, all man’s creations are botched.
    Warmed by no blood from the heart, poetry’s raptures grow faint.” [8]

This poem encapsulates much of Iqbal’s basic thought. Time is relentless. The glories of the Muslim past, such as the culture of Mughal India, are gone forever. Yet time and eternity are linked in a paradoxical manner. To say that Gabriel sits on the top of the minaret is to suggest that the harmonious beauty of the mosque transcends time, because it can speak to a person of the twentieth century. The artists who built the mosque did their work so well that then creation awakes response all another human mind, centuries later.

Authentic freedom means authentic emotion, emotion riot shaped by a twisted desire to please exploiters and tyrants. Liberated emotion responds freely to beauty. In this sense, the more free a person its, the more able he or she should be to bear witness to the goodness of creation, and thus to the goodness of the Creator. Iqbal plays with the paradox that we know that God is good because the servants of God, the creators of the mosque, have created a work of beauty. This beauty has a liberating effect on a man of another age who sees the perfection of the mosque. Time is transcended by the response of human persons separated by time and space who can recognize the witnessing power of their creations.

Iqbal also says in this poem that the life is a test. We saw that he understood the soul as the capacity to have and to fulfill purposes. If he were an ideological thinker, this would mean that the ideology was a blueprint, and that the purpose of the individual would be to shape the world according to that blueprint. However, he does not think that individuals fulfill themselves in this way. He writes:

Life is only a series of acts of attention, and an act of attention is inexplicable without reference to a purpose, conscious or unconscious…The element of purpose discloses a kind of forward look in consciousness…A state of attentive consciousness involves both memory and imagination as operating factors….No doubt, if teleology means the working out of a plan in view of a predetermined end or goal, it does make time unreal. It reduces the universe to a mere temporal reproduction of a pre-existing eternal scheme of structure in which individual events have already found their proper places, waiting, as it were, for their respective turns to enter into the temporal sweep of history. All is already given somewhere in eternity, the temporal order of events is nothing more than a mere imitation of the eternal mould. Such a view is hardly distinguishable from mechanism which we have already rejected. In fact, it is a kind of veiled materialism in which fate or destiny takes the place of rigid determinism, leaving no scope for human or even divine freedom. The world regarded as a process realizing a pre-ordained goal is not the world of free, responsible moral agents; it is only a stage on which puppets are made to move by a kind of pull from behind. There is, however, another sense of technology. From our conscious experience we have seen that to live is to shape and change ends and purposes and to be governed by them. Mental life is teleological in the sense that, while there is no far-off distant goal towards which we are moving, there is a progressive formation of fresh ends, purposes, and ideal scales of value as the process of life grows and expands. We become by ceasing to be what we are”.[9]

Iqbal is thus lucid about the test Muslims face in the present and future is not to just reproduce some pre-existing social and political order. They should rather learn to work within time to create something new. This creation of the new must happen not just once, but regularly. To have awareness of the directive soul within is to strive to realize one purpose and then to go on to other purposes. We should always be directed by purpose, yet the purposes also must change and develop as we mature, individually and corporately. The test is to respond in the present in order to make the world positively better for the future. This process never ceases, because once one goal is achieved, other goal are born. Once we solve one problem, another problem arises. But the purposes should always involve efforts to make goodness tangible in concrete situations.

A year after his visit to Cordoba, Iqbal gives a speech to the Muslims in Lahore in 1932. He says that he is a visionary idealist. He quotes the warning, from the Bible that where there is no vision, the people perish. The actual verse in the King James translation goes on to read “but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” [Proverbs: 29:18] The Chapter is entitled observations on public and private government. This is a Biblical statement about the link between freedom and law. Iqbal is using the Biblical quotation in order to explain what he sees as his vocation.

In this speech, Iqbal is giving the reasons why he thinks Muslims need to retain control over their own cultural development once the British get out off India. He says that the servility engendered by imperialism in the spirits of the colonized tends to make the repressed morally irresponsible. He wants the Muslims to be free to develop their own culture, and to become morally responsible for designing the laws, taxation and so forth, which will make their common life good, Iqbal does not intend to recreate the past, since he knows that is not possible. But he wants to rekindle vision and imagination.

To reveal an ideal freed from its temporal limitation is one function, to know the how ideals can be transformed into living actualities is quite another. If a man is temperamentally fit for the former function his task is comparatively easy, for it involves a dean jump over temporal limitations which waylay the practical politicians at every step Politics have their roofs in the spiritual life of man. It is my belief that Islam is not a matter of private opinion. It is a society, or if you like, a civic church….We must have a clear perception of the forces which are silently molding the future, and place a relatively permanent programme of work before the community.”[10]

At this time, Iqbal was advocating a federal state for India in which the Muslim would have control over their cultural autonomy. However, he says that this problem of federalism is less important than the threat of materialism as a foundation of culture. He Says:

These phenomena, however, are merely premonitions of a coming storm, which is likely to sweep over the whole of India and the rest of Asia. This is the inevitable outcome of a wholly political civilization which has looked upon man as thing to be exploited and not as personality to be developed and enlarged by purely cultural forces… The faith which you represent recognizes the worth of the individual, and disciplines him to give away his all to the service of God and man. Its possibilities are not yet exhausted. It can still create a new world where the social rank of man is riot determined by his caste of color, or the amount of divided he earns, but by the kind of life he lives, where the poor tax the rich, where human society is founded not on the quality of stomachs but on the equality of spirits, where private own ship is a trust and where capital cannot be allowed to accumulate so as to dominate the real producer of wealth. The superb idealism of your faith, however, needs emancipation from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists. Spiritually we are living in a prison house of thoughts and emotions which during the course of centuries we have woven round ourselves. And be it further said to the shame of us-men of older generation-which we have failed to equip the young generation for the economic, political, and even religious crises that the present age is likely to bring. The whole community needs a complete overhauling of its present mentality in order that it may again become capable of feeling the urge of fresh desires and ideals. He who desires to change an unfavorable environment must undergo a complete transformation of his inner being…. Nothing can be achieved without a firm faith in the independence of one’s own inner life.[11]

The relation between law and freedom in Iqbal’s thought is thus that persons must begin with faith in the independence of their inner life. This means no subservience to political, military, economic or religious control. Iqbal often writes of the first generation of Muslims as those who effectively struggled against control by kings, and priests. He sees his own struggle as the need to reaffirm freedom of spirit.

Lovely, oh Lord, this fleeting world; but why
    Must the frank heart, the quick brain, droop and sigh,
    Though usury mingle somewhat with his god ship,
    The white man is the world’s arch-deity;…
    Your laws are just, but their expositors
    Bedevil the Koran, twist it awry;….
    God-filled, I roam, speaking what truth I see-
    No fool for priests, nor yet of this age’s fry.
    My folk berate me, the stranger does riot love me:….
    In Nimrod’s fire faith’s silent witness, not
    Like mustard-seed in the grate, burned spluttering,-
    Blood warm, gaze keen, right-following, wrong-forswearing,
    In fetters free, prosperous in penury,

In fan or foul untamed and light of heart-
    Who can steal laughter from a flower’s bright eye?
    -Will no-one hush this too proud thing Iqbal
    Whose tongue God’s presence-chamber could not tie!” [12]

The image of the silent witness in the fire is a reference to the Qu’anic portrayal of Abraham cast into the fire for his faith, and transcending the flames. Iqbal shows himself trying to opt out of western materialism, and also out of the twisted understanding of the Qur’an characteristic of the traditional Islamic scholars of his time.

He is critical of the traditional scholars because lie thinks they still have the medieval tendency to study verses of the Qur’an out of context, rather than in focusing on ht message of the Qur’an as a whole. He thinks these traditional scholars have acquired the bad intellectual habits of just repeating stereotyped ideas, rather than in exercising their minds to apply the Qu’anic perspective to the real problems of the modern world. By refusing to think about new problems in Qur’an interpretation, the traditional ulema were still thinking about the needs of feudal society. For this reason, their thinking was largely irrelevant to the new problems of industrializing societies. The Qu’anic perspective is just, as Iqbal says in this poem. But justice only makes sense in concrete situations. Iqbal thinks that the free religious awareness lie advocates will enable persons to understand the basic principals of the Qur’an, human equality, and social justice. A person who understands spiritual freedom in the depths of his or her own personality, must also understand that all persons have the same inner qualities. For this reason, no kind of rectal, social, or genders contempt for other persons is acceptable. If one is valuable, all are valuable.

If the freedom of the soul of one is rooted in the Absolute, so also are the souls of all human persons. This is the basis of equality, and the reason why social justice is essential. In Iqbal’s words:

The individual achieves a free personality, not he 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’.[13]

The Sufi in question was Iqbal’s father who taught him to read the Qur’an every day, a duty which he carried on faithfully all his life. The poet tried constantly to appropriate the Qur’an as a message for his own age just as the Prophet had done for his age.[14]

We noted earlier that Iqbal said that we would know him, or any person by judging what he had done, that the actions reveal the quality of a person. This is his approach to the Prophet Muhammad. He believed that the prophet could be understood by his actions, namely that what Muhammad had done with his life revealed the quality and nature of his religious experience. Iqbal thought that the Prophet’s religious experience had compelled him to work for human equality and social justice, to free humanity form tyrants and priests, and to try to eliminate all forms of dominance and oppression. Iqbal considered the coming of Islam into human history as the source of the vision of the possibility of the creation of a just and good society. The challenge he offered to the Muslims of the present and the future was that they should pick up this challenge.

Freedom is thus prior to law since only the free can feel adequately the need to express their insights into the need for equality and justice. On the other hand, those who are oppressed cannot easily experience the goodness of Creation which could lead them to appreciate the reality of their spiritual depths. Those who experience freedom need to design social, political and economic structures of common life so that all persons will be able to discover the freedom latent in their consciousness.

As indicated in his 1932 speech, quoted above, Iqbal was well aware that there is a different between talking about the ideals of equality and justice, and working out such ideals in practice. He was himself a lawyer who practiced regularly in the courts in Lahore. He also took part to some degree in the legislative assembly of his area. He knew that actual legislative assembly of his area. He knew that actual legislative activity involved complex processes of compromise and adjustment. He was not an ideological thinker who dreamed that one need only imagine the perfect system and then implement it.

His view of Muslim history was that the ideals of freedom, equality and justice had been appropriated by the Prophet through the Revelation of the Qur’an, and implemented by the first community of believers in the contexts of the possibilities and limitation of their time. Iqbal wanted the Muslims of his time to recover this critical spirit, and vision, and then to go forth into the world of their own time to realize then ideals. The Muslims of the past had worked through judges making decisions to create the system of justice, the Shariah, which had served as a guide to community life in past centuries. In Iqbal’s words:

Now, this principle of the equality of all believers made early Musulmans the greatest political power in the world Islam worked as a leveling force; it gave the individual a sense of his inward power, it elevated those who were socially low… The work of freeing humanity from superstition is the ultimate ideal of Islam as a community… it is their mission to set others free’.[15]

Iqbal constantly emphasizes that the purpose of Islam is for the Muslims to create among themselves a community with a vocation to bear witness to the spiritual freedom of all individuals. No one should be the victim of control by political or religious authorities. This is why democracy is a necessary political expression of the purpose of the Qur’an. In this connection, in a modern Muslim democratic state as envisaged by Iqbal, the legislature should work to make laws that would increase human freedom. In the poet’s words: [16]

The whole system of Islamic ethics is based on the idea of individuality; anything which tends to repress the healthy development of individual is quite inconsistent with the spirit of Islamic law and ethics. A Muslim is free doing anything he likes, provided he does not violate the law. The general principles of this law are believed to have been revealed: the details, in order to cover the relatively secular cases, are left to the interpretation of professional lawyers. It is, therefore, true to that the entire fabric of Islamic law, actually administered is really judge made law, so that the lawyer performs the legislative function in the Muslim constitution. If, however, an absolutely new case arises which riot is provided for in the law of Islam, the will of the whole Muslim community becomes a further source of law.

The Muslim is free unless he violates the basic principles of the law. These basic principles are equality and justice, Individual freedom must be realized in a way that does not impede or harm the freedom of others. The process of creating the new which must be part of the on-going procedures and decisions by which a democratic society works at solving its problems is entirely in accord with Iqbal’s understanding of basic Islamic values. He insists however that the well-being of all human beings must be the end kept, in view as societies struggle to make their economic arid political systems more just. He hated materialism because he thought that societies motivated exclusively by material values were bound to oppress others, and eventually to destroy themselves.