Muhammad Iqbal

In the Persian poem “Secrets of the Self” (1915) Iqbal called Muslims from the self-annihilation of a decadent Sufism to the strengthening of the ego (khudi), and in “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam” (1930) he argued that the classical proofs of God fail but that religious experience, read with modern physics and biology, points to God as the Ultimate Ego in whom finite egos live and grow. The universe is unfinished and man is God's co-worker; the Fall was the rise of self-consciousness, not a sin; free will is real and destiny is not iron; immortality is not a right but an achievement; hell is a corrective experience, not everlasting torture; and the closed door of ijtihad must be reopened, with the legislative assembly as the modern form of consensus. He denounced territorial nationalism as idolatry yet in 1930 called for a consolidated Muslim state in northwest India, admired the social program of socialism while rejecting its atheism, and held that in Islam the spiritual and the temporal are one order.

Why he matters: He is the strongest attempt in the twentieth century to do for Islam what the Catholic modernists and personalists attempted for Christianity, to think revelation with Bergson's duration and evolution without dissolving it, and Catholic readers of Blondel or Teilhard will recognize both the ambition and the risk. His engagement with Dante and his critique of a mysticism of passivity make him a natural partner in dialogue.