Iqbal shines on the firmament of knowledge, and his thoughts will always illuminate our path

The moral and political decay of Muslims was at its highest in the first quarter of the last century and during this time the giant figure of Allama Iqbal appeared on the scene. He prepared the ground and laid down the intellectual foundations for revival of Muslim thought. He argued, “it was the spirit of Quran, manifested and unfolded in the form of scientific and intellectual development achieved by Europeans in the last few centuries”. According to Iqbal, inductive logic was born with the birth of Islam; it was observation and experience which Quran emphasized as well as its stress on the finite and the concrete, which paved the way for scientific method of inquiry.

When the Quran ordered to give up all fanciful and superstitious beliefs and bank on the faculty and senses of reason for the attainment of knowledge of the material world, and to think thoughtfully and at length on the natural and physical phenomena as these are the signs of Allah, the scientific spirit was born as a result of this imperative. Iqbal remained steadfast in his opinion that it is from the teachings of Muhammad (SAW) that west borrowed the concepts of economic and political rights of human being. He brought to the fore the urgent need and the immense significance of developing reconstructing the Islamic thought in the light of modern knowledge.

The modern philosophy of west (denying the possibility of acquiring knowledge through revelations from unseen, religious experience, instead insisted on embracing of collective materialism) and its onslaught was confronted by the poet of the east. He hailed that the acceptance of this philosophy would result in a complete dissection of religion i.e. the world of sacred-would be cut off from the unseen world if knowledge and mind is secularized, the sacred light that a heart possesses would be lost. According to Iqbal, dancing to the tunes of profane, wicked pied pipers of the west would put the scholars of Islam in danger and deceive the mankind at large, an age which had already experienced the total dominance of western civilization over all of mankind.

He responded and devoted two of the six lectures of Reconstruction of religious thought in Islam. “Allama Iqbal is the only person who presented the most well-reasoned and persuasive challenge to the new western philosophy ever penned by a Muslim”. The philosophical trail and the challenge which he blazed and offered, neither has been followed by Islamic scholarship nor has been condescended to respond by the Western scholarship. Islamic world which finds itself in the terrible plight is partly because of the failure of Islamic scholarship. The lust of power politics, secularization of education, social polarization and economic exploitation enjoyed by the west has led to a route of faith ruination, confused intellectuals, and all these materialistic concepts of the west were torn apart by Allama Iqbal.

Allama Iqbal asserted and denounced the western civilization and his powerful critique that condemned politico-socio concepts of nationalism and secularism. He reorganized revolutionary Islamic thought and presented the Islamic system of social justice on a scholarly level. His demonstration was concise yet an encyclopedic description of the procedure for bringing about the visualized Islamic revolution. In the opinion of Iqbal, the evil in today’s world is secularism and it’s the reason for separation of state from religion, and therefore corruption. Human sovereignty is disbelief and rejection of Almighty irrespective of whether it manifests itself in the form of individual sovereignty (autocracy and kingship) or in the form of popular sovereignty (democracy and people’s rule). In his masterpiece “Iblees ki majlis e shura” (The Devil’s parliament)

“Hum ne khud shahi ko pehnaya hai jumhoori libas

Jab zara adam huwa hai khud shanas o khud nigar”

Although renaissance and reformation was essentially a positive development in the history of human social evolution but the evil genius of the west diverted this consciousness towards popular sovereignty, and in this way the rule of the King (Almighty) was replaced with the rule of the people. In his final message to Muslim Ummah which is contained in “The Devils Parliament”, Iqbal made Muslims aware of the evil plans of the Satan and his advisers by saying, “they have decided that they have nothing to fear from the rising tides of democracy or socialism; all they are really concerned with is the possibility of Islamic revival. My observation of the so called institutions of democracy culminates eventually as “the rule of capitalists is nothing but an imperialistic cloak”. The threat and challenge for Satan and his diabolical schemes comes only from Islam, which has the potential to topple its global agenda.

Iqbal impressed Muslims to become free from political dominance of the west and reiterated that freedom from every discipline that tries to see man behave as man and does not like to see him stoop to the level of amoral bipeds in the clutches of raw instincts. A great majority of these moral phobics is highly literate. Amongst them are the holders of high academic degrees, including doctorates in philosophy, psychology, literature, history and what not. Certainly these enlightened abstractions are widely read and well informed. They may look as human beings, may appear in finely cut and gracefully tailored attires, with bewitching smiles on their faces, with seemingly refined etiquette and captivating courtesy, yet they are dead as human beings and driven by their beastly desires”.