Sir Muhammad Iqbal

“ To my mind, this inexplicable finite centre of experience is the fundamental fact of the universe. All life is individual; there is no such thing as universal life. God himself is an individual: He is the most unique individual. ”

“ In each of these undifferentiated, simple centres of consciousness, there is hidden a ray of the Absolute Light itself, and the perfection of the spirit consists in gradually actualising, by contact with the individualising principle—matter, its emotional and intellectual possibilities, and thus discovering its own deep being—the ray of eternal Love which is concealed by its union with consciousness. The essence of man, therefore, is not reason or consciousness; it is this ray of Love—the source of all impulse to noble and unselfish action, which constitutes the real man. ”

“ Showing that the Self is strengthened by Love. [36]
The luminous point whose name is the Self
Is the life-spark beneath our dust.
By Love it is made more lasting, 325
More living, more burning, more glowing.
From Love proceeds the radiance of its being
And the development of its unknown possibilities.
Its nature gathers fire from Love,
Love instructs it to illumine the world. 330 [Pg 29]
Love fears neither sword nor dagger,
Love is not born of water and air and earth.
Love makes peace and war in the world,
The Fountain of Life is Love’s flashing sword. ”

“ The existence joined with non-existence—Creation—Nature.
The Essence of God or Pure Thought cannot be understood; no words can express it, for it is beyond all relation and knowledge is relation. The intellect flying through the fathomless empty space pierces through the veil of names [Pg 152] and attributes, traverses the vasty sphere of time, enters the domain of the non-existent and finds the Essence of Pure Thought to be an existence which is non-existence—a sum of contradictions. ”

“ The more we advance in evolution, the nearer we get to him. In approaching him we are raising ourselves in the scale of life. The development of humanity both in mind and body is a condition precedent to his birth. For the present he is a mere ideal; but the evolution of humanity is tending towards the production of an ideal race of more or less unique individuals who will become his fitting parents. Thus the Kingdom of God on earth means the democracy of more or less unique individuals, presided over by the most unique individual possible on this earth. ”

“ Now when we examine the nature of perception, we see that there is a principle in man which, in so far as it is able to know more than one thing at a time, can assume, so to say, many different forms simultaneously. This principle cannot be matter, since it lacks the fundamental property of matter. The essence of the soul consists in the power of perceiving a number of objects at one and the same moment of time. But it may be objected that the soul-principle may be either material in its essence, or a function of matter. ”

“ All that brings drowsiness and makes us shut our eyes to Reality around, on the mastery of which alone Life depends, is a message of decay and death. There should be no opium-eating in Art. The dogma of Art for the sake of Art is a clever invention of decadence to cheat us out of life and power. ”

“ This Primordial Light is the source of all motion. But its motion is not change of place; it is due to the love of illumination which constitutes its very essence, and stirs it up, as it were, to quicken all things into life, by pouring out its own rays into their being. The number of illuminations which proceed from it is infinite. Illuminations of intenser brightness become, in their turn, the sources of other illuminations; and the scale of brightness gradually descends to illuminations too faint to beget other illuminations. ”

“ Iqbal has drunk deep of European literature, his philosophy owes much to Nietzsche and Bergson, and his poetry often reminds us of Shelley; yet he thinks and feels as a Moslem, and just for this reason his influence may be great. He is a religious enthusiast, inspired by the vision of a New Mecca, a world-wide, theocratic, Utopian state in which all Moslems, no longer divided by the barriers of race and country, shall be one. ”

“ In His absolute existence He is beyond the limitation of names and attributes, but when He externalises Himself, when He leaves His absoluteness, when nature is born, names and attributes appear sealed on her very fabric. ”

“ The true person not only absorbs the world of matter; by mastering it he absorbs God Himself into his Ego. Life is a forward assimilative movement. It removes all obstructions in its march by assimilating them. Its essence is the continual creation of desires and ideals, and for the purpose of its preservation and expansion it has invented or developed out of itself certain instruments, e.g. senses, intellect, etc., which help it to assimilate obstructions. ”

“ Our relation with the objects of our knowledge is not merely a passive relation; the individual soul, being itself an illumination, illuminates the object in the act of knowledge. The Universe to him is one great process of active illumination; but, from a purely intellectual standpoint, this illumination is only a partial expression of the infinitude of the Primal Light, which may illuminate according to other laws not known to us. The categories of thought are infinite; our intellect works with a few only. ”

“ Iqbal’s philosophy is religious, but he does not treat philosophy as the handmaid of religion. Holding that the full development of the individual presupposes a society, he finds the ideal society in what he considers to be the Prophet’s conception of Islam. ”

“ Thus from Mulla Ṣadrā's identity of the known and the knower, he passes to his conception of the Real as Will and Love. This Primal Love, which he regards as the essence of the Real, is the cause of the manifestation of the Universe which is nothing more than the self-expansion of Love. The word creation, with him, does not mean creation out of nothing; since, as the Shaikhīs maintain, the word creator is not peculiarly applicable to God alone. ”

“ Thou hast fled, like a scent, from thine own garden;
Thou hast made thy prison with thine own hand.
Our Time, which has neither beginning nor end, 1575
Blossoms from the flower-bed of our mind.
To know its root quickens the living with new life: [Pg 138]
Its being is more splendid than the dawn.
Life is of Time, and Time is of Life:
“Do not abuse Time!” was the command of the Prophet. 1580
Oh, the memory of those days when Time’s sword
Was allied with the strength of our hands! [107]
We sowed the seed of religion in men’s hearts
And unveiled the face of Truth ”

“ The ultimate principle of all existence is "Nūr-i-Qāhir"—the Primal Absolute Light whose essential nature consists in perpetual illumination. "Nothing is more visible than light, and visibility does not stand in need of any definition." [127:1] The essence of Light, therefore, is manifestation. For if manifestation is an attribute superadded to light, it would follow that in itself light possesses no visibility, and becomes visible only through something else visible in itself ”

“ Its nature remains untouched by the glow of Love, 1485
It is ever engaged in a joyless search.
Love is the Plato that heals the sicknesses of the mind: [101]
The mind’s melancholy is cured by its lancet.
The whole world bows in adoration to Love,
Love is the Mahmúd that conquers the Somnath of intellect. [102] 1490
Modern science lacks this old wine in its cup,
Its nights are not loud with passionate prayer. [Pg 131]
Thou hast misprized thine own cypress
And deemed tall the cypress of others.
Like the reed, thou hast emptied thyself of Self 1495
And given thine heart to the music of others. ”

“ The relation between the abstract illumination, or soul and body, is not that of cause and effect; the bond of union between them is love. The body which longs for illumination, receives it through the soul; since its nature does not permit a direct communication between the source of light and itself. But the soul cannot transmit the directly received light to the dark solid body which, considering its attributes, stands on the opposite pole of being. ”

“ If wine pours from my grapes, he is the cause.
I am dust, but his sun hath made me as a mirror:
Song can be seen in my breast.
From Ali’s face the Prophet drew a fair omen, 975
By his majesty the true religion is glorified.
His commandments are the strength of Islam:
All things pay allegiance to his House.
The Apostle of God gave him the name Bú Turáb;
God in the Koran called him “the Hand of Allah.” 980
Every one that is acquainted with Life’s mysteries
Knows what is the inner meaning of the names of Ali.
The dark clay, whose name is the body—
Our reason is ever bemoaning its iniquity. ”

“ Let us now sum up Al-Jīlī's Doctrine of the Trinity. We have seen the three movements of the Absolute Being, or the first three categories of Pure Being; we have also seen [Pg 171] that the third movement is attended with external manifestation, which is the self-diremption of the Essence into God and man. This separation makes a gap which is filled by the perfect man, who shares in both the Divine and the human attributes. He holds that the perfect man is the preserver of the Universe ”

“ If the knowledge of the existent is not immediate, the fact of its perception would require a process of thought which, as we know, it does not. The Ash‘arite Al-Rāzī admits that the concept of existence is immediate; but he regards the judgment—"The concept of existence is immediate"—as merely a matter of acquisition. Muḥammad ibn Mubārak Bukhārī, on the other hand, says that the whole argument of the realist proceeds on the assumption that the concept of my existence is something immediate—a position which can be controverted. ”

“ The ancient Philosophers of Persia were not dualists like the Zoroastrian priests who, on the ground of the principle that the one cannot cause to emanate from itself more than one, assigned two independent sources to Light and Darkness. The relation between them is not that of contrariety, but of existence and non-existence. The affirmation of Light necessarily posits its own negation—Darkness which it must illuminate in order to be itself. ”

“ Elsewhere he calls water the origin of knowledge, intellect, understanding, thought and idea. This instance leads him to guard against the error of looking upon God as immanent in nature, or running through the sphere of material existence. He says that immanence implies disparity of being; God is not immanent because He is Himself the existence. Eternal existence is the other self of God, it is the light through which He sees Himself. As the originator of an idea is existent in that idea, so God is present in nature. ”

“ The mind in the act of predicating whiteness of snow is working on a purely ideal existence—the quality of whiteness—and not on an objectively real essence of which the qualities are mere facets or aspects. ”

“ The existence of colour, for instance, is contingent in comparison to that of the ray, which manifests colour when a dark body is brought before an illuminating body. The Universe, therefore, though contingent as manifestation, is eternal by the eternal character of its source. Those who hold the non-eternity of the Universe argue on the assumption of the possibility of a complete induction. ”

“ In his psychology he follows Avicenna, but his treatment of this branch of study is more systematic and more empirical. As an ethical philosopher, he is a follower of Aristotle whose doctrine of the mean he explains and illustrates with great thoroughness. Above all he modifies and transforms the traditional Neo-Platonism, into a thoroughly Persian system of thought which, not only approaches Plato, but also spiritualises the old Persian Dualism. No Persian thinker is more alive to the necessity of explaining all the aspects of objective existence in reference to his fundamental principles. ”

“ Forms of light and darkness both owe their existence to the Abstract Light. The third element of a material body—the obscure atom or essence—is nothing but a necessary aspect of the affirmation of light. The body as a whole, therefore, is completely dependent on the Primal Light. The whole Universe is really a continuous series of circles of existence, all depending on the original Light. Those nearer to the source receive more illumination than those more distant. ”

“ There is a certain power in us which rules over physical organs, corrects sense-errors, and unifies all knowledge. This unifying principle which reflects over the material brought before it through the sense-channel, and, weighing the evidence of each sense, decides the character of rival statements, must itself stand above the sphere of matter.
The combined force of these considerations, says Ibn Maskawaih, conclusively establishes the truth of the proposition—that the soul is essentially immaterial. The immateriality of the soul signifies its immortality ”

“ With the study of Greek thought, the spirit which was almost lost in the concrete, begins to reflect and realise itself as the arbiter of truth. Subjectivity asserts itself, and endeavours to supplant all outward authority. Such [Pg 46] a period, in the intellectual history of a people, must be the epoch of rationalism, scepticism, mysticism, heresy—forms in which the human mind, swayed by the growing force of subjectivity, rejects all external standards of truth. ”

“ In spite of his belief in the complete heterogeneity of things, he applies the word existence to all things—a tacit admission that there is some essence common to all the various forms of existence. Abu’l-Ḥasan al-Ash‘arī replies that this application is only a verbal convenience, and is not meant to indicate the so-called internal homogeneity of things. But the universal application of the word existence by the idealist, must mean, according to the realist, that the existence of a thing either constitutes its very essence, or it is something superadded to the underlying essence of the thing. ”