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Religion versus Psychologism in Modern Muslim Philosophy: A Case

Study of Iqbal
Abstract
Muhammad Maroof Shah
Rajbag Colony, Nagbal, Ganderbal, Kashmir, 190006
marooof123@yahoo.com
The present paper critically explores appropriation of modern psychological notions by Iqbal in his
Madras lectures. Iqbal takes for granted much of controversial theses of modern psychology and its
philosophical overtones. He is essentially in agreement with the methodological premises of modern
psychology. He is unable to resist fully the influence of psychologism. He goes very far in giving
concessions to modern man’s psychological prejudices vis-à-vis religion. He is anxious to secure a space
for religion in modern age which is committed to some sort of psychologism. I have approached Iqbal
from the traditionalist metaphysical perspective to critique his religio-philosophical approach to God.
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Iqbal, one of the most important and influential of modern Muslim philosophers and key
modernist voice, although not a professional scientist or a philosopher of science, was nevertheless
deeply concerned with the question of science. His seminal work on Islam in relation to modern thought
was conceived to respond to or appropriate the thought current of modern science from Islamic
theological viewpoint. Iqbal’s modernism and his reconstructionist project derive directly from his
response to modern science. His is an original and unique appropriation of modern science in Islam. He
equated the birth of Islam with the birth of inductive intellect. He read modern scientific methodology in
the Quran. He extended empiricist character of science into the realm of religion. His interpretation of
the institution of finality of prophethood serves to legitimize modern age. In his view, the Prophet of
Islam wrote off the ancient world and announced the birth of new world that defines itself in terms of
rational and empirical approach of modern science. Apart from physics or the science of Nature it is the
psychological science or the science of the soul or inner experience that are most important or
fundamental in both the science as well as the religion as Iqbal emphasizes. The empiricist foundation
for faith that Iqbal argued for largely through his analysis of the realm of the psyche forms his highly
original thesis.
Psychology’s challenge to Religion
As an unprecedented event in the history of religion, the science of psychology (of psyche) has
come to be substituted for the science of the spirit in our age. Psychology replaces religion and
metaphysics for modern man. It is from psychological quarters that a crusade against religion has been
launched. Psychological appropriations of religion or the realm of the spirit are at best crude and
positively distorting. Modern psychology, according to traditionalists, is a profane discipline and quite
expectedly has failed to understand the sacred, the numinous, and the holy and in fact has been
committed to various reductionist fallacies in its approach to religion. Modern psychology has
contributed to a great deal to the global secularization. It has presented a picture of religion that is by and
large not acceptable to a traditionalist. Modern man’s apostasy or agnosticism derives to a significant
extent from his explorations of psychology. The question is given his psychological conditioning how
could religion appeal to modern man? This is the problem to which Iqbal has given a good deal of
attention in his lectures and this forms the subject of the present paper.
Iqbal took great interest in modern psychology and its implications for religious thought. He doesn’t
see anything wrong in modern man’s peculiar psychological makeup. He proceeds to appropriate
traditional religion and traditional psychology in terms of it. He makes this very clear in his preface to the
seminal work The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. He accepts as given the modern mind’s
bias for the concrete. He grants that there are men for whom it isn’t possible to organically assimilate an
alien universe by “reliving, as a vital process, that special type of inner experience on which religious
faith ultimately rests.” Modern man’s bias for the concrete has rendered him less capable of that
experience. He asserts that Islam itself had initially fostered this concrete approach. He deplores the fact
that modern day representatives of Sufism display ignorance of modern mind and criticizes them for their
incapability of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought or experience. He demands a method
that does no violence to the concrete type of mind; the empiricist and rationalist presumptions of modern
mind are duly respected by him throughout Reconstruction. He is essentially in agreement with the
methodological premises of modern psychology. He is unable to resist fully the influence of
psychologism. He goes very far in giving concessions to modern man’s psychological prejudices vis-à-vis
religion. He is anxious to secure a space for religion in modern age which is committed to some sort of
psychologism.
In his lectures Iqbal takes for detailed analysis the psychological science or the science of the soul or
the inner experience. The empirical foundation for faith that Iqbal argues largely through his analysis of
the realm of the psyche forms his highly original thesis. Iqbal sees the Prophet as a psychiatrist and argues
for rational justification of religion through his bold appropriation of modern psychological insights. In
this paper Iqbal’s observations on psychology will be subjected to a critical appraisal so as to highlight his
unique albeit unorthodox contribution in this regard.
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Conception of Revelation
Iqbal’s epistemology (or his appropriation of the Quranic epistemology) is deeply related to his analysis
of psychology or we can say that psychology informs his epistemology. The thesis of his first lecture is
that the unity of inner experience is one of the primary sources of knowledge. All mysticism and religion
is concerned with it and get their empirical verification and legitimation through this valid source of
knowledge. The other two sources of knowledge are history and nature. Iqbal’s concept of prophecy
forms a unique contribution to Islamic thought as it appeals to modern sensibility. The reductionist
psychologism that modern man uses to interpret and appropriate the Realm of the Spirit subtly influenced
Iqbal also and to some extent informs his concept of prophecy. Iqbal, in the same lecture, finds even
Freud and psychoanalysis – otherwise such an anathema to traditional religious sensibility – highly
relevant in analyzing the phenomenon of religion or prophetic-mystical experience. He is not fully able to
extricate himself from certain modernist prejudices that interpret the higher in terms of the lower. There is
hardly any place for angelology in his account. Modernist Muslims have tried to ingeniously interpret the
central figure of Prophet in Islam and Iqbalian attempt is one of the most original in this direction.
Iqbal defines a prophet as
a type of mystic consciousness in which ‘Unitary experience [of the mystic] tends to overflow its
boundaries …. In his personality the finite center of life sinks into his own infinite depths only to spring up
again, with fresh rigor, to destroy the old to disclose the new directions of life. 2
Traditionally revelation has been seen as a disclosure of God to prophet and there is unmistakable
initiative from God. A prophet is more a passive receptacle and a recipient of the ‘message’ than an
autonomous self-enclosed visionary or poet. For Iqbal the prophetic consciousness is a development of
psychic energy in certain individuals and is a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by
providing ready made judgments, choices, and ways of action. 3 This seems to resemble typical modern
psychologist’s way of approaching the issue. This also seems to be implying that prophethood could be
cultivated; it does not come from something that has nothing do with any mental faculty. Iqbal, however,
didn’t believe this but here he is unable to identify and clearly foreground the unique and independent
source of prophetic knowledge or revelation. Profane disciplines of modern science or modern Western
philosophy (epistemology) are simply incapable of making sense of revelation and its source in the
Universal Intellect. But Iqbal doesn’t invoke traditional metaphysics and epistemology in his explication
of the concept of prophecy. Perhaps this is because these things are quite alien to modern ways of
thinking.
Psychical appropriation of prophecy, so succinctly and provocatively presented by Sir Syed in his
commentary on the Quran (and also by Niaz Fatehpuri in his Man-wa-Yazdan from a more secularist
perspective), is coached in a more guarded language by Iqbal that reduces its heterodox tone. Wahy or
revelation, that unique attribute of prophet, is interpreted in a way that makes it a property of all men in
potentio. The uniqueness of this prophetic attribute is diffused and any role of divine initiative in this
interpretation seems to be ignored. His interpretation seems to be informed by evolutionist assumptions
also. There does not seem to be any vertical involvement in either the initiation of wahy or sealing off the
institution of prophethood. Iqbal does not feel any difference in kind but only of degree among various
types of wahy manifested in plants and animals, ordinary men and prophets. Prophetic and mystical
modes of consciousness are qualitatively similar according to him; the only difference is in their effects.
He writes:
Indeed the way in which the word wahy (inspiration) is used in the Quran shows that the Quran regards it
as a universal property of life; though its nature and character are different at different stages of the
evolution of life. The plant growing freely in space, the animal developing a new organ to suit new
environments in the depths of life are all cases of inspiration varying in character according to the needs of
the recipient, or the needs of the species to which the recipient belongs. Now during the minority of
mankind psychic energy develops what I call prophetic consciousness – mode of economizing individual
thought and choice by providing ready made judgments, choices, and ways of action. With the birth of
reason and critical faculty, however, life, it its own interest inhibits the formation and growth of non-
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rational modes of consciousness through which psychic energy flowed at an earlier stage of human
evolution.4
This psycho-anthropological approach to revelation, besides being problematic on traditional grounds, is
also susceptible to serious philosophical and scientific critique as will be argued in this paper. Iqbal also
makes a unique apology for inductive reason and its exclusive rights as demanded by modern spirit in this
context. The non-rational or mystical (and prophetic) modes of perceiving reality – the only valid mode to
be authentically religious according to the traditionalist perennialist approach – must be inhibited (and
what will thus become of religion?) for reinforcing inductive reason. For Iqbal the ancient world and
primitive modes of consciousness must be sidelined or abandoned but it leads to the fateful neurosis as
Jung illustrates in his voluminous writings because of man’s severance of his ties with the roots of his
being – the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Mystical consciousness which forms the
substratum of religious life and thus ensures fuller integral or holistic psycho-spiritual development must
be actively cultivated and rediscovered by man and modern man has suffered too much the consequences
of development of rational modes of consciousness and now he must reenchant the disenchanted world,
relive his past, rediscover what Foucault calls the Realm of Unreason that was forcefully suppressed by
the post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment Reason. Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul argues this
point from a purely psychological perspective. Modern man has lost his soul, or contact with the inner
depths of life because of his unilateral development of inductive reason and rational modes of
consciousness and what we need is to reappropriate and reestablish traditional mystical or non-rational
modes of life and consciousness as Iqbal himself pleads in his poetry. The Prophet needs to be
experienced and lived every moment and this is experiential dimension of Prophet which is crucially
important for modern man who seems to have been alienated from the inner depths of his life. Iqbal
himself realizes this throughout his poetry through his eulogizing of ishq (love) and Muhammed (SAW)
against the disenchanting rationalist modernist worldview. It is in his Madras lectures that Iqbal gives too
many concessions to modernist spirit and attempts to read some elements of his modernism, rationalism
and inductionism in the Quran. His statement that “in so far as the source of his revelation is concerned he
belongs to the ancient world; in so far as the spirit of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the modern
world,”5 needs qualification. The spirit of prophetic and mystical experience (that Iqbal finds qualitatively
similar) can’t be claimed for a particular age. It is timeless and in fact modernity represents certain
oblivion of perennial philosophy; modern spirit is essentially divergent from what prophets envisaged as
perennialists have argued. Iqbal supposes that the Prophet claims supernatural authority but at the same
time says that he does not go outside himself. Indeed this whole talk of natural and empirical character of
religious claims (that Iqbal argues for) implies this. Mystical experience may have nothing to do with
psychology contrary to what is assumed by orthodox Western (modernist) scholarship. Even Jung falls
into this trap of psychologism when he talks about mysticism and religion. The Realm of the Spirit, of
nothingness, of non-thought and silence has been confused by most modern psychologists with the Realm
of the Psyche, the mental realm, and the former is hardly believed in. The traditional ternary division of
body, soul and spirit rather than the Cartesian Western binary of soul and body is able to properly
approach the question of religion and mysticism.
Limitations of Psychology vis-à-vis Religion
Iqbal feels compelled to psychologize religion to appeal to modernist sensibility. There can be no
philosophical test (which is almost psychological test in case of Iqbal) of the revelation of religious
experience as Iqbal assumes. The empiricism is not competent here. Iqbal himself, in flat contradiction to
his own usual position, concedes this. He says, “Philosophy [and psychology] no doubt, has jurisdiction
to judge religion, but what is to be judged is of such nature that it will not submit to the jurisdiction of
philosophy except on its own terms.’’6 Religion will always elude any psychological filtering and
analysis. Philosophy too cannot enable any one to commit that vital act of appropriating the whole
universe which is iman as Iqbal himself defines it. Philosophy cannot invalidate religion so it cannot
validate it either. The religion celebrates the mystery and the unknown, the unlimited and neither
psychology nor philosophy can do anything with it. This is Iqbal’s position as well, especially in his
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poetry. The religion is synonymous with existence, with being (and nothingness). What can psychology
do here? Modern man, due to his unfortunate conditioning due to modern knowledge or modern science,
finds it enormously difficult to understand religion or empathize with it. The paradoxical, the irrational,
the illogical or supralogical, the mystical, the unscientific and all such labels associated with religion
make western man peculiarly unfit for properly approaching religion, especially the eastern religions.
Mysticism which forms the core of religion is just inassimilable either in the Western metaphysics of
presence or in modern positivism.
Whitehead’s famous characterization of religion previously referred to is again quoted to show
whether it is possible to appropriate religion in psychological paradigm. Whitehead thus characterizes
religion:
…the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things;
something which is real and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility and yet the
greatest of present facts; something which gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension;
something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate
ideal, and he hopeless quest.7
This shows how simplistic is the approach of psychologizing religion. Religion asks us to go beyond
mind and transcend all thought and all experience. The religious experience is not commensurable with
any other experience. The deconstructionist spirit of religion problematizes or vetoes any representation
or definition or objectevization of the object of religion that is essentially a differend and subject to
differance. Psychology helps to clarify certain phenomena associated with religion rather than the religion
per se. God cannot be experienced in the usual sense of the word experience. The concept of negative
divine, so characteristic of eastern religions and all mysticism shows this clearly. There is no way to know
Him (or catch the infinite through reason as Iqbal would like to believe) or to experience Him. He is the
unknown, the unknowable, the mysterium tremendum. He is known and experienced only when one
transcends all knowledge, all experience or when self gets annihilated and subject-object duality
transcended. All this is outside the scope of usual ways of doing psychology. God is only revealed in
silence, in a state where all speech is gone, or speech is but without words – the silence of which the
mystics speak and which the Buddha so succinctly illustrated. Discursive reason is utterly impotent in
approaching the Infinite. (However, in all fairness to Iqbal, it must be pointed out that he also feels
discursive reason to be wooden-legged. He distinguishes between discursive and non-discursive aspects
of reason. And foregrounds non-discursive aspect though he is not careful to define his terms always and
seems to use them very loosely.) Thus psychology can at best have only a negative role with respect to
religious experience. All discourse, all experience must end when God is seen or experienced. There is no
more any knower, known or knowledge, experiencer or experience (Iqbal doesn’t allow adequation of
subject to object in the sense Guenon, for instance, would argue for, and holds to dualistic epistemology
even if he would try to appropriate mystical transcendence of subject-object duality. He has emphatically
rejected the idea that subject and object become one (this point he has systematically argued in his lately
discovered incomplete work on history of Sufism) and that belief in their fundamental separation is
basically falling in the trap of Maya. Psychology may have some role in alerting us about the pernicious
satanic element in religious phenomena as Iqbal also sees but what could it do about the Beyond-Being,
the Nothing, the Absolute, the Hahūt. Intellectual metaphysics in not the rational metaphysics of Iqbal.
Iqbal’s statement about three levels of experience catered by three sciences appears to miss the most
important science and the most important level of experience – the science of (traditional) Metaphysics
and the level of the Spirit, the level of silence where alone is God, the Real, the really Real, Al-Haqq
revealed in full glory. The three main levels of experience on which Iqbal focusses his attention 8 could
only touch the outer fringe of the spiritual realm as he himself is compelled to admit in his last lecture.
There is an experience, according to mystics of all ages, which is not of time and does not unfold itself in
time, that is of the Timeless eternity and that has nothing to do with mind and consciousness as usually
understood. Love as understood by Iqbal and the life of appreciative self, transcends reason and time (so
Iqbal is qualifying his own position). Krishnamurti illustrates this forcefully.
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The Prophet and the Psychic

Iqbal is so enamored of psychology and its claims and its role vis-à-vis religion that he makes a
psychologist out of the Prophet himself. Syed Vahidudin rightly takes Iqbal to task on this account. 9 Iqbal
reads too much in what appears a minor incident in the life of the Prophet when he keenly observed Ibn
Sayyad, a psychic. Foucault, a postmodernist critic of modern psychiatry, makes an important point that
the suppression of the realm of unreason that includes the mystical and the mad created the department of
psychiatry. The unduly critical attitude towards mystics and experience of so-called psychics is
essentially irreverent modernist rationalist attitude for which Iqbal seems to speak ( though he is quite
critical of the same in other contexts also) when eulogizing critical rational attitude towards mystical and
psychic phenomena and trying to reinforce inductive reason. Psychiatry and a plethora of mental asylums
and schizophrenic patients seen today are essentially post-Enlightenment developments against which the
Anti-psychiatry movement was a response. It is rationalism that has been responsible for many evils of
modern age. The “psychics” and the “mad” could easily be appropriated or assimilated in medieval
culture and they were well cared for in the religious world view. They were not clinical cases to be
examined and condemned to psychiatric hospitals. They were not simply objects of curiosity. What is
argued here is that psychology and psychologist could only touch the outer fringe of religious experience,
as Iqbal himself admits that it has so far been the case in his last lecture “Is Religion Possible.” It is also
argued that we shouldn’t expect anything more from psychology. Iqbal violates his own principles at
certain places in his Reconstruction. Iqbal seems to ignore what is called as metaphysical realization.
Religion, as Guenon tells us, is not a matter of feeling or psychology. It is primarily knowledge,
especially in the perspective of Islam which foregrounds intelligence and Intellect and appeals to its
salvific function. Iqbal seems to privilege sentimental and devotional element at the cost of metaphysical
one in his famous characterization of three stages of religious life. 11 A Buddhist and a Sufi or a jnana yogi
will find it hard to agree with our philosopher of ishq. Sufistic or mystical techniques are primarily
intended to transcend mind and everything that has to do anything with psychology. Iman is a vital act but
it is also knowledge or gnosis; it is the vision of God and dispelling of the avidya or separative
knowledge. It could best be understood in metaphysical terms rather than in the psychological terms.
Iqbalian approach is unable to appropriate Buddhist, Hindu, Jaina and even orthodox Unitarian Sufi
approaches to mystic experience.
Empirical Test of Religion
In his anxiety to secure an empirical basis for religion, he, in Jamesian fashion, reduces religious data to
only a special part of total experience. According to him religion aims at “interpreting a totally different
region of human experience – the data of which can not be reduced to the data of any other science….
Religion aims at reaching the real significance of a special variety of human experience.” 12 This amounts
to admitting secular/religious dichotomy. This is to surrender religion’s exclusivist claims to whole Truth
and limit it to a particular part of life or experience. Islam identifies itself with al-Haqq or the Truth (it
being God’s denotative attribute). God is al-Muhit, i.e., the one who encompasses everything. Wherever
we turn there is the Face of God. The whole universe is an epiphany of God. Everything participates in
the life of the Ultimate Ego. Nothing is profane and everything is holy. Everything secular is religious in
its roots. God is Truth, Existence, and Bliss. Religion is not about God, or about Truth. It talks God, talks
Truth rather than talks about God or about Truth as Osho says. Religion is existence. Any defense of
religion on any other ground such as religious experience would reduce (and has reduced) religion and
God to a thing that could possibly be doubted in principle and made a matter of debate in philosophy of
religion. Metaphysics is effectively reduced to epistemology in Western philosophy of religion. There
have been attempts at explaining religious experience away through various reductionist/psychologistical
means. My point is that the philosophical and the pragmatic tests of religion will never make it absolutely
indubitable. Religion is not a thing that could possibly to be falsified, doubted or tested. Mysticism makes
this point convincingly. God is not a proposition that could possibly be approached through truth/
falsehood format. This point has been well argued by Huston Smith in his Essays on World Religions.
The empiricist positivist analytical spirit of modern science and mentality that Iqbal condones could
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entertain doubts about religion and that is why it continues to be agnostic/atheistic primarily and finds
religion hard to assimilate from its vantage point. The Quran does not conceive God or al-Haqq as
something towards which one could possibly be incredulous, something which could be known in
objective terms as a proposition. He is too really Real, indubitably Real to admit of any inquiry. No
falsifiablity criterion could be applied to it. We need not prove His existence; He is above all proof. The
very idea of proving the Truth (God is referred to as the Manifest Truth in the Quran) seems problematic
to Islam and the Eastern religious tradition. Philosophy has absolutely no right to judge religion. If one
adopts Western logical and rational categories, God of Islam appears tautological or a self-evident truth.
“He is the First and the Last, the Hidden and the Manifest. He is nearer to us than our jugular vein.”
Atheism is on a priori grounds false or inadmissible. Only a fool has said in his heart that God does not
exist, as the Bible says. Religion is not an interpretation of Reality but the Reality itself. God, our ultimate
and immediate concern, is the Ground of our being. How can one deny Being or whatever is. Whatever is
really, is God or manifests God or glorifies God in Unitarian Islamic (Sufistic) perspective as He is the
essence of existence. God, in the Quranic phrase, is the First and the Last, the Hidden and the Manifest.
Thus psychology, the inner experience on which Iqbal grounds religious claims, provide only a limited
perspective (that could possibly be problematized) for perceiving Reality or Truth. Religion is not a
theory, a hypothesis, the veracity of which could be tested by any means, any test. It is not a narrative or
metanarrative towards which any man or any age (like the postmodern age) could be incredulous. All
arguments for God’s existence are misconceived and beside the point. Religion is not a perspective
among other possible perspectives. It is all inclusive supra-conceptual vision. It is the most certain of
present facts because all facts derive their factity or reality from it. The universe is the symbol of God; we
breathe God, we live God. We live and move and have our being in God as pearls in a bead. The chirping
of a bird and singing of a cricket are hymns to God. A religious man sees God and only God everywhere
according to Sufism.
Problem of Modern Sensibility
Iqbal is embarrassingly apologetic about “outlandish” or “outmoded” language of medieval mystical
treatises. The religious psychology necessary for properly appreciating traditional Sufism is not present
in modern man with his very different psychological makeup who finds, according to Iqbal, traditional
imagery, symbolism and over all language used by the Sufis very difficult to appreciate and thus
meaningless. This necessitates development of a new language and newer techniques or perhaps
supplanting traditional mysticism with more universal modern empirical inductive scientific approach in
modern age. Iqbal thus gives too many concessions to the post- medieval man. It is difficult to agree with
Iqbal on this point. Modern man has unfortunately alienated himself from those traditional roots that
alone could nurture an authentic religious life. The fallen modern man sees everything from this fallen
perspective. Traditional religion with its mystical core could not be assimilated in modernist sensibility.
The traditional metaphysics common to all great religious traditions as the perennialists explain, could not
be remodeled or reconstructed in order to accommodate the prejudices of the new age or changed
psychological makeup. Modern psychology must be reconstructed, Islamised or traditionalized rather than
the vice verse as Iqbal and modernists would demand. Heidegger finds God absent, Nietzsche and Sartre
dead and Kafka on leave. How could God’s revelatory disclosure, so anxiously awaited by modern man,
become actualized? Only by returning to tradition, to the traditional universe that nurtured a particular
psychology could modern man be saved. Otherwise there is no escape from schizophrenia. The lost soul
in whose search modern man is wandering hither and thither can’t not be found without rejecting modern
psychologism and the worldview that is presupposed by it. Jung illustrates how difficult is the salvation or
individuation for modern man; how traumatic and terrifying his encounter with the collective unconscious
or archetypes. The traditional science of alchemy that modern man rejects as pseudoscience has much to
offer according to both the traditionalists and Jung whose is a more respectable voice to modern ears.
What appears so outlandish to modern psychology is the panacea and the task for the real psychologist
and psychiatrist is to reorient modern man towards this traditional qibla. Modern man must decondition
his modernist sensibility so as to be able to receive again the divine grace. God could not reveal Himself
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to modern man as long as he remains committed to modern project and post-enlightenment prejudices. He
will definitely be perceived as either absent or deaf or dead. Modern psychology, Iqbal rightly contends,
has not yet touched even the outer fringe of religious life and he does not feel hopeful about the present
state of things in psychology.14 But he misdiagnoses the real disease of which everything modern and
especially modern psychology is a symptom. The real disease is alienation from traditional well-spring of
life and modern man’s evolutionism as he feels that he has moved beyond the traditional or “primitive” or
ancient modes of thinking and that by doing so he has progressed. Only the drastic surgery and an
anticlockwise screwing could lead modern man back on the right track. No ad hoc compromises and no
reconstruction of traditional religious thought could save the situation for him. Iqbal’s suggestion that
psychology must develop an independent method calculated to discover a new technique better suited to
the temper of our times15 cannot work because it is precisely the temper of our times that needs to be
corrected. There can be no salvation unless modern man repents and it is precisely this repentance that
modern man so arrogantly and proudly denies the need of. Iqbal rightly diagnoses the malaise of modern
man’s religious psychology in the case history of Nietzsche. He says of him, “Thus failed a genius whose
vision was solely determined by his internal forces, and remained unproductive for want of expert
external guidance in his spiritual life.” 15And he adds that he needed a master and could not find one. But
the problem is that modern sensibility is against looking towards past, against being kept in “leading
strings.”
Significance of Dreams
Dreams have enormous significance in religious psychology. Both in Freud and Jung the dreams are of
pivotal importance. Religion also attaches great significance to dreams and allies them with prophecy.
Iqbal finds no use or only a negative function for them. He sees no positive function for altered modes of
consciousness such as sleep (and thus also dreams).
Interpretation of the Fall
Iqbal’s interpretation of the Fall shows influence of modern psychological notions. He reduces this great
and momentous event of primarily metaphysical import to a simple fact of psychology. He is even led to
deny the Fall as traditionally understood and interpret it as the rise of self-consciousness. Iqbal also
misses the tremendous metaphysical significance of Iblis, the Tree of Eternity, the Tree of Knowledge (of
good and evil) and the Garden of Eden. Iqbal is led to profoundly differ from Islamic scholarship as he is
influenced by modernist demythologizing enterprise inspired primarily by modern psychology and
anthropology. The enormous significance of the disturbing question of the problem of evil, and especially
the moral evil is largely ignored or missed by this psychological interpretation. The traditional religion
provides a far more comprehensive approach to this problem of evil than what humanistic modernist
psychology could conceive of. Modern evolutionary anthropology that hardly shares any of the
assumptions of traditional metaphysics regarding man and his origin and destiny is heavily influenced by
modern psychology. Iqbal, unlike the traditionalists, doesn’t reject the basic secular framework and
assumptions of modern anthropology and modern psychology for the sake of traditional religion. Iqbal, in
contrast, is for the reconstruction of traditional religious thought and that reconstruction is significantly
influenced by modern psychology, evolutionism and anthropology. He invokes modern defense of
religion in his apology for religion. When defending mysticism he refers to certain modern authorities
who were not even mystics in the traditional sense of the term. Compare Schuon’s and Iqbal’s writings on
mysticism and one notes the difference. Iqbal seems to be begging for space for a mystic in modern age.
This sounds so apologetic and defensive as to lose the grand mighty voice we see in sacred scriptures.
Prophet’s and sage’s tone is thunderous and earth shaking and that is why Nietzsche chose Zarathustra as
his mouthpiece in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. It is only this kind of voice that can thaw the ice of
hardened and complacent modern souls. A purely intellectual defense of religion and mysticism will
never be able to convert as demanded by religion. Modern psychology seems peculiarly impervious to
sage’s tone and style but this should not lead us to change the latter as Iqbal tries but the former. The
Prophet creates new psychology; he speaks from the whirlwind.
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The Spirit and the Psyche

Iqbal, like Jung, rightly rejects a purely psychological method for explaining religious passion as a form
of knowledge and says that “it is bound to fail in the case of our newer psychologists as it did fail in case
of Locke and Hume.”16 He rightly remarks about Jung that he is probably right in thinking that the
essential nature of religion is beyond the province of analytic psychology. He quotes Jung to the effect
that religion is not a subdivision of psychology and that a psychological consideration is permissible only
in respect of the emotional and symbolic phenomena associated with religion, where the essential nature
of religion is in no way involved. 17 However, in the same passage he accuses Jung of violating his own
principle more than once in his writings and makes a sweeping generalization:
The result of this procedure is that, instead of giving us a real insight into the essential nature of religion
and its meaning for human personality, our modern psychology has given us a plethora of new theories
which proceed on a complete misunderstanding of religion as revealed in its higher manifestations, and
lead us in an entirely hopeless direction. The implication of these theories, on the whole, is that religion
does not relate the human ego to any objective reality beyond himself; it is merely a kind of well meaning
biological device calculated to build barriers of an ethical nature round human society in order to protect
the social fabric against the otherwise unrestrained instincts of the ego .
He gives an impression, quoting Jung, that Christianity has already fulfilled its biological mission and that
it is impossible for modern man to understand its original significance. All this is only partially correct,
and especially in case of Jung, it definitely errs. Jungian psychology does provide some glimpses of
religion’s meaning for human personality. A fully integrated ego, according to Jung, is possible only
when religion is taken into consideration; when through the process of individuation one appropriates the
whole collective history of our race and makes peace with the archetype of God. According to Jung
modern man has erred in his disbelief in God of whose psychological reality (and about His metaphysical
reality he remains committed to agnosticism) there could not be any doubt. Man cannot exorcise this
“ghost” even if he will. God is the ground of our being and thus cannot be disowned. It is Freudian theory
of religion to which Iqbalian generalization applies. Jungian religion is not just a kind of biological device
calculated to build barriers of an ethical nature. Jung and many modern psychologists have made
admirable attempts in understanding the psychology of religion. Some have categorically refused to
extend the rights of psychology to judge religion. They cannot be criticized on this account. The essential
nature or the essence of religion is not just beyond psychology but beyond philosophy, beyond the ken of
reason and logic. The most fundamental “proposition” of religion is the mystery of God. Nothing can
provide any insight into the veiled mystery of the ultimate object of religion. Mystics like Eckhart,
Bohme, Nicholas of Cusa, Upanisadic writers, and mystical philosophers like Bradley, Hegel and Spinoza
amply demonstrate utter incapability of rational logical intellect to penetrate the mystery of the Absolute
or God, as Stace argues in his Time and Eternity (1952). No science (such as psychology) and nothing
from the natural order could provide any real help in this regard. The religious experience is ineffable and
autonomous and this domain of eternity or heaven is unconnected with the realm of time, of this world.
M.M. Sharief, in his appraisal of Iqbal, also pointed out problems in any nonintuitionist basis for religion.
Iqbal had rightly grounded his view of the Ultimate Reality on intuition but he erred in trying to find
extraintuitional support and analogy. It is modern man’s (and science’s) vain assumption that he could
solve the problem of religion, that he could appropriate the utterly other i.e., God into his scheme of
things and that he could analyze and thus appropriate religion, the sacred, the mysterium tremendum. It is
this assumption of modern science and philosophy that Iqbal seems to accept though not unqualifyingly.
Religion’s realm begins where all other realms – of mind, of knowledge or science, end. The Realm of the
Spirit although reflecting on the Realm of the Psyche, is, in ultimate analysis, incommensurable with it.
God is known only through God; only through God’s eye could He be seen. Iqbal himself concedes the
essential separation (and incommensurability) of the realms of science and religion and tries to resolve the
alleged conflict between the two by pointing out to their separate spheres of action or domains that do not
overlap because they do not interpret the same data of experience. But he himself violates this principle
many times when he admits of science’s and philosophy’s right to have a say in the religious problems
 9

and pleads accordingly for the reconstruction of religious thought and need to appropriate modern science
and its claims by religion, to purify and clarify and even evaluate certain of its claims. He even thinks that
psychology could in principle enlighten us regarding the essential nature of religion although he feels that
modern psychology has so far been unable to live up to these expectations. He would not have
complained of modern psychology’s failure in providing insights into the nature of religion had he not
supposed that psychology could possibly provide it.
The Question of Cognitivity of Mystic Experience
Iqbal gets involved in other difficult problems in philosophy and psychology of religion because of his
precarious positions he has already taken on certain basic issues. One problem that is of special
significance is the problem of cognitivity of religious experience. Iqbal defends the cognitivity of
religious experience. His observations on this issue are vulnerable to serious criticism. This may be
contrasted with the notion of gnosis in the metaphysical tradition of Islam, that bypasses most of the
objections to cognitivity of mystic experience from various quarters especially psychology. The emphasis
on psychological rather than metaphysical basis or perspective on religion in Iqbal creates for him certain
difficult problems. His summing up of the basic thesis of mysticism in his first lecture ‘‘Knowledge and
Religious Experience’’ is very problematic from the viewpoint of philosophy (and psychology) as well as
that of traditional religion. It amounts to a weak defense of religion’s great claim to complete certainty
and incontestable authority. Mystic experience does not reveal God as an Object, as Other Self, as we
normally know and experience any other object. God is not an object among other objects. How could He
be revealed to us as an object? There is no subject left intact when mystic experience occurs and thus one
can hardly speak of an object (God) being revealed to an experiencing subject. There is neither knower,
nor known and nor any knowledge when mystic encounters God. Religion is not based on a dubious and
problematizable (by modern psychological interpretations) cognitivity of religious experience but on
something else that is absolutely indubitable, absolutely certain intuition and absolutely transparent
metaphysical truth. There is no need to interpret religious experience; to make a possible case for God as
a religious person sees all experience – of beauty, of love, of goodness, of harmony, of music, of nature –
as symbolic of God, or His character or behavior. The mystic sees nothing but God and may come to
doubt his own self but not God. He lives by God and breathes God. God is the most Real, the only
Reality, the very Reality (al-Haqq). Man’s discovery of and belief in Him cannot be a matter of
epistemology that could possibly be refuted. He is not seen only at certain rare moments, as Iqbal thinks, 18
but He is az-Zahir, the Manifest Truth regarding which no doubt could be entertained. Everything and
every moment reveal Him. One can see Him always and He is every moment in a new glory. The world is
God and nothing can exist outside His Infinitude. But God is not the world; he is more than the world. He
is the Hidden or the Unmanifest. The Real, which includes the unknown Reality, the highest degree of
Reality or divines presence, is also God. The Quran declares that there is no truth but Truth, no reality but
Reality or no god but God and thus the religious object, the religious truth (or experience) is the only
truth. From the metaphysical perspective God is the First Principle, the Reality of Realities, Being as well
as the Beyond-Being; there hardly arises the need to prove or defend the possible hypothesis of God on
the grounds of supposed religious experience and the problematic issue of cognitivity of faith is simply
bypassed. Many modern philosophers of religion such as Wisdom and Flew forcefully argue against the
God-talk as theists like Iqbal would define it. A theist’s position is indeed very weak and vulnerable on
such grounds as linguistic philosophies and deconstruction – however these problems arise only for those
modern apologists of religion (the fact of existence of God can’t be problematized in any conceivable
way as it is a priorily given, an ab initio, the Alpha and the Omega, the First Principle, the basic
Ontological Fact, the Ground of being),who having abandoned or relegated to the background the
metaphysics and the traditional metaphysical approach to religion, try to find refuge in some sort of
empiricist psychological approach (which alone seems to appeal to positivist modernist sensibility). The
empiricism (that takes the day to day ordinary experience, the experience of tables and billiard balls, the
experience that assumes subject-object dualism as the first principle of epistemology, as the standard or
the normative one and dogmatically asserts that such experiences, as are revealed in the altered states of
 10

consciousness are to be presumed as inferior and thus appropriated, explained away and thus
marginalized, silenced by being “othered”) and the associated psychology (that usually treats religion as a
problem, as something which is susceptible t psychological testing, as something that psychology should
be able to account for in secularist terms, as something rooted in and dependent on psychology) could at
best be only a dangerous ally of religion and of course provide a very flimsy ground for it, if at all. The
modernist psychological and empiricist circles have only negatively interpreted religion or appropriated it
in a way that is by no means acceptable to traditional orthodox religious consciousness. Freud’s infamous
theory that religion is a universal neurosis, an illusion, and that God has been created in man’s image
rather than the vice versa and Jung’s agnosticism with regard to the metaphysical claims of religion and
Fromn’s humanist psychoanalytical appropriation of religion that has no scope for a personal God or the
higher degrees of reality represent the approach of modern psychology vis-à-vis religion. God, especially
the God of traditional religion, has no place in modern psychology and empiricism (in short in modern
scientific worldview). All those attempts that try to carve a niche for God assuming the veracity of
modern scientific framework and its grand “metaphysical” claims are doomed. They succeed, at best, to
make credulous a God who is hardly recognizable as the God of traditional religion.
According to Iqbal mystic experience gives us knowledge of God as we have knowledge of other
objects. This assertion needs qualification as there can be no possible knowledge of God. God is mystery
al-gayyiib, mysterium tremendum, unfathomable mystery. We can know only the unknowability of God.
The dark – impenetrably dark – ground of Godhead, cannot be known in the ordinary sense of the term.
The word knowledge seems hardly applicable to our relationship with God. We “become” God rather
than know Him. God is not an object; there is no objective transcendent God in mysticism. Iqbal’s
panentheism also implies a non-objective God. The subject-object duality is overcome in the most
intimate encounter with God as Iqbal himself notes. So all knowledge must be noughted in the process.
God is not out there, some object in the ordinary sense of the term object. No subject can thus objectively
know God. God is the “utterly other.” He is not one among other things in the universe, a being among
other beings. None can know God but God. The ultimate ideal of the religion is, as Whitehead says, a
“hopeless quest.” Religion is the hunger of the soul for the impossible, the unattainable, the
inconceivable, the unknowable. Religion seeks the infinite. And the infinite by definition is impossible,
unreachable, ungraspable as Stace says. 19 All mystics have emphasized the negative divine, the
nothingness of God. God is Non-being, Nothing, Emptiness, the Void, the Abyss, the great silence, the
great darkness, “the wordless Godhead,’’ “the nameless Nothing,” “the still wilderness” (Eckhart), “the
wild waste,” “the nameless, formless nothing” (Tauler), “the everlasting Nay”(Bohme). In view of all this
Iqbalian assertion that we know God (Beyond-Being, Utter mystery of Godhead, hardly figures in Iqbal’s
philosophy of God)20 as we know other objects seems too simplistic. Iqbal says that the idea of God has a
reference to experience i.e. He would pass the empirical test if specially carried out. God is wholly
outside the natural order, wholly transcending the realm of temporality or time. Eternity cannot be
experienced in the usually accepted sense of the term experience. Only out of time can we experience
Him. One can experience God only when one is no more, when self is gone, totally annihilated or gone
(the Sufis call it fana, fana must precede baqa). Ba Yazid famously put it that one can see God only when
God remains and self has surrendered or is no more.
Iqbal emphasizes objectivity of mystic experience and asserts that it is not mere retirement into the
mists of pure subjectivity. However, calling mystic experience objective presupposes that there is a
subject who experiences it i.e., it is an experience of the subject or by the subject. This means that
subject-object duality is not transcended and thus it is open to many objections raised by many modern
psychologists and philosophers of religion. It contradicts Iqbal’s own statement that mystic experience
momentarily suppresses the private personality of the subject of experience. 21 The problematic approach
to the psychology and philosophy of mysticism discernible in Iqbal has been avoided by many other
mystics and mystical philosophers. Stace’s and Krishnamurti’s defense of mystic experience, for instance,
although differing in approach, is remarkably resistant to otherwise forceful critique of mystic experience
from many quarters. The very question of objectivity and cognitivity of mystic experience does not arise
 11

in their paradigms. Psychology is transcended. Psychology knows nothing of this experience at the
deepest level because it is rooted in the divine moment which lies wholly outside the natural (and mental
or psychological) order. Freud and Jung could have no say here. It is none of their business. God’s
revelation could not be a problem for a psychologist, for profane psychology. Intuition, (synonymous
with mystic experience) as Stace explains it, has nothing to do with psychology (in Iqbal it is the structure
of mind, experience by the mind and in short psychology that is involved in mystic experience and has
important role in our perception of the divine). There is a sharp division between intellect and intuition
and it is Iqbal’s bracketing of these two together that creates so many problems for Iqbalian rationalist
empiricist defense of religion via religious experience. As Stace says:
There is no sense in asking what intuition is, any more than there would be sense in asking what the
intellect is. Intellect is the name given to the process of understanding objects by means of concepts.
Intuition is the name given to the apprehension of the divine in mystical experience. It is conceptless and
without the division into subject and object which is the characteristic of the intellect. 22
Modern man is more inclined to trust reason and suspect intuition. He knows only psychology but
not the science of the spirit. So religion, if it has to be made credible, must be appropriated in terms of
reason and psychology and Iqbal attempts to present religion in this dress and needless to say it demands
drastic reinterpretation and reconstruction of religious thought. Iqbal falls to the typically modern
temptation to make sense of religion, to make it comprehensible, to make peace and arrange a
compromise between religion and the scientific intelligence, between the mystic and the logician. It is
ultimately idolatrous instinct at work. We want to make an image of God or comprehensible
representations of Him against which prophets, mystics, negative theology and now deconstruction warns
us. Mystics have always spoken (whenever they were compelled to break their vow of silence) in the
language of contradiction with which their utterances abound. They have, in a way, advocated the
postmodern logic of contradictions. Nicholas of Cusa plainly admitted that the Aristotelian law of non-
contradiction is not valid ultimately as it does not apply to God who is coincidentia oppositorum.
Tertulian’s famous statement that “I believe because it is absurd” only illustrates religion’s supralogical
or alogical (not irrational or illogical as some rationalist critics of religion would claim) character. Stace
gives various examples of plain contradictions in mystics. He quotes Bohme to illustrate the idea of the
contradictoriness of the Ultimate who says that the eternal Yes and the Eternal No lie together in God and
Eckhart who says “Thou shalt love God as He is, a non-God.” He also refers to the Upanisads in this
connection that record such statements as “He(one) moves, and He moves not” and “Brahman is both
being and non-being.” Whitehead when speaking of the ultimate “something” shows marked tendency
(that irrupts despite his rationalism as its source is religious experience or intuition that has no respects for
the Aristotelian laws of thought such as the law of non contradiction) to paradox and self contradiction.
He illustrates how such philosophers as Hegel, Spinoza and Bradley who despite their professed
rationalism contain plain contradictions because the mystical impulse somehow influenced their
philosophies. He says about Vedanta, and the philosophies of Hegel, Spinoza and Bradley:
All these philosophies assert, each in its own way, the proposition that the Ultimate is one and infinite.
Because this is a mystical doctrine, it necessarily gives rise to a contradiction in any philosophical attempt
at a rational understanding of it. The precise contradiction, to which it leads, is that the world is and is not
identical with God, Brahman, Substance, the Absolute – or whatever the ultimate is called. This
contradiction is ultimate and irresoluble. It arises because of the following logical necessity. The ultimate
being infinite, can have nothing outside it. Therefore the world can not fall outside it. There can not be any
difference, the world is the absolute. But the ultimate, being one, is relationless, without parts, without
division, without manyness. The world, on the other hand is the arena of manyness, division and relation.
Therefore it is not the Absolute, not contained in it, falls outside it.23
The point to be noted here is that Iqbal cannot solve the inevitable problem of contradiction that
thought or our mental faculty is plagued with while approaching the infinite. Intuition or mystic
experience must be recognized as the independent “sense organ” or source of “knowledge” that is not
organically linked with what Iqbal calls the intellect, with the natural or the psychological order of things.
In a mystic experience, there is discontinuance with the normal consciousness, reason, logic and thought
 12

as William James correctly thinks, although Iqbal is correct in saying that it is the same Reality which is
operating on us in both the cases. Iqbal tries to bridge the two by attributing idea or cognitivity to the
mystic feeling and holding non-discursive view of reason. He reduces, as psychologism would demand,
mystic experience to a sort of feeling, albeit with a cognitive content. Attributing cognitive content to
mystic feeling is a projection of rational logical epistemological categories to a realm that by definition
transcends this talk of knowledge and cognitivity conceived from a dualistic standpoint. It is very difficult
to juxtapose without causing confusion and problems to either side, the mystic and the ordinary
consciousnesses, the intuition and the reason. One cannot appropriate logical epistemic categories while
speaking about intuition. The sages are not seekers and thinkers, and revelation is not poetry. The feeling
that characterizes intuition rejects or transcends all idea and does not unproblematically lend itself to idea.
Idea only distorts it. But that doesn’t mean it is not genuine. All problems that plague mystical
philosophies, all discourse about God by mystics to which consistent naturalist rationalist and positivist
critics have referred to, arise because of mystic’s unwarranted attempts to make effable what is ineffable,
to graft idea to feeling, to speak about God who cannot be spoken of, to adopt here a logical or rational or
philosophical or even scientific language. Iqbal had remarked in his critique of Ibn Arabi that mysticism,
when it becomes philosophy, becomes problematic. But here he is himself indulging in this exercise.
Intuition is antithetical to philosophizing endeavor. It lies outside the rational logical intellect. It
transcends any notion of idea. It is not through the alleged cognitivity of mystic experience that religion
builds a metaphysic as Iqbal thinks. Mystics have rightly condemned the intellect (conceptual intellect) as
an organ of knowledge, despite Iqbal’s pleading for the contrary (although he himself condemns it at
many places in his poetry). Stace defends this mystics’ condemnation of the intellect. The conceptual
intellect (it is abuse of the term intellect if it is used to refer to non-conceptual modes of apprehending
Reality unless one is a perennialist) cannot grasp the relationless, divisionless, non-conceptualizable
infinite. Only intuition can grasp God and there is a sharp difference between intuition and intellect with
respect to their approach to Reality. The latter is debarred from greeting or encompassing the infinite by
virtue of its very definition (as generally defined). The intellect (reason as Iqbal and Stace use it
synonymously for reason is bounded by its most fundamental categories space, time and causality – and
there is no way to outgrow them except in intuition. Iqbal, unwarrantedly, hopes or supposes that the
intellect of man is outgrowing its own most fundamental categories – time, space and causality. 24 He is
led to assert that “The mystic’s intimate association with the eternal which gives him a sense of the
unreality of serial time does not mean a complete break with serial time.” 25 This is not correct as the
unanimous testimony of mystics goes against this. There is a radical disjunction between the realm of
Eternity and that of the time. The notion of time loses all its relevance and reality at the moment mystic
encounters Eternity. Eternity engulfs and devours serial time. Time ceases to exist in the usual sense of
the concept. It is only when mystic comes out of this supreme moment that this world of space and time
makes its presence felt. Serial time intrudes only after this experience and not during it. The serial time
must go and the Eternal Now take its place. God cannot be experienced in time. As long as there is a trace
of mind, of thought, of time, God cannot be genuinely experienced. J. Krishnamurti emphasizes this point
time and again in his lectures. “To understand that which is beyond time, the fabrications of thought must
come to an end. Thought cannot exist without words, symbols, images [and idea]. And only when the
mind is quite free of its own creations, is there a possibility of finding out what is real.” 26 We must
transcend mind and reach a state of choiceless awareness, 27 a state of no-mind because the mind is the
result of time, it is based on the memories of yesterday. 28 “It is thought that creates time. Thought is time,
and whatever thought projects must be of time.”29
Defence of Religion
Iqbal, however, is quick to defend religion against its psychologist critics. He rejects ideas of Freud, Jung
and others that might problematize religious thesis. He rejects certain key ideas of Freud on purely
scientific grounds also. He writes about Freud’s theory of unconscious (and that could be deployed to
problematize his own basic concept of ego) that
 13

the main theory of this newer psychology doesn’t appear to me to be supported by any adequate evidence.
If our vagrant impulses assert themselves in our dreams, or at other times we aren’t strictly ourselves, it
doesn’t follow that they remain imprisoned in a kind of lumber room behind the normal self. The
occasional invasion of these suppressed impulses on the region of our normal self tends more to show the
temporary disruption of our habitual presence in some dark corner of the mind.30
He rejects the thesis of Freud’s Future of an Illusion and other psychoanalytic critiques of religion which
posit that it is a pure fiction created by these repudiated impulses of mankind with a view to find a kind of
fairyland for free unobstructed movement. Iqbal rejects this thesis by positing sharp separation of
domains of religion and science and in the process compromising metaphysical significance of religious
beliefs. Religion doesn’t enlighten us regarding the nature or structure of universe; it doesn’t explain
things in terms of causation. He circumscribes the realm of religion to a very narrow part of experience –
religious experience.31
Iqbal is primarily interested in defending religion against its psychologistical critiques though he
succumbs to psychologism at certain places. Defending religion against Freud he writes:
Nor is it possible to explain away the content of religious consciousness by attributing the whole thing to
the working of the sex-impulse. The two forms of consciousness- sexual and religious- are often hostile to
or at any rate, completely different to each other in point of their character, their aim and the kind of
conduct they generate. 32
Iqbal defends the passional character of all knowledge and thus religious knowledge. He asserts “In all
knowledge there is an element of passion, and the object of knowledge gains or loses its objectivity with
the rise and fall in the intensity of passion.” 33 Iqbal also denies modern psychology any say in
understanding religion, though half heartedly. He says, “Jung, however, is probably right in thinking that
the essential nature of religion is beyond the province of analytic psychology.” 34 He is dismissive of Jung
and modern psychology for violating this principle by giving us a theory or theories of religion that
proceed on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of religion as revealed in its higher manifestations,
and carry us in an entirely hopeless direction. 35 Quoting a passage from Shiekh Ahmad Sirhandi he shows
how modern psychology has failed to penetrate the essence of religion and knows nothing of the great
richness and profundity and significance of religious experience. He out rightly declares that modern
psychology hasn’t touched even the outer fringe of the subject. 36 From the vantage point of religion,
modern psychological methods are inadequate. His concluding or representative position on the relevance
of psychology in understanding religion presented in the following passages of his last lecture “Is
Religion Possible” and this, I suppose, exonerates him from the charges of psychologism though , it needs
to be reiterated, that it permeates deeply here and there, consciously or unconsciously in his
Reconstruction.
Personally, I don’t at all feel hopeful of the present state of things in either biology or psychology. Mere
analytic criticism with some understanding of the organic conditions of the imagery in which religious life
has sometimes manifested itself isn’t likely to carry us to the living roots of human personality. Assuming
that sex imagery has played a role in the history of religion or that religion has furnished imaginative means
of escape from or adjustment to an unpleasant reality – these ways of looking at the matter can’t, in the
least, affect the ultimate aim of religious life, that is to say, the reconstruction of the finite ego by bringing
him into contact with an eternal life process, and thus giving him metaphysical status of which we can have
only a partial understanding in the half-choking atmosphere of our present environment.37
Here a brief mention of a perennialist critic of Iqbal Shahzad Qaisar’s observations on Iqbal’s views
on psychology is in order. Qaisar asserts that Iqbal’s analysis of three periods of religious life is
unwarranted.38 It is the second period that he designates as ‘Thought’ which once achieved may seal the
possibility for further progress as is borne by the history of rationalists experience with religion in the
modern West. Rational metaphysics can’t borrow the wings to fly high into the sky of transcendence.
“Door to the infinite is opened only through intellectual metaphysics. In Qaisar’s words:
At the stage of discovery psychology can’t displace metaphysics. Psychology by its commitment to psyche
can never apprehend anything which exists outside it. It deals with the limited and it has no inkling of the
 14

unlimited. It is by virtue of mystic experience that man can transcend metaphysics. Such an experience is
beyond the scope of psychology.”39
He left more vital levels of experience out of account by focusing only on the three levels of
reality.40 How can the entire story of the universe of inner experience be brought in the domain
of restrictive field of psychology? It is intellect which validates reason and similarly it is the
spirit which grounds the psyche and not the other way round. The language of philosophy is the
main factor for veiling the intellectual metaphysical perspective and it is here that Iqbal commits
a basic mistake. His endeavour in both Reconstruction and the Development of Metaphysics in
Persia was to interpret in modern scientific and philosophical language Islamic metaphysical
thought and this is a questionable endeavour. Iqbal didn’t appreciate that the very concept of
rational metaphysics was a contradiction in terms.41
Living religion is not the question of psychology; it is the question of being. Iqbal doesn’t fully
appreciate the traditional religious doctrines of hell and Satan. Iqbal’s overall unorthodox approach with
regard to the eschatological problems is influenced by his psychology. His interpretation of hell and
heaven as states (mental states) only is obviously unorthodox and informed by psychological rather than
metaphysical approach.
Problems with Personalism
We may now make a few remarks on Iqbal’s concept of ego and his psycvholgical
translation of spiritual or metaphysical domain in this regard. Iqbal’s philosophy of ego hinges on
certain psychological views. Iqbal refers to the ego as a finite centre of consciousness and unity of mental
states. This concept of ego would depend on our knowledge of psychology. This makes Iqbal’s position
very problematic and vulnerable to a purely psychological critique. Iqbal does reckon with the
philosophical critiques of the idea of ego (for example that of Bradley) but he seems to ignore more
disturbing psychological critiques of the idea of ego. Freud’s problematization of this idea through his
discovery of unconscious (which is more forcefully presented as a critique of the idea of self by Lacan in
recent times) is not convincingly refuted by Iqbal. The phenomenon of multiple personalities serves to
problematize Iqbal’s concept of ego as a unity of mental states although he thinks that it problematizes the
concept of soul as substance unaffected by mental states (which is traditional theological position as
represented by Ghazali in Islam). Indeed Spirit, the witnessing self, the appreciative self, is unaffected by
mental states. Iqbal confounds appreciative and efficient self. He gives efficient self more than its due
role in understanding notions of soul and spirit in classical authorities. Immortality, revelation, prayer all
are ultimately spiritual notions which belong to the realm of the Spirit, the appreciative self. Iqbal is led to
reject the traditional idea of soul as substance and substitutes it by the idea of ego because of his bias
against traditional theology and his primarily psychological approach to the problem His efficient self is
mainly psychological or mental thing. However his notion of appreciative self comes close to the
traditional conception and it is his approximation of the idea of spirit. It may be pointed out that Iqbal’s
concept of appreciative self because of integral relationship with efficient self fails to correspond to the
traditional understanding of Spirit though there are profound correspondences discernible. However in
much of his Reconstruction he treats self as efficient self and very occasionally as appreciative self that
transcends the dominion of psychology. It is consistent with his tendency to psychologize. Iqbal’s
philosophy of ego is unique in the history of Islamic philosophy. He translates spirit as soul and this error
costs him dearly as Shahzad Qaisar has noted at many places. There is in Western philosophical
tradition the persistent belief in empirical and transcendental ego that replace traditional terms
soul and spirit. But the traditional understanding of transpersonal entity of no-mind, of Spirit, of
pure objectless consciousness, of the watching self that stands apart from the world, unaffected
by action or evil is different from psychological approach that confounds the psychologoical and
the spiritual and even reduces the spiritual and transindividual to psychological and individual.
The willing desiring thinking self is not the watching self, the spirit. But in the Western
 15

philosophy especially post-Aristotelian Western philosophy consciousness is object directed and

not objectless. Iqbal also mixes up empirical and transcendental or appreciative selves, soul and
spirit, to use traditional terminology. Iqbal is right to deny soul body dualism but he fails to
notice essential dichotomy between the transpersonal unborn uncreated element and what goes
by the name of personality. For Iqbal the ego is not unaffected by environment; it invades and is
invaded by the environment and this tension keeps it operating. This kind of analysis doesn’t
apply to the entity that transcends all the individualities of existence, that never indulges in any
action or is identifiable with or dependent on any pheonomenal thing.
We may ask of any personalist philosophy ‘What does man as an ego accomplish?’
History offers a dismal record and rudely challenges any sanguine estimate of it. The ego counts
for almost nothing in Nature's scheme of things. This is the complaint of many secular
philosophies also. Modern literature and philosophy that revolves round the theme of the death
of God essentially makes a similar point. In the sacred scriptures it is God, the All-Encompassing
who counts rather than man and his ambitions, aspirations, dreams, all of which are dubbed as
vanity. But at the same time they assert, contrary to Spirit denying secular philosophies, that man
is in no way to be identified with the ego. The immortal Spirit or Self is never born and never
dies. It isn’t by becoming or in the realm of time that one attains heaven or immortality. It isn’t
actions which save ultimately. The ego as unity of mental states is simply not there in many
cases to be perfected by any kind of discipline whatsoever. Man is nothing if we see him as an
ego that stands over and against or separate from Existence or God. A drop doesn’t count in the
ocean of existence. It is only when the drop consents to relinquish its separate existence, its
"I"ness (defined vis-à-vis the Existence or God which is taken as object) could it count.
(However Iqbal sees God as an Ego and the finite egos living as beads in God, deriving their ‘I
amness’ from God. He becomes a panentheist here and comes close to Sufi position though he
uses the otherwise libeled term of ego.) Otherwise man is nothing (faqeer) according to the
Quran. Only God is rich. Ego, despite what Iqbal might take it to be, is the principle of
alienation as long as it takes God as the other, as long as it insists on not merging with the
Ultimate Ego, as long as it doesn’t dissolve itself into nothing and let only God to assert through
it that "I am that I am." It behooves only God to say "I am." The ego has to be transcended in
that discipline of fana to subsist eternally in God. This idea is appropriated by Iqbal in his Asrari
Khudi in the framework of personalist philosophy. There is no cure for alienation, the pain of
hijr (despite Iqbal's assertion to the contrary) in a dualistic worldview. Apart from God nothing
exists and man can have authentic existence only if he cultivates akhlaq-allah, if he accepts to be
naughted by the All-Encompassing. God is the other pole of man and the mystics experience
this. Iqbal seems to grant all these points though he is keen to assert at the same time the
autonomy of ego. The ego as something independent or autonomous reality or for that matter any
real thing as such is not, only the Ultimate Ego is. The onus lies on the former to realize or
experience this and this is the end of mysticism. In countless situations the ego encounters its
own nothingness and the dazzling reality of God who alone exists. Despite Iqbal's romanticizing
of the achievements of ego and his great attempt to secure its independent status vis-à-vis
universe and God the fact remains that pessimistic conclusion is unavoidable in a worldview that
reduces the Spirit or Self to the ego and posits unbridgeable dualism. The life of ego is a life of
suffering and it is only the mystic who by dissolving ego conquers suffering. As long as one
asserts one’s ego over and against the Existence, there is bound to be suffering. "Birth is painful,
decay is painful, disease is painful, union with the pleasant is painful; painful is the separation
from the pleasant and any craving that is unsatisfied that too is painful. In brief the five
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aggregates which spring from attachment are painful (i.e., body, feeling, perception, will and
reason)” as Buddha has put it. While we wander and stray on this long pilgrimage of the earthly
career of ego more tears have been shed than is water in the world oceans. “Vanity of vanities,
all is vanity,” as the author of Ecclesiastics has put it.
Self as Spiritual rather than Psycholgical Entity
It needs to be made clear emphatically that Sufi inheritance of Iqbal makes his
philosophy fundamentally rooted in Spirit rather than Psyche. He is very keen to emphasize
potential for transcendence (of the psychological) in the self through the experience of love
which he takes to be spiritual rather than psychological phenomenon. He is interested in eternity
and finds it in the recesses of his heart and by virtue of this he flees from the time centric
psychological paradigm. His most fundamental criticism against Western civilization is the
latter’s exclusive focus on the psychological/mental/rational as opposed to spiritual/supramental
intuitional realm focussed by mystics. For him salvation is attained by virtue of transcendence of
the phenomenal in intense experience of love/unmediated vision or gnosis and it demands great
self discipline that really transforms psychological orientation to spiritual one. Iqbal emerges as a
spokesperson of religious experience which is essentially spiritual though he may not have been
able to emphasized the distinction in his explications of the same. He is on the side of Sufi
pneumatology as distinguished from Freudian or other modern psychologies. He is a philosopher
of self that is a metaphysical transpsycholgical entity. He belongs consciously to the universe of
faith that by definition transcends the psychic or mental plane. Having stated this much we can
move to conclude the discussion by summarizing the points that distinguish between a full
fledged traditional position that emphasizes the spiritual and Iqbalian position that takes too
much influence from or notice of the modern psychologism.
Conclusion
From the traditional metaphysical perspective (for this perennialist appraisal of Iqbal I
am indebted to Shahzad Qaisar’s works such as Of Intellect and Reason, Institute of Islamic
Culture, Lahore,1990, and Iqbal and Khawja Gulam Farid on Experiencing God, Iqbal Academy
Pakistan, 2002) Iqbal’s fundamental assumptions about the Spirit and the soul and his reduction
of the Spirit and soul to what he calls the ego and then his attempt to build his metaphysics not
from the strictly Unitarian and universalistic but individualistic and dualistic basis and
committing himself to rational and inductive methodology that ignores metaphysical
understanding of man’s intellectual constitution are problematic. His rational treatment of the
Absolute, emphasis on the individuality of God, privileging of individual mystical over universal
metaphysical realization and thus his personalist concept of man’s ultimate destiny and salvation
are also quite problematic. The Intellect is supra-individual faculty that comprehends things in
their totality and doesn’t take only a piecemeal view of things. He has not touched pure
metaphysics or traditional metaphysics. Iqbal’s starting point is Divinity or differentiated Reality
(personal God conceived as the Ultimate Ego) rather than the Absolute, the Supreme Principle,
the Essence or Pure Being or Beyond-Being. His philosophical and theological dualism comes in
his way of understanding traditional psychology. He doesn’t take full cognizance of the
metaphysical Reality of man which is constituted by Intellect or Spirit (ruh) which is in man but
not his. This universal element or Self in man transcends individuality. He translates ruh (Spirit)
as nafs (soul) and rereads traditional idea of soul as ego. He does reach at certain moments the
threshold of traditional metaphysics but in the absence of intellectual perspective falls back to his
essentially individualistic approach that is heavily informed by modern psychological science.
Notes & References:
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1. Iqbal, M., The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, ed.and annot. M. Saeed Sheikh, Adam
Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi, 1997, p. 101.
2. Ibid., p.100.
3. Ibid., p.100.
4. Ibid., p.101.
5. Ibid., p.100.
6. Ibid., p.2.
7. Cited in Stace, W,.T Time and Eternity : An Essay Concerning Philosophy of Religion, Princeton University
Press, London, 1952, p.1.
8. Iqbal, M., op. cit., p.26.
9. See Syed Vahidudin’s Islamic Experience in Contemporary Thought Vol, 3rd of Islam in India; Studies and
Commentaries, ed. Christian W. Troll, Chapter12, for his critique of Iqbal for his reading too much in the
incident of Ibn Sayyad.
10. Iqbal, M., op cit., p.152.
11. Ibid., p.143. He divides religious life into three stages or periods—faith, thought and discovery. Metaphysical
realization is the highest stage in the life of mystic but according to Iqbal the direct contact with reality in the
third or last stage is not describable as knowledge, as gnosis, as metaphysical realization.
12. Ibid., p.20.
13. Ibid., p.152.
14. Ibid., p.153.
15. Ibid., p.154.
16. Ibid., p.21.
17. Ibid., p.151.
18. See Faqeer Vahidudin’s Rozgar-i-faqeer, Islamic Book House, New Delhi 1992, Vol. 1, p.361) where Iqbal is
quoted in this connection.
19. Stace, W,.T Time and Eternity : An Essay Concerning Philosophy of Religion, Princeton University Press,
London, 1952, p.9.
20. Iqbal, M., op cit., p.14.
21. Ibid., p.15.
22. Stace W. T op. cit., p.41.
23. Stace, W.T op. cit., pp.161- 162.
24. Iqbal,M., op.cit., p.6.
25. Ibid., p.18.
26,27,28,29. All these quotes are from Krishnamurti for Beginners: An Anthology K.F.I., 1995.
30. Iqbal, op. cit., p.19.
31. Ibid., p.20.
32. Ibid., p.20.
33. Ibid., p. 21.
34. Ibid., p.151.
35. Ibid., p.151.
36. Ibid., p.153.
37. Ibid., p.153.
38. Qaisar, Shahzad, Of Intellect and Reason, Institute of Islamic Culture, Lahore,1990, p.299.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.,p.345.
41 Ibid.,p.326.
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