The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

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Overview

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is a series of lectures by the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), given in Indian cities in the late 1920s and published as a book about 1930, then in an expanded edition in 1934. Iqbal argues that Muslim thought must be rethought in dialogue with modern science and philosophy, without giving up revelation. His central idea is the ego or self, understood as a free, growing centre of action that develops through effort and its relation to God. For readers in South Asia it is a major modern attempt to root self-development in faith and local intellectual tradition.

Context

Iqbal was trained in Lahore, Cambridge and Munich and worked as a lawyer and poet in colonial Punjab. Muslim reformers of his time debated how to respond to British rule, Western science and weak institutions at home. He drew on Islamic theology and Sufism and also on European thinkers such as Kant, Nietzsche and Bergson. The lectures were his most systematic prose statement of that engagement.