The Methodology of the Free Thinking of Iqbal Lahori

Muḥammad Iqbāl Lāhūrī (aka Iqbal Lahori) was a Muslim reformer whose reformist thoughts were known the world over. He is counted as a peer to such thinkers as Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī. This article focuses on the thought of Iqbal and the context of that thought. It attempts to reconstruct the philosophical groundings which were the framework for his theorizing and shows how they affected his thought overall. The work at hand attempts to show that Iqbal’s novel contributions were influenced by the Westernized thought of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān on the one hand, and the anticolonial struggles and the efforts to unify [the Muslims] by Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn on the other. Moreover, Iqbal’s epistemology was much affected by the sensationalist and materialist leanings of the period in which he lived, and was also coloured by his superficial grasp of the philosophical heritage of the Islamic world, whereby he attempted to connect the perspectives of Muslim and Western philosophers. The result of this approach of Iqbal was the reconstruction and reform of religion predicated on a sensational-empirical knowledge base and the introduction of an open-minded “religion” reminiscent of the Enlightenment.