Examining Iqbal Lahori's View on Religious Experience

Undoubtedly, the first writer among Muslim thinkers who paid attention to the issues of religious experience in the West is Iqbal Lahori. This paper is a descriptive-analytical method aimed at analyzing Iqbal Lahori's opinion about religious experience. He, according to Hawking's point of view, accepted a pragmatic approach to religion in which religious experience, reason, and intuition have their own place. In this way, he criticized James's view and offered a new explanation of the key concepts of Islam. From Iqbal’s point of view, religion is a kind of “potential self-awareness” that is placed next to “normal self-awareness” that provides facilities for experiencing and learning knowledge. Iqbal considers faith to be the gem of religion, and at the same time, he does not consider reason as limiting or opposed to faith. Like Hawking, Iqbal emphasizes that religion begins with emotion, but is not limited to it and extends to the metaphysical as well. Throughout its history, religion has never presented itself as a matter of f emotion but has continuously tried to discover the metaphysical. By accepting Hawking's words, Iqbal achieves two results 1. rejecting the Sufi view of reason, and 2. solving the problem of linguistic revelation. In addition, Iqbal enumerates characteristics for mystical experiences, which are: 1. immediacy, 2. indivisibility, 3. connection with other self, 4. incommunicado, 5. connection with reality and the world.