Becoming a Genuine Muslim

Kierkegaard and Muhammad Iqbal

Sevcan Ozturk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351169264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

Despite the apparent lack of any cultural and religious connection between Kierkegaard and Iqbal, their philosophical and religious concerns and their methods of dealing with these concerns show certain parallels.

This book provides a Kierkegaardian reading of Muhammad Iqbal's idea of becoming a genuine Muslim. It reflects on the parallels between the philosophical approaches of Kierkegaard and Iqbal, and argues that, though there are certain parallels between their approaches, there is a significant difference between their philosophical stances. Kierkegaard was concerned with developing an existential dialectics; Iqbal, however, focused mostly on the identification of the problems of the modern Muslim world. As a result, Iqbal's idea of becoming a genuine Muslim – the practical aspect of his thought and one of the most central issues of his philosophy – seems to be unclear and even contradictory at points. This book therefore uses the parallels between the two philosophers' endeavours and the notions developed by Kierkegaard to provide a strong hermeneutical tool for clarifying where the significance of Iqbal's idea of becoming a Muslim lies.

By bringing together two philosophers from different cultural, traditional and religious backgrounds, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Comparative Politics, Contemporary Islamic Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion.

1 Introduction

In this book the overall aim is to provide a Kierkegaardian reading of Muhammad Iqbal’s idea of becoming a self, particularly a Muslim self. At first sight this may seem to be a surprising project. Kierkegaard (1813–1855), after all, was a nineteenth-century Danish Christian thinker, whereas Iqbal (1877–1938) was a twentieth-century thinker living in British-ruled India. Furthermore, Kierkegaard only very occasionally refers to Islam,¹ while Iqbal makes no mention of Kierkegaard in his works despite being in close contact with European thought and talking about many of the major European and American philosophers.² Despite the apparent lack of connection between Kierkegaard and Iqbal, there are, however, good reasons to deal with these two thinkers as a research topic. First, there have been very few critical studies of Iqbal’s philosophy. This book will attempt to rectify this state of affairs by providing a critical analysis of Iqbal’s notion of the self. Since Iqbal develops his notion of the self in part in dialogue with existentialist thinkers, notably Nietzsche,³ it makes sense to apply to Iqbal’s thought the profound analysis of becoming a religious self provided by the ‘father of existentialism’, namely Kierkegaard. Second, although this book aims primarily at shedding light on Iqbal’s thought, it also makes a contribution to Kierkegaard research. In the voluminous secondary literature on Kierkegaard there have been very few studies aimed at developing a relationship between Kierkegaard and any thinker belonging to a different tradition or religion, particularly to Islam.⁴ The fact that there is not much written on Iqbal and Kierkegaard in these respects indicates that there is a significant gap in the literature. Despite the fact that there have been a vast number of studies on each of these thinkers separately, there are only three published works dealing with them together. Only one author, Ghulam Sabir, has penned a long comparative study on Iqbal and Kierkegaard, and one other, Abrahim H. Khan, published two articles on these two thinkers in English. Sabir published a book entitled Kierkegaard and Iqbal: Startling Resemblances in 2003.⁵ However, as the title clearly suggests, the work focuses on comparing Iqbal and Kierkegaard, and finding similarities between these two thinkers. It does not, as such, apply Kierkegaardian insights to the interpretation of Iqbal. Khan, on the other hand, has authored two articles on Iqbal and Kierkegaard. One of these articles, entitled ‘Kierkegaard and Iqbal on Becoming a Genuinely Existing Self’, has been published among the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group and the Søren Kierkegaard Society in 2007.⁶ This article is the basis for Khan’s more recent paper on Iqbal and Kierkegaard entitled ‘Muhammad Iqbal and Kierkegaard’s “Judge William” ’.⁷ They show that there is not much secondary literature available that analyses Iqbal and Kierkegaard and that, what there is, it is inadequate in some respects on Iqbal and Kierkegaard. This book aims to rectify this deficiency.

The third and perhaps most important reason for undertaking this study is that Kierkegaard and Iqbal are addressing similar problems. They both aim at purifying religion from ‘alien’ elements. Christianity, for Kierkegaard, must be distinguished from the other phenomena that had been associated and confused with it such as Hegelianism, which had reduced Christianity to an inferior form of philosophy. Kierkegaard is also concerned to distinguish Christianity from the social norms of society and from simply being human. That is, in Kierkegaard’s works there is found an early critique of what would later be called ‘culture Protestantism’, the confusion and conflation of Christianity with the dominant norms and values of contemporary society.⁸ Iqbal’s thought includes a parallel set of concerns. Like Kierkegaard with regard to Christianity, Iqbal holds that Islam has been confused and conflated with non-Islamic ideas that undermine the true character of the faith. For Iqbal, the elements from which religion must be purified are Greek thought and Islamic mysticism, which in his view undermine the significance of human existence. Their critique of the contemporary forms of their respective religions in turn led both Kierkegaard and Iqbal to be critical of the religious authorities who had allowed such a lamentable state of affairs to come about. Both thinkers call for return to the original sources of Christianity and Islam respectively.

A closer examination of the methods Kierkegaard and Iqbal use in regard to these problems reveals another parallel, namely that they both attempt to deal with their concerns in similar ways. These similarities can be found in their literary technique, their emphasis on taking human existence as the starting point for their reflections, and their development of a notion of the self. It is their common concerns, and the parallel methods adopted by Kierkegaard and Iqbal in order to address these concerns, that seem to allow undertaking a comparative study of Iqbal and Kierkegaard. However, anyone attempting to undertake a comparative study of Iqbal and Kierkegaard, particularly of their understanding of the notion of the self, faces the problem that Iqbal seems not to plan the details of his philosophy of the self in a clear way as Kierkegaard does. In Khan’s words, Iqbal presents the notion of the self ‘as emerging through relation, as corresponding with consciousness of itself, and as becoming. But he does not seem to map out details of the relation as Kierkegaard does.’⁹ As a result, Iqbal’s philosophy of the self is problematized by a terminology that is not perfectly fit for the purpose. What seems to be most important for Iqbal is the identification of the problems of the Muslim world in the modern era. As Ebrahim Moosa nicely puts it, ‘He was more interested in pushing the boundaries of thought by raising still more questions to highlight some interminable problems.’¹⁰ Even if it was deliberate as Moosa claims¹¹ or not, the main result of this is that Iqbal does not provide his readers with a clear idea of how to become a Muslim self despite the fact that it is perhaps the core of his philosophical thought.

Iqbal’s philosophy aims at dispelling the problems of the modern Muslim world by reconstructing Islamic thought and creating a new world. As it is hoped will become clear in the course of this study, Iqbal focuses on this motivation and seeks an urgent way to make this purpose real in a most ambitious manner. He believes that in order to create his ideal world there are many urgent issues ranging from politics and economics to education that need to be dealt with. He had a very wide philosophical knowledge, and showed his ability to use this knowledge in what he wrote. One of the main features of Iqbal’s thought that distinguishes it from others is, in Charles Taylor’s words, that he

manages to establish a mutual and fruitful exchange between thinkers and texts that are quite distant from each other: Nietzsche and Bergson, Hallaj and Rumi, and between those and still others, taken up in the context of rereading the Quran.¹²

Iqbal is not only successful at cultivating fruitful conversations between different thinkers in different contexts, he also presents an unusual ability to establish a connection between modern Western philosophy and traditional Islamic thought. In other words, he successfully deals with modern discussions in an Islamic context. An example of this can be seen in his discussion of the notion of action. Iqbal discusses the notion of action in Hegelian and Kantian contexts and with references to dualism and mechanistic understanding of action,¹³ but he also discusses it with references to the Qur’anic verses. He establishes a relationship between human actions and the development of personality, he even invents the notions of ‘ego-sustaining action’ and ‘egodissolving action’, and introduces human actions as the means of achieving immortality promised by the Qur’an.¹⁴ The examination of his philosophy of action would be the subject of a whole other study. However, it should be noted that, although his discussion of action involves ambiguities at some points, the relationship he establishes between actions and the development of the self as an ultimate aim of Islam can actually be regarded as a significant contribution to contemporary philosophy of action, which currently seems to neglect Islamic contributions to the concept.¹⁵ The main problem with Iqbal’s presentation of his philosophy, particularly in terms of the practical aspect of it, is that his terminology is not up to the task and sometimes creates problems for his aim of the ‘reconstruction’ of Islamic religious thought. In spite of this, the parallels mentioned are thought to provide sufficient justification for the application of aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought to Iqbal’s. Despite his rejection of any kind of system and his avoiding of defining his own terms directly, it is the contention of this book that the concepts Kierkegaard develops, and his wish to develop a consistent terminology, provide a powerful hermeneutic both for interpreting Iqbal’s thought and for making clear where the significance of Iqbal’s conception of the self lies.

The feasibility of providing a Kierkegaardian reading of Iqbal is supported by the fact that I am not the first to have undertaken such a project. The next task here is therefore to review the literature that has addressed the questions with which this study is concerned. First, this will expose the philosophical inadequacy of much of the secondary literature on Iqbal, which makes necessary the type of philosophical analysis that will be undertaken in the subsequent chapters. Second, it will set the scene for the discussion by considering the few studies of the relation between Iqbal and Kierkegaard that have appeared thus far.

A critical survey of selected secondary literature on Iqbal

Previously it was mentioned that although there is much written material on Iqbal, these works are rarely critical, objective and analytical. The two main characteristics of such uncritical studies of Iqbal are first, that they are extremely appreciative of Iqbal almost to the point of being celebratory, and second, that they have mostly been published in Pakistan.¹⁶ This is understandable, because Iqbal is much more than merely an intellectual for Pakistan. He is best known not as a religious philosopher but as the spiritual father, and foremost proponent of the idea of Pakistan as an independent Muslim country, although it is claimed that he is not actually the real ‘father’ of this idea.¹⁷

An example of the uncritical and highly appreciative treatment of Iqbal can be observed in A. K. Brohi’s article ‘Iqbal as a Philosopher-Poet’. Brohi writes: ‘And Iqbal is significant to us precisely because nobody has served more than he has the cause of Islam – he is, for us, the mouthpiece of Muslim destiny as it articulates itself in our own day.’¹⁸ This suggestion by Brohi is an exaggeration of Iqbal’s status...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The construction of a Kierkegaardian hermeneutics
• 3 Iqbal in context
• 4 Making distinctions
• 5 Cultivating existential appropriation on the part of the reader
• 6 Conclusion
• Index