<i>God, Science, and Self: Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought</i> By Nauman Faizi

Living at the intersection of different worlds, the early twentieth-century Indian Muslim poet-philosopher and politician-activist Muhammad Iqbal left a significant but undervalued imprint on both modern philosophy and modern history. The academic interest in this significant philosopher has waxed and waned over the past century. Much of it can be simplistically divided between the hagiographic and the critical, each of which can be further divided between works that perceive Iqbal as a progressive or as a reactionary. Over the last two decades, however, academic study of Iqbal has gained a renewed momentum, though with relatively little critical analysis focused on Iqbal’s philosophical magnum opus, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. It is this gap that Nauman Faizi’s (Lahore University of Management Studies) God, Science and Self, Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought seeks to address. Faizi notes that contemporary commentators have correctly perceived confusion, convolution, and contradiction within the Reconstruction, and that they ‘attribute the work’s ambiguous and troubled plain sense to the chaotic and crisis-ridden intellectual context of colonial modernity’ (p. 5). While Faizi largely agrees with this account, he contends that the primary source of the confusion resides within some obscurity in Iqbal’s epistemology. Faizi argues that Iqbal’s project can be better understood as an effort to expand modern epistemology by distinguishing two distinct kinds of knowing, the representational and the pragmatic. The representational ‘conceives knowledge as descriptive, foundational, binary and essential’, whereas the pragmatic ‘imagines knowledge as performative, probabilistic, vague and contextual’ (p. 8). The pragmatic modifies the connection between physical objects and their description, and the representational prevents the potential relativistic consequences of subjective epistemology, thereby better resolving the crisis created by modernity.

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