2011 Articles

Iqbal's Notion of an 'Islamic Modernity'

Ali, Bizaa Zeynab

This study seeks to explore Muhammad Iqbal's particular conception of an 'Islamic modernity' and understand it's implications for Muslim societies. It aims to highlight Iqbal's vision of Islam as a modern postcolonial religion and his notion of the 'principle of movement' in Islam which informs his distinctive critique of Islamic modernism. The paper tries to throw light on Iqbal's intellectual engagement with the West and briefly reviews the way in which Iqbal's political thought coincided and diverged with that of his contemporaries in South Asia. This paper underlines Iqbal's rejection of both secularism and traditionalism in Islam. This seemingly contradictory position is interesting to study in the Islamic context because modernity and secularism are considered to be mutually contigious and complementary phenomenon. This paper attempts to underscore the clear distinction between modernity and secularism, as highlighted through Iqbal's work. It also argues that this ostensibly paradoxical understanding of modernity beleaguers the impact of Iqbal's thought and in many ways obstructs it's articulation in the Muslim societies.