Iqbal’s Engagement with Modernity

Muhammad Iqbal stood at a crossroads of two worlds. Educated in Lahore, Cambridge, Munich, and Heidelberg, he absorbed European philosophy deeply yet returned home troubled by what he had seen. The modern West impressed him with its science, energy, and intellectual curiosity, but it also alarmed him. He sensed a civilization drifting away from its spiritual moorings. His response was neither blind rejection nor uncritical adoption. Instead, Iqbal tried to separate what was valuable in modernity from what he believed was corrosive, building a vision that fused scientific progress with Islamic ethical guidance. Understanding this engagement helps explain why Iqbal remains one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century.

The two faces of modernity 🔗

Iqbal’s view of modernity was layered. He admired the dynamism of European thought, its commitment to reason, and its scientific achievements. At the same time, he was deeply critical of the philosophical foundations on which modern Western life rested. His scholarship treated his own writing as a meeting point between Islamic and Western traditions, where he drew on modern European philosophies to develop a theory of civilizational renewal while also rejecting what he saw as the moral emptiness of European modernity.

This dual attitude is the key to grasping Iqbal. He did not want to turn back the clock. He wanted to reconstruct, not regress. The challenge he set for himself was to identify the spirit of modern progress and reattach it to a spiritual and ethical core that he believed Islam could provide.

What he valued in the modern world 🔗

Iqbal recognised that modernism brought significant scientific and economic benefits. He praised intellectual inquiry, the questioning spirit, and the refusal to accept stagnation. In fact, he criticised his own community harshly for falling into intellectual decay. He argued that Muslim societies had grown rigid and that this rigidity was a betrayal of the dynamic message of Islam itself.

For Iqbal, embracing science and rational inquiry was not un-Islamic. It was a return to an earlier Islamic spirit of curiosity and engagement with the world. He rejected passive withdrawal from life. One of his famous images describes the world not as a retreat for the ascetic but as a field for the cultivation of the self, a place where human beings act, build, and strive.

What troubled him 🔗

The problem, as Iqbal saw it, was that modern Western civilization had focused entirely on material life while neglecting the spiritual. He argued that material gains did not equate with self-understanding and that modernism failed to offer an adequate philosophical foundation for a meaningful life. Wealth, technology, and comfort were real, but they could not answer the deeper questions of human purpose.

His worry was sharpest when he looked at secularism. By separating the spiritual from the worldly, modern Europe had, in his view, hollowed out public and private life. Iqbal traced the moral and material crisis of the modern West to the secularization of both public and private existence. Once God and ethics were pushed out of social and political life, he believed, civilization lost its anchor.

The critique of materialism and individualism 🔗

Two features of modernity drew Iqbal’s strongest criticism: rampant materialism and a hollow form of individualism. He saw both as symptoms of a civilization that had lost sight of the spiritual dimension of human existence.

Iqbal believed that a purely materialistic concept of life ignored the human being’s spiritual needs and damaged the relationship between people and the divine. He worried that modern humans, dazzled by material progress, had reduced their lives to consumption and accumulation. This is why he resisted the idea that progress could be measured only by economic output. For Iqbal, true progress meant the unfolding of human potential, not merely the growth of wealth.

Khudi: a different idea of the self 🔗

Iqbal’s answer to the spiritual emptiness of modern individualism was his celebrated concept of Khudi, often translated as selfhood or ego. This is one of his most original contributions, and it is frequently misunderstood. Khudi is not selfishness or arrogance. It is self-respect and self-transformation, the belief that human beings can reshape their destiny through effort, courage, and conviction.

Where modern Western individualism often produced isolated, self-interested individuals, Iqbal’s Khudi pointed toward a disciplined and purposeful self rooted in moral autonomy. He drew on European thinkers in developing this idea, engaging with figures like Nietzsche and Bergson, but he refused to simply copy them. Instead he absorbed and challenged their ideas, weaving them into a vision anchored in Islamic spirituality and human unity.

The result was a striking reversal. Iqbal taught that strengthening the self does not lead to egoism. Paradoxically, the cultivation of Khudi leads to a deeper submission to the divine will, as the individual realizes their true purpose within the cosmic order. The fully realized self serves a higher moral mission rather than its own narrow desires.

The rejection of secular nationalism 🔗

Perhaps no aspect of modernity worried Iqbal more than secular nationalism. As nationalism swept across Europe and began influencing Indian politics, Iqbal grew increasingly critical of it. He argued that nationalism built around territory, race, and ethnicity was inherently divisive.

Iqbal denounced the features of nationalism that divide humanity along racial and territorial lines and breed enmity. He saw territorial nationalism as a force that idolized racial distinctions and set communities against one another. In its place, he proposed the idea of the ummah, a spiritual community that transcends tribe, language, and territory.

The basis in Tawhid 🔗

Iqbal’s critique of nationalism was not merely political. It flowed from a theological principle. His reflections on the unity of life and the unity of humanity, based on the concept of tawhid, struck at the root of both secularism and nationalism. Tawhid, the oneness of God, implied for Iqbal a corresponding unity among human beings.

If all humanity shared one creator, then dividing people into rival nation-states based on accidents of geography seemed to him a kind of false worship. This is why he contrasted nationalism, which he saw as parochial, with the universalism of Islam. The ummah, in his view, lifted human beings out of narrow loyalties into a wider spiritual fraternity.

A spiritual reconstruction of democracy 🔗

Iqbal’s critique of modernity did not lead him to reject democracy. On the contrary, he engaged seriously with democratic ideas and tried to reconstruct them on a spiritual foundation. His thinking here appears most clearly in his major prose work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, a series of lectures delivered in the late 1920s.

Iqbal accepted the principle of representative government. He associated it with the Islamic concept of ijma, or consensus, and even declared that the republican form of government is consistent with the spirit of Islam. He envisioned an elected legislative assembly capable of making law for the community.

Ijtihad and the principle of movement 🔗

Central to this vision was the revival of ijtihad, the practice of independent legal reasoning. Iqbal argued that Islamic thought had become frozen for centuries and that this stagnation was a betrayal of the dynamic spirit of the faith. His lecture on the principle of movement made the case for reviving dynamic Islamic thought after a long period of rigidity.

By transferring the authority of ijtihad to an elected legislative assembly, Iqbal connected modern democratic institutions to Islamic legal tradition. He suggested that a body of elected representatives could perform the collective reasoning that the community needed to adapt to changing times, while jurists guided the discussion. This was his way of marrying the modern principle of representation with the religious need for ethical and legal continuity.

Spiritual democracy 🔗

The culmination of this thinking was Iqbal’s idea of spiritual democracy. He distinguished his vision from what he regarded as the non-spiritual democracies of Europe, presenting spiritual democracy as the highest goal of Islam. The phrase captures his entire project in miniature. He wanted the participatory and egalitarian features of democracy, but he insisted they be infused with spiritual and ethical purpose rather than left as mechanical procedures.

In other words, Iqbal accepted the form of modern democracy but wanted to fill it with a different content. Democracy without spiritual depth, he feared, could degenerate into the rule of numbers without wisdom. Democracy guided by moral and spiritual principles, by contrast, could realize human dignity and justice.

Economic justice and the limits of socialism 🔗

Iqbal also engaged with the economic ideologies of his time, including socialism. He was genuinely sympathetic to the socialist concern for the poor and the exploited. He understood poverty not merely as economic deprivation but as a condition that corrodes the self and weakens the human spirit.

Yet his support was conditional. While Iqbal welcomed the demand for economic justice, he criticised the extremes of communism, particularly its denial of private property. He saw both unchecked capitalism and absolute communism as failing the Islamic ideals of brotherhood, justice, and equity. Instead, he called for a new economic order based on the teachings of Islam that would champion the economic emancipation of humanity as a whole.

Here again we see the familiar pattern. Iqbal welcomed the modern concern for social and economic justice but insisted that it be guided by ethical principles rather than purely material doctrines. Justice mattered to him, but it had to be rooted in a spiritual vision of human dignity.

Integration, not rejection 🔗

The thread running through all of Iqbal’s positions is integration. He did not want to escape modernity, and he did not want to surrender to it. He wanted to take its genuine achievements, namely science, democracy, dynamism, and the demand for justice, and reconnect them to the spiritual and ethical wisdom he found in Islam.

Iqbal’s project can be understood as an attempt to build an alternative epistemological and ontological foundation to that of the European Enlightenment, drawing on Islam’s mystical and intellectual traditions. He believed the spiritual aspects of human experience were not optional extras but essential ingredients of a balanced and fulfilling life.

This is why it is misleading to call Iqbal anti-modern. He was a critic of modernity in the way that a reformer is a critic, someone who sees both the promise and the danger and wants to redirect it. His engagement with modernity was ultimately a call to harmonize material progress with spiritual depth, in the hope of creating a more just and humane society.

What do you think? Can the achievements of modernity, such as science and democracy, truly be separated from the secular and materialist assumptions that produced them, as Iqbal hoped? And in a diverse society, is Iqbal’s vision of unity grounded in spiritual principles a source of cohesion, or does it risk excluding those who do not share the same faith?

References

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329563085_Oscillating_between_'East'_and_'West'_Muhammad_Iqbal_and_an_Islamic_Recasting_of_Modernity
2. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/782589/summary
3. https://www.howtests.com/articles/allama-muhammad-iqbal-as-the-ideological-architect-of-pakistan
4. https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1356683-reclaiming-iqbal-s-vision
5. https://www.geo.tv/latest/632768-reclaiming-iqbal-s-vision
6. https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/muhammad-iqbal-nationalism-pakistan
7. https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/519
8. https://qantara.de/en/article/muhammad-iqbal-reconstruction-religious-thought-islam
9. https://alfaqr.net/en/spiritual-democracy-as-espoused-in-the-philosophy-of-allama-iqbal/
10. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2492824/iqbal-the-principle-of-movement-in-islam
11. https://islamiceconomicsproject.com/2023/03/10/economic-philosophy-allama-iqbal/