THE RECONSTRUCTION OF 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ISLAM 

MUHAMMAD IQBAL 
IQBAL ACADEMY PAKISTAN 

ISBN 969-416-354-4 
© 2011 
Iqbal Academy Pakistan 
þGovernment of Pakistan, 
6th Floor, Aiwan-i-Iqbal Complex, 
Off Egerton Road, Lahore. 
Tel:[+ 92-42] 36314-510/99203573 
Fax:[+ 92-42] 3631-4496 
Email: director@iap.gov.pk 
Website: www.allamaiqbal.com 

Publisher:  :  Director  
Iqbal Academy Pakistan  
Writer:  :  M. Suheyl Umar  
1st Edition  :  2011  

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ISLAM 


CONTENTS 
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION PREFACE 
I. 	KNOWLEDGE AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
II. 	THE PHILOSOPHICAL TEST OF THE REVELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 23-49 
III. 	THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND THE MEANING OF PRAYER 50-75 
IV. 	THE HUMAN EGO–HIS FREEDOM AND IMMORTALITY 76-98 
V. 	THE SPIRIT OF MUSLIM CULTURE 99-115 
VI. 	THE PRINCIPLE OF MOVEMENT IN THE STRUCTURE OF ISLAM 116-142 
VII. IS RELIGION POSSIBLE? 143-157 NOTES AND REFERENCES 158-214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 215-235 QUR’ANIC INDEX 236-241 INDEX 242-277 



EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 
In the present edition of Allama Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, an attempt has been made at providing references to many authors cited in it and, more particularly, to the passages quoted from their works. The titles of these works have not always been given by the Allama and, in a few cases, even the names of the authors have to be worked out from some such general descriptions about them as ‘the great mystic poet of Islam’, ‘a modern historian of civilization’, and the like. 
The work, however, referred to more often than any other, and quoted most, is the Qur’.n. Of a large number of passages quoted from it, about seventy-seven, generally set apart from the main text, carry numbered references to the Qur’.nic S.rahs and verses. The unnumbered passages from the Qur’.n, about fifty or so, given within the text are comparatively briefer– sometimes very brief, merely calling attention to a unique expression of the Qur’.n. References to these as well as to many Qur’.nic ideas and quite a few Qur’.nic subjects, alluded to especially in the first five Lectures, have been supplied in the “Notes” and later also in the “Index of Qur’.nic References.” A numerical scanning of this Index shows quite significantly that the number of verses bearing on the subjects of ‘man’, ‘Qur’.nic empiricism’ and the ‘phenomenon of change’ (mostly in terms of alternation of the night and the day and also in a wider sense) in each case, is comparatively larger than the number of verses on any other single subject. This may as well be noted in the clustering of such verses or of references to them on quite a few pages of the Reconstruction. 
Added to the verses quoted from the Qur’.n and references to them, in the present work, are a good number of quite significant observations and statements embodying Allama’s 
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rare insight into the Qur’.n born of his peculiarly perceptive and deep study of it. These are to be found scattered all over the work, except in Lecture VII, where one would notice just one observation and complete absence of passages from the Qur’.n, possibly because it was originally addressed to a non-Muslim audience. About sixty-five of these observations and statements have been listed in the general Index under: ‘observations and statements based on’ as a sub-entry of the ‘Qur’.n’. 
Of the other works quoted from in the Reconstruction, forty-nine that I could work out and later list in the Index, about fifteen are by Muslim authors, mostly mystics and mystic poets. Passages from these Muslim works, originally in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, have been given, with the single exception of R.m.’s Mathnaw., in their first-ever English translation by Allama Iqbal. Notable among these are passages from Fakhr al-D.n al-R.z.’s Al-Mab.hith al Mashriqiyyah and Shaikh Ahmad Sirhind.’s Makt.b.t and, above all, Ziya G.kalp’s Turkish poems, which the Allama was able to render into English from their German version by August Fischer in his Aus der religi.sen Reformbewegung in der Turkei (Leipzig, 1922). 
Equally important and perhaps more are Allama’s condensed English versions of considerably longer passages or sections from Ibn Maskawaih’s Al-Fawz al-Asghar (on evolutionary hypothesis in both the biological and the spiritual sense), Sh.h Wal. All.h’s magnum opus Al-Hujjat Allah al-B.lighah (on the prophetic method of building up a universal Shar.‘ah) and ‘Ir.q.’s Gh.yat al-Imk.n f. Dir.yat al-Mak.n (on the plurality of space-orders and time-orders). This last, the longest of all the summarized translations from works in Arabic or Persian, was originally prepared by Allama Iqbal from the, then a rare, MS for his Sectional Presidential Address: “A Plea for Deeper Study of the Muslim Scientists” presented at the Fifth Oriental Conference, Lahore: 20-22 November 1928. The translation of the passage from Sh.h Wal. All.h’s Al-Hujjat Allah al-B.lighah, however, seems to belong to a still later date. There is a clear reference to this significant passage in Allama Iqbal’s letter addressed to Sayyid Sulaim.n Nadv. on 22 September 1929, i.e. a month before he delivered the first six Lectures at the Aligarh Muslim University. All these summarized translations, it may be added, form parts of the main text of Lectures III, V and VI. 
As to R.m.’s Mathnaw., quoted very extensively (six of its verses are quoted even in the original Persian), one is to note that the translations of all the passages from it are not by Allama Iqbal himself but by others: Whinfield, Nicholson (with certain modifications) and Thadani. Only in one case has the Allama given his own translation of a verse from R.m. (p. 88); but, unbelievable though it is, this verse, according to the Persian translator of the Reconstruction, is to be found neither in the Mathnaw. nor in the Kulliy.t-i Shams. This certainly needs further research. However, almost every time a passage is quoted from the Mathnaw. or even a reference is made to it, the reader is reminded of ‘the beautiful words of R.m. and of his being ‘far more true to the spirit of Islam than’, say, ‘Ghaz.l.’. 
Of about thirty-four Western writers from whose works the Allama has quoted, as many as twenty-five were his contem­poraries and among these one is to underline the names of Whitehead, Eddington, Wildon Carr, Louis Rougier, and certainly also of Spengler. One is also to note that the works of these and other contemporaries quoted from happen to be mostly those which were published between 1920 and 1928. This is not at all to minimize the importance of quite significant passages quoted from the works of Bergson, James, Hocking and even Aghnides, all published before 1920, but only to refer to the fact of there being a greater number of quotations in the Reconstruction from Western works published within a certain period of time. 
The year 1920, in fact, happens to be the year of the publication of Einstein’s epoch-making Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition. And it is the year also of the publication of Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation and Wildon Carr’s General Principle of Relativity in Its Philosophical and Historical Aspect, perhaps the earliest expository works on Relativity by English writers. Passages from both these works are to be found in the Reconstruction. Einstein’s own work is catalogued in Allama’s personal library along with a dozen others bearing on Relativity-Physics. 
Mention must also be made here of Alexander’s peculiarly difficult two-volume Space, Time and Deity, which on its appearance in 1920 was hailed as ‘a philosophical event of the first rank’. This is perhaps the first contemporary work which 
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received Allama’s immediate professional comments, even though brief, embodying his significant admission: ‘Alexander’s thought is much bolder than mine’. Despite Alexander’s pronounced realistic (and hereby also naturalistic-empiricistic and so scientific) metaphysics, the Allama seems to have found in his supreme ‘principle of emergence’ a kind of empirical confirmation of Bergson’s Creative Evolution. It was verily in terms of the principle of emergence that he explained to Nicholson his idea of Perfect Man in contradistinction to that of Nietzsche’s Superman in his long, perhaps the longest, letter addressed to him on 24 January 1921. 
Allama Iqbal’s assessment of the works of Western writers, especially of those which received his closest attention, seems to be characterized by the ambivalence of admiration and dissatisfaction, or acceptance and rejection. This is also reflected in one of his most valuable dicta addressed to Muslims: ‘Approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude’ (p. 78). Nowhere is this ambivalence perhaps better exemplified than in Allama’s treatment of Spengler’s The Decline of the West; two volumes published in April 1926 and November 1928. He readily accepts some of Spengler’s pronouncements such as these: ‘The history of Western knowledge is thus one of progressive emancipation from classical thought’; ‘The symbol of the West . . . is the (mathematical) idea of function’; ‘Not until the theory of functions was evolved’ could it become possible for us to have ‘our dynamic Western physics’. But the Allama was completely dissatisfied with the very central thesis of The Decline of the West ‘that cultures, as organic structures, are completely alien to one another’. In his Address at the Oriental Conference, he pointedly observed that facts ‘tend to falsify Spengler’s thesis’. It was this thesis or doctrine of ‘mutual alienation of cultures’ or cultural isolationism, the Allama strongly felt, that blinded Spengler to the undeniable Muslim influences or ingredients in the development of European culture. There is no mention in his otherwise ‘extremely learned work’ of such known facts of history as the anti-classicism of the Muslim thinkers, which found its clearest expression in the work of the very brilliant Ibn Khald.n– Spengler’s Muslim counterpart in many ways. Nor is there any reference, in The Decline of the West, to Al-B.r.n.’s ‘theory of functions’, clearly enunciated in his Al-Q.n.n al­Mas‘.d., six hundred years before Fermat and Descartes– a fact which Spengler had every right to know for he was so well versed in mathematics, and even as a historian of cultures. 
Again, while referring to Spengler’s allegation that ‘the culture of Islam is thoroughly Magian in spirit and character’ Allama Iqbal candidly observes: ‘That a Magian crust has grown over Islam, I do not deny’. And he adds quite importantly for us: ‘Indeed, my main purpose in these lectures has been to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from its Magian overlayings’ (p. 114). However, Spengler’s vision of Islam as a cultural movement, according to Allama, was completely perverted by his thesis of ‘mutual alienation of cultures’ and also by his morphological approach to history, which led him to group Islam as a culture with the manifestly Magian cultures of Judaism, Zoroastrianism and others. Allama Iqbal did recognize the historical fact that Islam imported some concepts and a ‘religious experience’– as reflected, for instance, in some esoteric traditions in Muslim theology and in certain theosophical and occultist tendencies in Sufism– from these earlier cultures in the period of its expansion as also in later periods especially 
when the conquered became conquerors culturally. But these importations, the Allama insisted, remained all along the husk of Islam, its Magian crust or its Magian overlayings. Spengler’s capital error is obvious. 
Moreover, Spengler failed to perceive in the idea of finality of prophethood in Islam, ‘a psychological cure for the Magian attitude of constant expectation’. It should be clear to any body that with the ‘revelation’ of this idea of finality, one of the greatest that dawned upon the prophetic consciousness, ‘all personal authority claiming a supernatural origin came to an end in the history of man’. Spengler also failed to appreciate the cultural value of this idea in Islam. With all his ‘overwhelming learning’, it perhaps did not become possible for him to comprehend the all-important truth that ‘the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Qur’.n, and the emphasis that it lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge are . . . different aspects of the same idea of finality’. It is these aspects of the idea of finality which bring to man, indeed, a keen 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 
awareness of the ‘birth’ of a new epoch with Islam, the epoch ‘of inductive intellect’. 
The fact that none of the works of the Western writers quoted from in the Reconstruction crosses 1928 as its date of publication does not make much of a problem so far as the first six Lectures are concerned. One has only to recall that the first three Lectures were written or finally re-written in 1928, and the next three in 1929, mostly perhaps during the summer vacations of the Courts. It is quite likely that at the time of writing the second set of three lecturers in 1929, Allama Iqbal did not come across many works published in the West the same year, or did not find anything in them to quote from in his Lectures. But the last Lecture in the present work: ‘Is Religion Possible?’ was delivered in a session of the Aristotelian Society, London, in December 1932; and yet all the six Western works quoted from, even in this Lecture, happen to have been published within 1928. How is one to understand Allama’s not keeping up his usual keenly perceptive and reportedly avid reading of the Western philosophers? 
Why this almost an ascetic self-denial of philosophy? There could be many reasons for this. Among these, due allowance has to be made for his preoccupation of two different orders: one which suited his superb poetic genius most; and the other, of more practical nature, which increasingly took possession of his time and attention towards guiding and helping the Muslims of India in their great struggle for an autonomous homeland. Allama Iqbal all along keenly felt that Islam was to have an opportunity ‘to mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 11). From the depth of these feelings there emerged a prophetic vision of a geographical form– now called Pakistan. 
As stated above Allama’s avowed main purpose in his Lectures is ‘to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emanci­pated from its Magian overlayings’ (p. 114). There is, how-ever, not much mention of Magianism, nor of the specific Magian overlayings of Islam, in the Reconstruction. In all there is a brief reference to Magian culture in the opening section of Lecture IV and to Magian idea or thought in the concluding passage of Lecture V. In the latter case Allama’s statement that Ibn Khald.n has ‘finally demolished the alleged revelational basis in Islam of an idea similar . . . to the original Magian idea’ (p. 115) is an implied and may be some what suppressed reference to his view that ‘all prophetic traditions relating to mahd., mas.hiyyat and mujaddidiyyat are Magian in both provenance and spirit’ (Iqb.ln.mah, Vol. II, 231). It may be rightly said that Allama’s whole Weltanschauung is so completely anti-Magian that he does not always have to name Magianism whenever he says something which implies anti-Magianism. A good instance of this, perhaps, would be his observation in Lecture VII on the ‘technique’ of medieval mysticism in the Muslim East. ‘Far from reintegrating the forces of the average man’s inner life, and thus preparing him for participation in the march of history’, this Muslim mysticism, he tells us, ‘has taught man a false renunciation and made him perfectly contented with his ignorance and spiritual thraldom’ (pp. 148-49). 
It remains, however, true that there are not very many statements in the Reconstruction even with Allama’s implied anti-Magianism, unless we understand the expressions ‘implied’ and ‘implication’ in a different and deeper sense, and go to the very starting-point or genesis of his anti-Magianism. As is the case with most of his other great and rare insights– generally couched in a language different from that of Bergsonian-Whiteheadian metaphysics, Allama owes his anti-Magianism to his uniquely perceptive reading of the Qur’.n. It essentially emanates from his keen understanding of the profound significance of the supreme idea of finality of prophethood looked at from the point of view of religious and cultural growth of man in history, and even thus, looked at also from the point of view of ‘man’s achieving full self-consciousness’ as bearer of the ‘Divine trust’ of ‘personality’ (ego) and of the ‘Divine promise’ of ‘a complete subjugation of all this immensity of space and time’. With this Prophetic idea of the perfection and thereby the completion of the chain of all Divinely-revealed religions in Islam, says Allama: ‘all personal authority, claiming a supernatural origin, has come to an end in the history of man’ (p. 101). But then from the same supreme idea also emanates the keen awareness of the epochal ‘birth of inductive intellect’, summed up in Allama’s well-known 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 
aphorism: ‘Birth of Islam is the birth of inductive intellect’ (p. 101). Added to this is his observation, characterized by the same simplicity and directness of ‘perception’: ‘In the Prophet of Islam, life discovers other sources of knowledge suitable to its new direction’ (p. 101). Thus, ‘abolition of all Magian claims’ and ‘the birth of inductive intellect’, within the logic of Islamic experience, are two co-implicant ideas, for they owe their origin to the same supreme idea of finality and from it they Draw their common inspiration. 
Because of the veritable inner unity of the Qur’.n, man’s new awareness of himself with regard to both his place in Nature and his position in History awakened by ‘the idea of finality’ is already clearly reflected in ‘the emphasis that the Qur’.n lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge’. The latter, according to the Allama, is only one of the other aspects of the former; as is also ‘the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Qur’.n’. Thus, ‘the birth of inductive intellect’ is to be found in the Qur’.n in more than one way; and, therefore, in as many ways is to be found also the repudiation of Magianism inherently implied by it. This explains largely, perhaps, Allama’s having taken up in the Reconstruction the methodological device of removing the Magian crust from Islam by promoting, from within Islam, its own intrinsic awareness of the birth of in­ductive intellect. This is borne out by many of the brightest parts of the present work. 
Some of the perceptive Western readers of the Reconstruction have correctly noticed in Allama’s idea of ‘the birth or awakening of inductive intellect’ a middle term between ‘Islam’ and ‘modern science’, even as one is also to notice Allama’s bracketing ‘science’ with ‘God-consciousness’– more precious than mere belief in God, in some of his extraordinary pronouncements. These appear sometimes, suddenly as if, in the concluding part of an argument as spontaneous expressions of an essential aspect of that argument’s inner impulse, which seems to have become a little more heightened in the end. Such are the pronouncements, for instance, in which the Allama equates the scientist’s observation of Nature with someone’s ‘virtually seeking a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego’ (p. 45) or where he calls ‘the scientific observer of Nature,’ ‘a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer’ (p. 73). Making this matter of ‘God-consciousness through-science’ more explicit, he tells us that ‘scientific observation of Nature keeps us in close contact with the behaviour of Reality, and thus sharpens our inner perception for a deeper vision of it’ (p. 72), or that ‘one indirect way of establishing connexions with the reality that confronts us is reflective observation and control of its symbols as they reveal themselves to sense-perception’ (p. 12). So sure is Allama of the near at hand possibilities of the scientific observer’s ‘establishing connexions with Reality’ through his following the ‘modest’ ways of inductive intellect that he significantly concludes: ‘This alone will add to his power over Nature and give him that vision of the total-infinite which philosophy seeks but cannot find’ (p. 73). 
The Reconstruction, however, cannot be said to be a critique of Magian supernaturalism, nor, perhaps, is it al-together a dissertation on Islamic awareness of inductive intellect, or on Islam’s saying ‘yes’ to the world of matter and the unique emphasis that it lays on the empirical aspect of Reality, and thence on science and on power over Nature. All these do get their due place in Allama’s work, but they also get their share of criticism in the philosophically conceived total religio-moral synthesis of Islam. In fact, the exigency of the writing of the major part of the Reconstruction seems to have arisen, among other things, out of a state of despair into which Muslim religio­philosphic tradition had fallen, apparently, out of sheer neglect over the ages. Muslims in the end were, thus, left with what the Allama has de-scribed ‘a worn-out’ or ‘practically a dead metaphysics’ with its peculiar thought-forms and set phraseology producing manifestly ‘a deadening effect on the modem mind’ (pp. 72, 78). The need for writing a new Muslim metaphysics could not be overemphasized; and the Allama wrote one in the Reconstruction in terms of contemporary developments in science and philosophy. This he hoped would ‘be helpful towards a proper understanding of the meaning of Islam as a message to humanity’ (p. 7). Allama’s hope came true. The Reconstruction is one of the very few precious Muslim works available today for a meaningful discourse on Islam at the international forum of learning. Even thus it is unique in promoting effective interreligious dialogue, provided the 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 
‘metaphysics’ at least of the major world religions are got similarly translated into the common idiom and metaphor of today. The Reconstruction certainly also aims at greatly facilitating the much-needed inner communication between Islam and some of the most important phases of its culture, on its intellectual side’ (p. 6), which now, with the passage of time, have come to be manifested in many human disciplines rapidly progressing all over the world. Promotion of Islam’s communication with its own manifestations elsewhere is, perhaps, today, historically speaking, an indispensable part of Muslims’ own ‘proper understanding of the meaning of Islam’. 
While preparing the script of the Reconstruction for its present edition I have used basically its Oxford University Press edition of 1934. The few misprints of the proper names like Maimmonides, Rongier, Tawfik Fitrat –which seem to have been transferred to the Oxford edition of the Reconstruction from its poorly printed original Lahore (Kapur Art Printing Works) edition of 1930– were pointed out by some of the earlier Western reviewers. None of these misprints, however, posed much of a problem except one, which, I confess, put me on real hard work. I mean: ‘Sarkash. of the tenth century of the Hijrah’, a misprint of composite nature relating to both name and date. The French, the Urdu and the Persian translators of the Reconstruction have noted it as a misprint for ‘Sarakhs. of the fifth century of the Hijrah’– a bit too commonly known a name and date to find its way into a composite misprint in the Reconstruction; and then the date certainly a bit anachronistic for the passage where it is meant to go. After arriving at, what I may be allowed to call, my foolproof reasons and authenticated evidence with regard to this misprint in name and date, I decided to change it into ‘Zarkash. of the eighth century of the Hijrah’ with a long note to this name. 
As to my primary task of tracing the passages quoted in the Reconstruction to their originals in the Muslim or Western writers, I am to say that I did finally succeed in finding them out except four, i.e. those quoted from Horten, Hurgronje, von Kremer and Said Halim Pasha. All these passages belong to Lecture VI. This Lecture, as I have adduced some evidence to show in my Notes, is justly believed to be the revised and enlarged form of a paper on Ijtih.d read by Allama Iqbal in December 1924. After all my search for the so far four untraced passages in the possible works which could become available to me, I am inclined to assume that they are Allama’s own translations from German works. Allama’s translation of two passages from Friedrich Naumann’s Briefe über Religion and five passages from August Fischer’s Aus der religi.sen Reformbewegung in der Turkei in Lecture VI, earlier paper on Ijtih.d and his past practice of quoting from German works in The Development of Metaphysics in Persia as well as his correspondence with some of the noted German and other orientalists are among the additional reasons for this assumption. 
As to the passages which have been quoted in Lecture VI and could be traced to their originals, there are good reasons to believe that all the three passages quoted from Nicolas Aghnides’ Mohammedan Theories of Finance (a copy of which was presented to the Allama in March-April 1923), in the latter part of this Lecture, belong to the period of Allama’s writing his paper on the ‘Idea of Ijtih.d in the Law of Islam’ in 1924. This also seems to be true of Ziya G.kalp’s poems translated by the Allama from Aus der religi.sen Reformbewegung in der Turkei (1922) a copy of which he did receive in April 1924 from the author, August Fischer, then also the editor of Islamica. In one of his letters to Sayyid Sulaim.n Nadv., the Allama clearly refers to his having made use of Ziya G.kalp’s poems in his paper on Ijtih.d. There are, however, at least two passages which, with some good measure of certainty, can be said to belong to later dates. I mean the passage in the beginning of Lecture VI from Denison’s Emotion as the Basis of Civilization, published in 1928; and, secondly, the passage from Al-Hujjat All.h al-B.lighah which, as stated earlier, is to be linked with Allama’s letter to Sayyid Sulaim.n Nadv. on 22 September 1929. 
Composition of Lecture VI, thus, appears to be spread over a longer period of time than is the case with other Lectures; even as Allama’s interest in the ‘idea of Ijtih.d in the Law of Islam’ and thereby in the entire methodology of Muslim jurisprudence 
– recurrently visible in the last fifteen years of his life– is much more sustained than his interest in many other subjects, including a good many that he came across in his avid and vast 
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reading of the great Western philosophers. 
In a press interview, a little before the second Round Table Conference, the Allama expressed his intention of writing a book on ‘the system of fiqh in the light of modern know-ledge’, another ‘work of reconstruction’ on the legal aspect of Islam, much more important than its purely theological aspect. To this second work of reconstruction, his present work of reconstruction on the philosophical aspect of Islam, he added with his usual modesty, was ‘necessary as a prelude’. The much cherished book: ‘The Reconstruction of Legal Thought in Islam’ was, however, not written: but the bare fact that the Allama wanted to write it and the great importance that he attached to the writing of it, signifies, perhaps, his will to posterity. 
In working out references to the views of many authors– Islamic or Western, medieval or modern–cited in the present work, or in providing notes to some of the points raised or names and terms mentioned in it, I sincerely believe that, though I have reaped a rich academic harvest of my work, I have done only what any other admirer and lover of Allama Iqbal would have done, and done better. 
From an almost encyclopaedic range of views and facts covered in the Reconstruction as also from the pre-eminently towering intellectual and spiritual stature of Allama Iqbal, it should not be difficult to imagine that the production of an annotated edition of this work could not have become possible for me without the kindly assistance and advice of many friends and scholars both in Pakistan and abroad. I most sincerely acknowledge my debt to them all. 
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Chief Justice Dr. Javid Iqbal for his kindly agreeing to the proposal of bringing out an annotated edition of the Reconstruction and also for granting permission for its publication. I am also grateful to the members of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Islamic Culture, Lahore, for their approval of my under­taking this work as one of my academic assignments in partial fulfilment of my duties as Director of the Institute, and especially to Dr. M. Afzal, Minister for Education, for his kind encouragement and sustained keen interest in its publication. 
It is my most pleasant duty to thank Professor M. Siddiq of Islamia College, Lahore, for his many courtesies and generous assistance in the use of Allama Iqbal’s personal library and particularly for his expert advice in the matter of locating and reading Allama’s marginal and other marks and notes in his personal copies of many important works. 
My grateful thanks are also due to Dr. Ahmad Nabi Khan, Director: Archaeology, and his junior colleague Mr. M.H. Khokhar, Curator: Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore, for their special courtesy which made it possible for me to examine and study some of the important MSS and books preserved in this Museum and especially the letters of the orientalists. This did help me solve some of my riddles. 
I am gratefully indebted to Qazi Mahmudul Haq of the British Library, London, for his kindly sending me the Photostat of Allama Iqbal’s article published in the first issue of Sociological Review (1908), and also of sections from Deni-son’s, now a rare book, Emotion as the Basis of Civilization. In addition Mr. Haq very kindly arranged to send to me microfilms of certain MSS in Cairo including the unique MS of Khw.jah Muhammad P.rs.’s Ris.lah dar Zam.n-o Mak.n. Thus alone did it become possible for me to work out some difficult, if not impossible, references in the Reconstruction. 
I also wish to express my gratitude to Mlle Mauricette Levasseur of Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, for her kindly supplying me the requested information on André Servier, and more importantly for her detailed notes on Louis Rougier (earlier Rongier) which helped me work through a somewhat tangled problem of names and titles. 
My very grateful thanks are due to the two Dutch friends: the Reverend Dr. Jan Slomp and Mr. Harry Mintjes. The former was never tired of translating for me passages from articles and books in German or French, for the information requested by me sometimes was to become available only in these languages. And it was Mr. Mintjes who finally made it possible for me to have the photostat of the passages from Naumann’s Briefe über Religion quoted in the Reconstruction. 
I must also thank my nephew, Professor Mustansir Mir of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for his ready supply of photostats of this or that article, or of parts of books, or more 
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importantly of a new dissertation on Allama Iqbal in the States. 
Of the many more friends and scholars who have kindly helped me in my work or from whose views I have benefited in one way or the other, mention must be made of Maul.n. M. Hanif Nadvi and Maulana M. Is aq Bhatt.. I met them al-most daily in the office of the Institute of Islamic Culture, and it was always so convenient to take some significant Arabic texts to them and enter into a lively discussion on this or that Islamic issue touched upon in the Reconstruction. I am ever so grateful to them for all these discussions. 
I must also acknowledge my great indebtedness to Mr. M. Ashraf Darr, Secretary and Publication Adviser of the Institute, for his kindly preparing the entire manuscript for press, for his many valuable suggestions and technical assistance in the difficult task of preparing the two Indexes– particularly the second, which, in fact, has grown unto index-cum-concordance– and finally for reading and correcting proofs of the latter part of the work, i.e. the editor’s part starting with his Notes and References. 
Nobody is more conscious of the many drawbacks in this latter part than I, and, for that very reason, none so eager to welcome the suggestions of the worthy reader to improve upon it, for the next edition. 
Even so, I would like to dedicate this part of the work by the editor to the memories of the late Chief Justice S. A. Rahman and the late Maulana Said Ahmad Akbar.b.d., the two Iqbalites, who helped me understand ‘the great synthesis, the greatest in the modern Muslim world’ that Allama Iqbal is. May their souls rest in eternal peace! 
Lahore: May 1984 M. Saeed Sheikh 

PREFACE 
The Qur’.n is a book which emphasizes ‘deed’ rather than ‘idea’. There are, however, men to whom it is not possible organically to assimilate an alien universe by re-living, as a vital process, that special type of inner experience on which religious faith ultimately rests. Moreover, the modern man, by developing habits of concrete thought– habits which Islam itself fostered at least in the earlier stages of its cultural career– has rendered himself less capable of that experience which he further suspects because of its liability to illusion.  The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in important respects, from our own. ‘Your creation and resurrection,’ says the Qur’.n, ‘are like the creation and resurrection of a single soul.’ (31:28) A living experience of the kind of biological unity, embodied in this verse, requires today a method physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind. In the absence of such a method the demand for a scientific form of religious knowledge is only natural. In these Lectures, which were undertaken at the request of the Madras Muslim Association and delivered at Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh, I have tried to meet, even though partially, this urgent demand by attempting to reconstruct Muslim religious philosophy with due regard to the philosophical traditions of Islam and the more recent developments in the various domains of human knowledge. And the present moment is quite favourable for such an undertaking. Classical Physics has learned to criticize its own foundations. As a result of this criticism the kind of 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 
materialism, which it originally necessitated, is rapidly disappearing; and the day is not far off when Religion and Science may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies. It must, however, be remembered that there is no such thing as finality in philosophical thinking. As knowledge advances and fresh avenues of thought are opened, other views, and probably sounder views than those set forth in these lectures, are possible. Our duty is carefully to watch the progress of human thought, and to maintain an independent critical attitude towards it. 
M.I. 
I 

KNOWLEDGE AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
WHAT is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These questions are common to religion, philo­sophy, and higher poetry. But the kind of knowledge that poetic inspiration brings is essentially individual in its character; it is figurative, vague, and indefinite. Religion, in its more advanced forms, rises higher than poetry. It moves from individual to society. In its attitude towards the Ultimate Reality it is opposed to the limitations of man; it enlarges his claims and holds out the prospect of nothing less than a direct vision of Reality. Is it then possible to apply the purely rational method of philosophy to religion? The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the Ultimate Reality. The essence of religion, on the other hand, is faith; and faith, like the bird, sees its “trackless way” unattended by intellect which, in the words of the great mystic poet of Islam, “only waylays the living heart of man and robs it of the invisible wealth of life that lies within.”1 Yet it cannot be denied that faith is more than mere feeling. It has something like a cognitive content, and the existence of rival parties– scholastics and mystics– in the history of religion shows that idea is a vital element in religion. Apart from this, religion on its doctrinal side, as defined by Professor Whitehead, is “a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended.”2 Now, since the transformation and guidance of man’s inner and outer life is the essential aim of religion, it is obvious that the general truths which it embodies must not remain unsettled. No one would hazard action on the basis of a doubtful principle of conduct. Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science. Science may ignore a rational metaphysics; indeed, it has ignored it so far. Religion can hardly afford to ignore the search for a reconciliation of the oppositions of experience and a justification of the environment in which humanity finds itself. That is why Professor Whitehead has acutely remarked that “the ages of faith are the ages of rationalism”.3 But to rationalize faith is not to admit the superiority of philosophy over religion. Philosophy, no doubt, has jurisdiction to judge religion, but what is to be judged is of such a nature that it will not submit to the jurisdiction of philosophy except on its own terms. While sitting in judgement on religion, philosophy cannot give religion an inferior place among its data. Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man. Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis. Nor is there any reason to suppose that thought and intuition are essentially opposed to each other. They spring up from the same root and complement each other. The one grasps Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation. Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals itself to them in accordance with their function in life. In fact, intuition, as Bergson rightly says, is only a higher kind of intellect.4 
The search for rational foundations in Islam may be regarded to have begun with the Prophet himself. His constant prayer was: “God! grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things!”5 The work of later mystics and non-mystic rationalists forms an exceedingly instructive chapter in the history of our culture, inasmuch as it reveals a longing for a coherent system of ideas, a spirit of whole-hearted devotion to truth, as well as the limitations of the age, which rendered the various theological Knowledge and Religious Experience movements in Islam less fruitful than they might have been in a different age. As we all know, Greek philosophy has been a great cultural force in the history of Islam. Yet a careful study of the Qur’an and the various schools of scholastic theology that arose under the inspiration of Greek thought disclose the remarkable fact that while Greek philosophy very much broadened the outlook of Muslim thinkers, it, on the whole, obscured their vision of the Qur’an. Socrates concentrated his attention on the human world alone. To him the proper study of man was man and not the world of plants, insects, and stars. How unlike the spirit of the Qur’an, which sees in the humble bee a recipient of Divine inspiration6 and constantly calls upon the reader to observe the perpetual change of the winds, the alternation of day and night, the clouds,7 the starry heavens,8 and the planets swimming through infinite space!9 As a true disciple of Socrates, Plato despised sense-perception which, in his view, yielded mere opinion and no real knowledge.10 How unlike the Qur’an, which regards “hearing” and “sight” as the most valuable Divine gifts11 and declares them to be accountable to God for their activity in this world.12 This is what the earlier Muslim students of the Qur’an completely missed under the spell of classical speculation. They read the Qur’an in the light of Greek thought. It took them over two hundred years to perceive– though not quite clearly–that the spirit of the Qur’an was essentially anti­classical,13 and the result of this perception was a kind of intellectual revolt, the full significance of which has not been realized even up to the present day. It was partly owing to this revolt and partly to his personal history that Ghaz.l. based religion on philosophical scepticism– a rather unsafe basis for religion and not wholly justified by the spirit of the Qur’an. 
Ghaz.l.’s chief opponent, Ibn Rushd, who defended Greek 
philosophy against the rebels, was led, through Aristotle, to what is known as the doctrine of Immortality of Active Intellect,14 a doctrine which once wielded enormous influence on the intellectual life of France and Italy,15 but which, to my mind, is entirely opposed to the view that the Qur’an takes of the value and destiny of the human ego.16 Thus Ibn Rushd lost sight of a great and fruitful idea in Islam and unwittingly helped the growth of that enervating philosophy of life which obscures man’s vision of himself, his God, and his world. The more constructive among the Ash‘arite thinkers were no doubt on the right path and anticipated some of the more modern forms of Idealism; yet, on the whole, the object of the Ash‘arite movement was simply to defend orthodox opinion with the weapons of Greek dialectic. The Mu‘tazilah, conceiving religion merely as a body of doctrines and ignoring it as a vital fact, took no notice of non-conceptual modes of approaching Reality and reduced religion to a mere system of logical concepts ending in a purely negative attitude. They failed to see that in the domain of knowledge– scientific or religious– complete independence of thought from concrete experience is not possible. 
It cannot, however, be denied that Ghaz.l.’s mission was almost apostolic like that of Kant in Germany of the eighteenth century. In Germany rationalism appeared as an ally of religion, but she soon realized that the dogmatic side of religion was incapable of demonstration. The only course open to her was to eliminate dogma from the sacred record. With the elimination of dogma came the utilitarian view of morality, and thus rationalism completed the reign of unbelief. Such was the state of theological thought in Germany when Kant appeared. His Critique of Pure Reason revealed the limitations of human reason and reduced the whole work of the rationalists to a heap of ruins. And justly has he been described as God’s greatest gift to his country. Ghaz.l.’s philosophical scepticism which, how­ever, went a little too far, virtually did the same kind of work in the world of Islam in breaking the back of that proud but shallow rationalism which moved in the same direction as pre-Kantian rationalism in Germany. There is, however, one important difference between Ghaz.l. and Kant. Kant, con­sistently with his principles, could not affirm the possibility of a knowledge of God. Ghaz.l., finding no hope in analytic thought, moved to mystic experience, and there found an independent content for religion. In this way he succeeded in securing for religion the right to exist independently of science and metaphysics. But the revelation of the total Infinite in mystic experience convinced him of the finitude and incon­clusiveness of thought and drove him to draw a line of cleavage between thought and intuition. He failed to see that thought and intuition are organically related and that thought must necessarily simulate finitude and inconclusiveness because of its alliance with serial time. The idea that thought is essentially finite, and for this reason unable to capture the Infinite, is based Knowledge and Religious Experience on a mistaken notion of the movement of thought in knowledge. It is the inadequacy of the logical understanding which finds a multiplicity of mutually repellent individualities with no prospect of their ultimate reduction to a unity that makes us sceptical about the conclusiveness of thought. In fact, the logical understanding is incapable of seeing this multiplicity as a coherent universe. Its only method is generalization based on resemblances, but its generalizations are only fictitious unities which do not affect the reality of concrete things. In its deeper movement, however, thought is capable of reaching an immanent Infinite in whose self-unfolding movement the various finite concepts are merely moments. In its essential nature, then, thought is not static; it is dynamic and unfolds its internal infinitude in time like the seed which, from the very beginning, carries within itself the organic unity of the tree as a present fact. Thought is, therefore, the whole in its dynamic self-expression, appearing to the temporal vision as a series of definite specifications which cannot be understood except by a reciprocal reference. Their meaning lies not in their self-identity, but in the larger whole of which they are the specific aspects. This larger whole is, to use a Qur’anic metaphor, a kind of “Preserved Tablet”,17 which holds up the entire undetermined possibilities of knowledge as a present reality, revealing itself in serial time as a succession of finite concepts appearing to reach a unity which is already present in them. It is in fact the presence of the total Infinite in the movement of knowledge that makes 
finite thinking possible. Both Kant and Ghaz.l. failed to see that 
thought, in the very act of knowledge, passes beyond its own finitude. The finitudes of Nature are reciprocally exclusive. Not so the finitudes of thought which is, in its essential nature, incapable of limitation and cannot remain imprisoned in the narrow circuit of its own individuality. In the wide world beyond itself nothing is alien to it. It is in its progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude. Its movement becomes possible only because of the implicit presence in its finite individuality of the infinite, which keeps alive within it the flame of aspiration and sustains it in its endless pursuit. It is a mistake to regard thought as inconclusive, for it too, in its own way, is a greeting of the finite with the infinite. 
During the last five hundred years religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary. There was a time when European thought received inspiration from the world of Islam. The most remarkable phenomenon of modern history, however, is the enormous rapidity with which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. There is nothing wrong in this movement, for European culture, on its intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam. Our only fear is that the dazzling exterior of European culture may arrest our movement and we may fail to reach the true inwardness of that culture. During all the centuries of our intellectual stupor Europe has been seriously thinking on the great problems in which the philosophers and scientists of Islam were so keenly interested. Since the Middle Ages, when the schools of Muslim theology were completed, infinite advance has taken place in the domain of human thought and experience. The extension of man’s power over Nature has given him a new faith and a fresh sense of superiority over the forces that constitute his environment. New points of view have been suggested, old problems have been re­stated in the light of fresh experience, and new problems have arisen. It seems as if the intellect of man is outgrowing its own most fundamental categories– time, space, and causality. With the advance of scientific thought even our concept of intelligibility is undergoing a change.18 The theory of Einstein has brought a new vision of the universe and suggests new ways of looking at the problems common to both religion and philosophy. No wonder then that the younger generation of Islam in Asia and Africa demand a fresh orientation of their faith. With the reawakening of Islam, therefore, it is necessary to examine, in an independent spirit, what Europe has thought and how far the conclusions reached by her can help us in the revision and, if necessary, reconstruction, of theological thought in Islam. Besides this it is not possible to ignore the generally anti-religious and especially anti-Islamic propaganda in Central Asia which has already crossed the Indian frontier. Some of the apostles of this movement are born Muslims, and one of them, Tevfik Fikret, the Turkish poet, who died only a short time ago,19 has gone to the extent of using our great poet-thinker, M.rz. ‘Abd al-Q.dir Bedil of Akbar.b.d, for the purposes of this movement. Surely, it is high time to look to the essentials of Islam. In these Knowledge and Religious Experience lectures I propose to undertake a philosophical discussion of some of the basic of ideas of Islam, in the hope that this may, at least, be helpful towards a proper understanding of the meaning of Islam as a message to humanity. Also with a view to give a kind of ground-outline for further discussion, I propose, in this preliminary lecture, to consider the character of knowledge and religious experience. 
The main purpose of the Qur’an is to awaken in man the higher consciousness of his manifold relations with God and the universe. It is in view of this essential aspect of the Qur’anic teaching that Goethe, while making a general review of Islam as an educational force, said to Eckermann: “You see this teaching never fails; with all our systems, we cannot go, and generally speaking no man can go, farther than that.”20 The problem of Islam was really suggested by the mutual conflict, and at the same time mutual attraction, presented by the two forces of religion and civilization. The same problem confronted early Christianity. The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insight of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through. 
Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man’s relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within. It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal. With Islam the ideal and the real are not two opposing forces which cannot be reconciled. The life of the ideal consists, not in a total breach with the real which would tend to shatter the organic wholeness of life into painful oppositions, but in the perpetual endeavour of the ideal to appropriate the real with a view eventually to absorb it, to convert it into itself and illuminate its whole being. It is the sharp opposition between the subject and the object, the mathematical without and the biological within, that impressed Christianity. Islam, however, faces the opposition with a view to overcome it. This essential difference in looking at a fundamental relation determines the respective attitudes of these great religions towards the problem of human life in its present surroundings. Both demand the affirmation of the spiritual self in man, with this difference only that Islam, recognizing the contact of the ideal with the real, says “yes” to the world of matter21 and points the way to master it with a view to discover a basis for a realistic regulation of life. 
What, then, according to the Qur’an, is the character of the universe which we inhabit? In the first place, it is not the result of a mere creative sport: 
We have not created the Heavens and the earth and whatever is between them in sport. We have not created them but for a serious end: but the greater part of them understand it not. 22 
It is a reality to be reckoned with: 
Verily in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and in the succession of the night and of the day, are signs for men of understanding; who, standing and sitting and reclining, bear God in mind and reflect on the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and say: “Oh, our Lord! Thou hast not created this in vain (3: 190­91). Again the universe is so constituted that it is capable of 
extension: (God) adds to His creation what He wills (35: 1).23 It is not a block universe, a finished product, immobile and incapable of change. Deep in its inner being lies, perhaps, the dream of a new birth: 
Say– go through the earth and see how God hath brought forth all 
creation; hereafter will He give it another birth (29:20). 
In fact, this mysterious swing and impulse of the universe, 

this noiseless swim of time which appears to us, human beings, as the movement of day and night, is regarded by the Qur’an as one of the greatest signs of God: 
God causeth the day and the night to take their turn. Verily in this is teaching for men of insight (24: 44). 
This is why the Prophet said: “Do not vilify time, for time is God.”24 And this immensity of time and space carries in it the promise of a complete subjugation by man whose duty is to 
Knowledge and Religious Experience reflect on the signs of God, and thus discover the means of realizing his conquest of Nature as an actual fact: 
See ye not how God hath put under you all that is in the Heavens, and all that is on the earth, and hath been bounteous to you of His favours both in relation to the seen and the unseen? (31: 20). And He hath subjected to you the night and the day, the sun and the moon, and the stars too are subject to you by His behest; verily in this are signs for those who understand. (16: 12). Such being the nature and promise of the universe, what is 
the nature of man whom it confronts on all sides? Endowed with a most suitable mutual adjustment of faculties he discovers himself down below in the scale of life, surrounded on all sides by the forces of obstruction: 
That of goodliest fabric We created man, then brought him down to the lowest of the low (95: 4-5). 
And how do we find him in this environment? A “restless”25 being engrossed in his ideals to the point of forgetting everything else, capable of inflicting pain on himself in his ceaseless quest after fresh scopes for self-expression. With all his failings he is superior to Nature, inasmuch as he carries within him a great trust which, in the words of the Qur’an, the heavens and the earth and the mountains refused to carry: 
Verily We proposed to the Heavens and to the earth and to the mountains to receive the trust (of personality), but they refused the burden and they feared to receive it. Man alone undertook to bear it, but hath proved unjust, senseless! (33: 72). 
His career, no doubt, has a beginning, but he is destined, perhaps, to become a permanent element in the constitution of being: 
Thinketh man that he shall be thrown away as an object of no use? Was he not a mere embryo? Then he became thick blood of which God formed him and fashioned him, and made him twain, male and female. Is not He powerful enough to quicken the dead? (75: 36-40). 
When attracted by the forces around him, man has the power to shape and direct them; when thwarted by them, he has the capacity to build a much vaster world in the depths of his own inner being, wherein he discovers sources of infinite joy and inspiration. Hard his lot and frail his being, like a rose-leaf, yet no form of reality is so powerful, so inspiring, and so beautiful as the spirit of man! Thus in his inmost being man, as conceived by the Qur’an, is a creative activity, an ascending spirit who, in his onward march, rises from one state of being to another: 
But, Nay! I swear by the sunset’s redness and by the night and its gatherings and by the moon when at her full, that from state to state shall ye be surely carried onward (84: 16-19). It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the 
universe around him and to shape his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to mould its forces to his own ends and purposes. And in this process of progressive change God becomes a co-worker with him, provided man takes the initiative: 
Verily God will not change the condition of men, till they change what is in themselves (13: 11). If he does not take the initiative, if he does not evolve the 
inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inward push of advancing life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter. But his life and the onward march of his spirit depend on the establishment of connexions with the reality that confronts him26 It is knowledge that establishes these connexions, and knowledge is sense-perception elaborated by understanding. 
When thy Lord said to the Angels, “Verily I am about to place one in my stead on earth”, they said, “Wilt Thou place there one who will do ill and shed blood, when we celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy holiness?” God said, “Verily I know what ye know not!” And He taught Adam the names of all things, and then set them before the Angels, and said, “Tell me the names of these if ye are endowed with wisdom”. They said, “Praise be to Thee! We have no knowledge but what Thou hast given us to know. Thou art the Knowing, the Wise”. He said, “O Adam, inform them of the names”. And when he had informed them of the names, God said, “Did I not say to you that I know the hidden things of the Heavens and of the earth, and that I know what ye bring to light and what ye hide?” (2: 30-33). The point of these verses is that man is endowed with the 
faculty of naming things, that is to say, forming concepts of them, and forming concepts of them is capturing them. Thus the character of man’s knowledge is conceptual, and it is with the weapon of this conceptual knowledge that man approaches the observable aspect of Reality. The one noteworthy feature of the Qur’an is the emphasis that it lays on this observable aspect of Reality. Let me quote here a few verses: 
Assuredly, in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth; and in the alternation of night and day; and in the ships which pass through the sea with what is useful to man; and in the rain which God sendeth down from Heaven, giving life to the earth after its death, and scattering over it all kinds of cattle; and in the change of the winds, and in the clouds that are made to do service between the Heavens and the earth– are signs for those who “understand” (2: 164). 
And it is He Who hath ordained for you that ye may be guided thereby in the darkness of the land and of the sea! Clear have We made Our signs to “men of knowledge”. And it is He Who hath created you of one breath, and hath provided you an abode and resting place (in the womb). Clear have We made Our signs for “men of insight”! And it is He Who sendeth down rain from Heaven: and We bring forth by it the buds of all the plants and from them bring We forth the green foliage, and the close-growing grain, and palm trees with sheaths of clustering dates, and gardens of grapes, and the olive, and the pomegranate, like and unlike. Look you on their fruits when they ripen. Truly herein are signs unto people who believe (6: 97-99). 
Hast thou not seen how thy Lord lengthens out the shadow? Had He pleased He had made it motionless. But We made the sun to be its guide; then draw it in unto Us with easy in drawing (25: 45-46). 
Can they not look up to the clouds, how they are created; and to the Heaven how it is upraised; and to the mountains how they are rooted, and to the earth how it is outspread? (88: 17-20). 
And among His signs are the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and your variety of tongues and colours. Herein truly are signs for all men (30: 22). No doubt, the immediate purpose of the Qur’an in this 
reflective observation of Nature is to awaken in man the consciousness of that of which Nature is regarded a symbol. But the point to note is the general empirical attitude of the Qur’an which engendered in its followers a feeling of reverence for the actual and ultimately made them the founders of modern science. It was a great point to awaken the empirical spirit in an age which renounced the visible as of no value in men’s search after God. According to the Qur’an, as we have seen before, the universe has a serious end. Its shifting actualities force our being into fresh formations. The intellectual effort to overcome the obstruction offered by it, besides enriching and amplifying our life, sharpens our insight, and thus prepares us for a more masterful insertion into subtler aspects of human experience. It is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which trains us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal. Reality lives in its own appearances; and such a being as man, who has to maintain his life in an obstructing environment, cannot afford to ignore the visible. The Qur’an opens our eyes to the great fact of change, through the appreciation and control of which alone it is possible to build a durable civilization. The cultures of Asia and, in fact, of the whole ancient world failed, because they approached Reality exclusively from within and moved from within outwards. This procedure gave them theory without power, and on mere theory no durable civilization can be based. 
There is no doubt that the treatment of religious experience, as a source of Divine knowledge, is historically prior to the treatment of other regions of human experience for the same purpose. The Qur’an, recognizing that the empirical attitude is an indispensable stage in the spiritual life of humanity, attaches equal importance to all the regions of human experience as yielding knowledge of the Ultimate Reality which reveals its symbols both within and without.27 One indirect way of establishing connexions with the reality that confronts us is reflective observation and control of its symbols as they reveal themselves to sense-perception; the other way is direct association with that reality as it reveals itself within. The naturalism of the Qur’an is only a recognition of the fact that man is related to nature, and this relation, in view of its possibility as a means of controlling her forces, must be exploited not in the interest of unrighteous desire for domination, but in the nobler interest of a free upward movement of spiritual life. In the interests of securing a complete vision of Reality, therefore, sense-perception must be supplemented by the perception of what the Qur’an describes as Fu’.d or Qalb, i.e. heart: 
God hath made everything which He hath created most good; and began the creation of man with clay; then ordained his progeny from germs of life, from sorry water; then shaped him, and breathed of His spirit unto him, and gave you hearing and seeing and heart: what little thanks do ye return? (32: 7-9). 
Knowledge and Religious Experience The “heart” is a kind of inner intuition or insight which, in 
the beautiful words of R.m., feeds on the rays of the sun and 
brings us into contact with aspects of Reality other than those open to sense-perception.28 It is, according to the Qur’an, something which “sees”, and its reports, if properly interpreted, are never false.29 We must not, however, regard it as a mysterious special faculty; it is rather a mode of dealing with Reality in which sensation, in the physiological sense of the word, does not play any part.30 Yet the vista of experience thus opened to us is as real and concrete as any other experience. To describe it as psychic, mystical, or supernatural does not detract from its value as experience. To the primitive man all experience was super-natural. Prompted by the immediate necessities of life he was driven to interpret his experience, and out of this interpretation gradually emerged “Nature” in our sense of the word. The total-Reality, which enters our awareness and appears on interpretation as an empirical fact, has other ways of invading our consciousness and offers further opportunities of interpretation. The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional. The facts of religious ex­perience are facts among other facts of human experience and, in the capacity of yielding knowledge by interpretation, one fact is as good as another. Nor is there anything irreverent in critically examining this region of human experience. The Prophet of Islam was the first critical observer of psychic phenomena. 
Bukh.r. and other traditionists have given us a full account of his observation of the psychic Jewish youth, Ibn Sayy.d, whose 
ecstatic moods attracted the Prophet’s notice.31 He tested him, questioned him, and examined him in his various moods. Once he hid himself behind the stem of a tree to listen to his mutterings. The boy’s mother, however, warned him of the approach of the Prophet. Thereupon the boy immediately shook off his mood and the Prophet remarked: “If she had let him alone the thing would have been cleared up.”32 The Prophet’s companions, some of whom were present during the course of this first psychological observation in the history of Islam, and even later traditionists, who took good care to record this important fact, entirely misunderstood the significance of his attitude and interpreted it in their own innocent manner. Professor Macdonald, who seems to have no idea of the fundamental psychological difference between the mystic and the prophetic consciousness, finds “humour enough in this picture of one prophet trying to investigate another after the method of the Society for Psychical Research.”33 A better appreciation of the spirit of the Qur’an which, as I will show in a subsequent lecture,34 initiated the cultural movement terminat­ing in the birth of the modern empirical attitude, would have led the Professor to see something remarkably suggestive in the Prophet’s observation of the psychic Jew. However, the first Muslim to see the meaning and value of the Prophet’s attitude 
was Ibn Khald.n, who approached the content of mystic 
consciousness in a more critical spirit and very nearly reached the modern hypothesis of subliminal selves.35 As Professor 
Macdonald says, Ibn Khald.n “had some most interesting 
psychological ideas, and that he would probably have been in close sympathy with Mr. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.”36 Modern psychology has only recently begun to realize the importance of a careful study of the contents of mystic consciousness, and we are not yet in possession of a really effective scientific method to analyze the contents of non-rational modes of consciousness. With the time at my disposal it is not possible to undertake an extensive inquiry into the history and the various degrees of mystic consciousness in point of richness and vividness. All that I can do is to offer a few general observations only on the main characteristics of mystic experience. 
1. The first point to note is the immediacy of this experience. In this respect it does not differ from other levels of human experience which supply data for knowledge. All experience is immediate. As regions of normal experience are subject to interpretation of sense-data for our knowledge of the external world, so the region of mystic experience is subject to interpretation for our knowledge of God. The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience. 37 
2. The second point is the unanalysable wholeness of mystic 
Knowledge and Religious Experience experience. When I experience the table before me, innumerable data of experience merge into the single experience of the table. Out of this wealth of data I select those that fall into a certain order of space and time and round them off in reference to the table. In the mystic state, however vivid and rich it may be, thought is reduced to a minimum and such an analysis is not possible. But this difference of the mystic state from the ordinary rational consciousness does not mean discontinuance with the normal consciousness, as Professor William James erroneously thought. In either case it is the same Reality which is operating on us. The ordinary rational consciousness, in view of our practical need of adaptation to our environment, takes that Reality piecemeal, selecting successively isolated sets of stimuli for response. The mystic state brings us into contact with the total passage of Reality in which all the diverse stimuli merge into one another and form a single unanalysable unity in which the ordinary distinction of subject and object does not exist. 
3. The third point to note is that to the mystic the mystic state is a moment of intimate association with a Unique Other Self, transcending, encompassing, and momentarily suppressing the private personality of the subject of experience. Considering its content the mystic state is highly objective and cannot be regarded as a mere retirement into the mists of pure subjectivity. But you will ask me how immediate experience of God, as an Independent Other Self, is at all possible. The mere fact that the mystic state is passive does not finally prove the veritable “otherness” of the Self experienced. This question arises in the mind because we assume, without criticism, that our knowledge of the external world through sense-perception is the type of all knowledge. If this were so, we could never be sure of the reality of our own self. However, in reply to it I suggest the analogy of our daily social experience. How do we know other minds in our social intercourse? It is obvious that we know our own self and Nature by inner reflection and sense-perception respectively. We possess no sense for the experience of other minds. The only ground of my knowledge of a conscious being before me is the physical movements similar to my own from which I infer the presence of another conscious being. Or we may say, after Professor Royce, that our fellows are known to be real because they respond to our signals and thus constantly supply the necessary supplement to our own fragmentary meanings. 
Response, no doubt, is the test of the presence of a conscious self, and the Qur’an also takes the same view: 
And your Lord saith, call me and I respond to your call (40: 60). And when My servants ask thee concerning Me, then I am nigh unto them and answer the cry of him that crieth unto Me (2: 186). It is clear that whether we apply the physical criterion or the 
non-physical and more adequate criterion of Royce, in either case our knowledge of other minds remains something like inferential only. Yet we feel that our experience of other minds is immediate and never entertain any doubt as to the reality of our social experience. I do not, however, mean, at the present stage of our inquiry, to build on the implications of our knowledge of other minds, an idealistic argument in favour of the reality of a Comprehensive Self. All that I mean to suggest is that the immediacy of our experience in the mystic state is not without a parallel. It has some sort of resemblance to our normal experience and probably belongs to the same category. 
4. Since the quality of mystic experience is to be directly experienced, it is obvious that it cannot be communicated.38 Mystic states are more like feeling than thought. The interpretation which the mystic or the prophet puts on the content of his religious consciousness can be conveyed to others in the form of propositions, but the content itself cannot be so transmitted. Thus in the following verses of the Qur’an it is the psychology and not the content of the experience that is given: 
It is not for man that God should speak to him, but by vision or 
from behind a veil; or He sendeth a messenger to reveal by His 
permission what He will: for He is Exalted, Wise (42: 51). 

By the star when it setteth, 
Your compatriot erreth not, nor is he led astray. 
Neither speaketh he from mere impulse. 
The Qur’an is no other than the revelation revealed to him: 
One strong in power taught it him, 
Endowed with wisdom with even balance stood he 
In the highest part of the horizon: Then came he nearer and approached, 
And was at the distance of two bows or even closer 
And he revealed to the servant of God what he revealed: 
His heart falsified not what he saw: 
What! will ye then dispute with him as to what he saw? 
He had seen him also another time 

Near the Sidrah tree which marks the boundary: 
Near which is the garden of repose: 
When the Sidrah tree was covered with what covered it: His eye 
turned not aside, nor did it wander: 
For he saw the greatest of the signs of the Lord (53: 1-18). 
The incommunicability of mystic experience is due to the fact 

that it is essentially a matter of inarticulate feeling, untouched by discursive intellect. It must, however, be noted that mystic feeling, like all feeling, has a cognitive element also; and it is, I believe, because of this cognitive element that it lends itself to the form of idea. In fact, it is the nature of feeling to seek expression in thought. It would seem that the two– feeling and idea– are the non-temporal and temporal aspects of the same unit of inner experience. But on this point I cannot do better than quote Professor Hocking39 who has made a remarkably keen study of feeling in justification of an intellectual view of the content of religious consciousness: 
What is that other-than-feeling in which feeling may end? I answer, consciousness of an object. Feeling is instability of an entire conscious self: and that which will restore the stability of this self lies not within its own border but beyond it. Feeling is outward-pushing, as idea is outward-reporting: and no feeling is so blind as to have no idea of its own object. As a feeling possesses the mind, there also possesses the mind, as an integral part of that feeling, some idea of the kind of thing which will bring it to rest. A feeling without a direction is as impossible as an activity without a direction: and a direction implies some objective. There are vague states of consciousness in which we seem to be wholly without direction; but in such cases it is remarkable that feeling is likewise in abeyance. For example, I may be dazed by a blow, neither realizing what has happened nor suffering any pain, and yet quite conscious that something has occurred: the experience waits an instant in the vestibule of consciousness, not as feeling but purely as fact, until idea has touched it and defined a course of response. At that same moment, it is felt as painful. If we are right, feeling is quite as much an objective consciousness as is idea: it refers always to something beyond the present self and has no existence save in directing the self toward that object in whose presence its own career must end! Thus you will see that it is because of this essential nature of 
feeling that while religion starts with feeling, it has never, in its history, taken itself as a matter of feeling alone and has constantly striven after metaphysics. The mystic’s condemnation of intellect as an organ of knowledge does not really find any justification in the history of religion. But Professor Hocking’s passage just quoted has a wider scope than mere justification of idea in religion. The organic relation of feeling and idea throws light on the old theological controversy about verbal revelation which once gave so much trouble to Muslim religious thinkers.40 Inarticulate feeling seeks to fulfil its destiny in idea which, in its turn, tends to develop out of itself its own visible garment. It is no mere metaphor to say that idea and word both simultaneously emerge out of the womb of feeling, though logical understanding cannot but take them in a temporal order and thus create its own difficulty by regarding them as mutually isolated. There is a sense in which the word is also revealed. 
5. The mystic’s intimate association with the eternal which gives him a sense of the unreality of serial time does not mean a complete break with serial time. The mystic state, in respect of its uniqueness, remains in some way related to common experience. This is clear from the fact that the mystic state soon fades away, though it leaves a deep sense of authority after it has passed away. Both the mystic and the prophet return to the normal levels of experience, but with this difference that the return of the prophet, as I will show later, may be fraught with infinite meaning for mankind. 
For the purposes of knowledge, then, the region of mystic experience is as real as any other region of human experience and cannot be ignored merely because it cannot be traced back to sense-perception. Nor is it possible to undo the spiritual value of the mystic state by specifying the organic conditions which appear to determine it. Even if the postulate of modern psychology as to the interrelation of body and mind is assumed to be true, it is illogical to discredit the value of the mystic state as a revelation of truth. Psychologically speaking, all states, whether their content is religious or non-religious, are organically determined.41 The scientific form of mind is as much organically determined as the religious. Our judgement as to the creations of genius is not at all determined or even remotely affected by what our psychologists may say regarding its organic conditions. A certain kind of temperament may be a necessary condition for a certain kind of receptivity; but the antecedent condition cannot be regarded as the whole truth about the character of what is received. The truth is that the organic causation of our mental states has nothing to do with the criteria by which we judge them to be superior or inferior in point of value. “Among the visions and messages”, says Professor William James, 42 
some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end it had come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. 
The problem of Christian mysticism alluded to by Professor James has been in fact the problem of all mysticism. The demon in his malice does counterfeit experiences which creep into the circuit of the mystic state. As we read in the Qur’an: 
We have not sent any Apostle or Prophet43 before thee among whose desires Satan injected not some wrong desire, but God shall bring to naught that which Satan had suggested. Thus shall God affirm His revelations, for God is Knowing and Wise (22: 52). 
And it is in the elimination of the satanic from the Divine that the followers of Freud have done inestimable service to religion; though I cannot help saying that the main theory of this newer psychology does not appear to me to be supported by any adequate evidence. If our vagrant impulses assert themselves in our dreams, or at other times we are not strictly ourselves, it does not follow that they remain imprisoned in a kind of lumber room behind the normal self. The occasional invasion of these suppressed impulses on the region of our normal self tends more to show the temporary disruption of our habitual system of responses rather than their perpetual presence in some dark corner of the mind. However, the theory is briefly this. During the process of our adjustment to our environment we are exposed to all sorts of stimuli. Our habitual responses to these stimuli gradually fall into a relatively fixed system, constantly growing in complexity by absorbing some and rejecting other impulses which do not fit in with our permanent system of responses. The rejected impulses recede into what is called the “unconscious region” of the mind, and there wait for a suitable opportunity to assert themselves and take their revenge on the focal self. They may disturb our plans of action, distort our thought, build our dreams and phantasies, or carry us back to forms of primitive behaviour which the evolutionary process has left far behind. Religion, it is said, is a pure fiction created by these repudiated impulses of mankind with a view to find a kind of fairyland for free unobstructed movement. Religious beliefs and dogmas, according to the theory, are no more than merely primitive theories of Nature, whereby mankind has tried to redeem Reality from its elemental ugliness and to show it off as something nearer to the heart’s desire than the facts of life would warrant. That there are religions and forms of art, which provide a kind of cowardly escape from the facts of life, I do not deny. All that I contend is that this is not true of all religions. No doubt, religious beliefs and dogmas have a metaphysical significance; but it is obvious that they are not interpretations of those data of experience which are the subject of the sciences of Nature. Religion is not physics or chemistry seeking an explanation of Nature in terms of causation; it really aims at interpreting a totally different region of human experience– religious experience– the data of which cannot be reduced to the data of any other science. In fact, it must be said in justice to religion that it insisted on the necessity of concrete experience in religious life long before science learnt to do so.44 The conflict between the two is due not to the fact that the one is, and the other is not, based on concrete experience. Both seek concrete experience as a point of departure. Their conflict is due to the misapprehension that both interpret the same data of experience. We forget that religion aims at reaching the real significance of a special variety of human experience. 
Nor is it possible to explain away the content of religious consciousness by attributing the whole thing to the working of the sex-impulse. The two forms of consciousness– sexual and religious– are often hostile or, at any rate, completely different to each other in point of their character, their aim, and the kind of conduct they generate. The truth is that in a state of religious passion we know a factual reality in some sense outside the Knowledge and Religious Experience narrow circuit of our personality. To the psychologist religious passion necessarily appears as the work of the subconscious because of the intensity with which it shakes up the depths of our being. In all knowledge there is an element of passion, and the object of knowledge gains or loses in objectivity with the rise and fall in the intensity of passion. That is most real to us which stirs up the entire fabric of our personality. As Professor Hocking pointedly puts it: 45 
If ever upon the stupid day-length time-span of any self or saint either, some vision breaks to roll his life and ours into new channels, it can only be because that vision admits into his soul some trooping invasion of the concrete fullness of eternity. Such vision doubtless means subconscious readiness and subconscious resonance too,– but the expansion of the unused air-cells does not argue that we have ceased to breathe the outer air:– the very opposite! 
A purely psychological method, therefore, cannot explain religious passion as a form of knowledge. It is bound to fail in the case of our newer psychologists as it did fail in the case of Locke and Hume. 
The foregoing discussion, however, is sure to raise an important question in your mind. Religious experience, I have tried to maintain, is essentially a state of feeling with a cognitive aspect, the content of which cannot be communicated to others, except in the form of a judgement. Now when a judgement which claims to be the interpretation of a certain region of human experience, not accessible to me, is placed before me for my assent, I am entitled to ask, what is the guarantee of its truth? Are we in possession of a test which would reveal its validity? If personal experience had been the only ground for acceptance of a judgement of this kind, religion would have been the possession of a few individuals only. Happily we are in possession of tests which do not differ from those applicable to other forms of knowledge. These I call the intellectual test and the pragmatic test. By the intellectual test I mean critical interpretation, without any presuppositions of human experience, generally with a view to discover whether our interpretation leads us ultimately to a reality of the same character as is revealed by religious experience. The pragmatic 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 
test judges it by its fruits. The former is applied by the philosopher, the latter by the prophet. In the lecture that follows, I will apply the intellectual test. 
II 

THE PHILOSOPHIC TEST OF THE REVELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
SCHOLASTIC philosophy has put forward three arguments for the existence of God. These arguments, known as the Cosmological, the Teleological, and the Ontological, embody a real movement of thought in its quest after the Absolute. But regarded as logical proofs, I am afraid; they are open to serious criticism and further betray a rather superficial interpretation of experience. 
The cosmological argument views the world as a finite effect, and passing through a series of dependent sequences, related as causes and effects, stops at an uncaused first cause, because of the unthinkability of an infinite regress. It is, however, obvious that a finite effect can give only a finite cause, or at most an infinite series of such causes. To finish the series at a certain point, and to elevate one member of the series to the dignity of an uncaused first cause, is to set at naught the very law of causation on which the whole argument proceeds. Further, the first cause reached by the argument necessarily excludes its effect. And this means that the effect, constituting a limit to its own cause, reduces it to something finite. Again, the cause reached by the argument cannot be regarded as a necessary being for the obvious reason that in the relation of cause and effect the two terms of the relation are equally necessary to each other. Nor is the necessity of existence identical with the conceptual necessity of causation which is the utmost that this argument can prove. The argument really tries to reach the infinite by merely negating the finite. But the infinite reached by contradicting the finite is a false infinite, which neither explains itself nor the finite which is thus made to stand in opposition to the infinite. The true infinite does not exclude the finite; it embraces the finite without effacing its finitude, and explains and justifies its being. Logically speaking, then, the movement from the finite to the infinite as embodied in the cosmological argument is quite 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam illegitimate; and the argument fails in toto. The teleological argument is no better. It scrutinizes the effect with a view to discover the character of its cause. From the traces of foresight, purpose, and adaptation in nature, it infers the existence of a self-conscious being of infinite intelligence and power. At best, it gives, us a skilful external contriver working on a pre-existing dead and intractable material the elements of which are, by their own nature, incapable of orderly structures and combinations. The argument gives us a contriver only and not a creator; and even if we suppose him to be also the creator of his material, it does no credit to his wisdom to create his own difficulties by first creating intractable material, and then overcoming its resistance by the application of methods alien to its original nature. The designer regarded as external to his material must always remain limited by his material, and hence a finite designer whose limited resources compel him to overcome his difficulties after the fashion of a human mechanician. The truth is that the analogy on which the argument proceeds is of no value at all. There is really no analogy between the work of the human artificer and the phenomena of Nature. The human artificer cannot work out his plan except by selecting and isolating his materials from their natural relations and situations. Nature, however, constitutes a system of wholly interdependent members; her processes present no analogy to the architect’s work which, depending on a progressive isolation and integration of its material, can offer no resemblance to the evolution of organic wholes in Nature. The ontological argument which has been presented in various forms by various thinkers has always appealed most to the speculative mind. The Cartesian form of the argument runs thus:1 
To say that an attribute is contained in the nature or in the concept of a thing is the same as to say that the attribute is true of this thing and that it may be affirmed to be in it. But necessary existence is contained in the nature or the concept of God. Hence it may be with truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that God exists. 
Descartes supplements this argument by another. We have the idea of a perfect being in our mind. What is the source of the idea? It cannot come from Nature, for Nature exhibits nothing but change. It cannot create the idea of a perfect being. Therefore, corresponding to the idea in our mind, there must be The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience an objective counterpart which is the cause of the idea of a perfect being in our mind. This argument is somewhat of the nature of the cosmological argument which I have already criticized. But whatever may be the form of the argument, it is clear that the conception of existence is no proof of objective existence. As in Kant’s criticism of this argument the notion of three hundred dollars in my mind cannot prove that I have them in my pocket.2 All that the argument proves is that the idea of a perfect being includes the idea of his existence. Between the idea of a perfect being in my mind and the objective reality of that being there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over by a transcendental act of thought. The argument, as stated, is in fact a petitio principii:3 for it takes for granted the very point in question, i.e. the transition from the logical to the real. I hope I have made it clear to you that the ontological and the teleological arguments, as ordinarily stated, carry us nowhere. And the reason of their failure is that they look upon “thought” as an agency working on things from without. This view of thought gives us a mere mechanician in the one case, and creates an unbridgeable gulf between the ideal and the real in the other. It is, however, possible to take thought not as a principle which organizes and integrates its material from the outside, but as a potency which is formative of the very being of its material. Thus regarded thought or idea is not alien to the original nature of things; it is their ultimate ground and constitutes the very essence of their being, infusing itself in them from the very beginning of their career and inspiring their onward march to a self-determined end. But our present situation necessitates the dualism of thought and being. Every act of human knowledge bifurcates what might on proper inquiry turn out to be a unity into a self that knows and a confronting “other” that is known. That is why we are forced to regard the object that confronts the self as something existing in its own right, external to and independent of the self whose act of knowledge makes no difference to the object known. The true significance of the ontological and the teleological arguments will appear only if we are able to show that the human situation is not final and that thought and being are ultimately one. This is possible only if we carefully examine and interpret experience, following the clue furnished by the Qur’an which regards experience within and without as symbolic of a reality described by it,4 as “the First 
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam and the Last, the Visible and the Invisible.”5 This I propose to do in the present lecture. Now experience, as unfolding itself in time, presents three main levels– the level of matter, the level of life, and the level of mind and consciousness– the subject-matter of physics, biology, and psychology, respectively. Let us first turn our attention to matter. In order exactly to appreciate the position of modern physics it is necessary to understand clearly what we mean by matter. Physics, as an empirical science, deals with the facts of experience, i.e. sense-experience. The physicist begins and ends with sensible phenomena, without which it is impossible for him to verify his theories. He may postulate imperceptible entities, such as atoms; but he does so because he cannot otherwise explain his sense-experience. Thus physics studies the material world, that is to say, the world revealed by the senses. The mental processes involved in this study, and similarly religious and aesthetic experience, though part of the total range of experience, are excluded from the scope of physics for the obvious reason that physics is restricted to the study of the material world, by which we mean the world of things we perceive. But when I ask you what are the things you perceive in the material world, you will, of course, mention the familiar things around you, e.g. earth, sky, mountains, chairs, tables, etc. When I further ask you what exactly you perceive of these things, you will answer– their qualities. It is clear that in answering such a question we are really putting an interpre­tation on the evidence of our senses. The interpretation consists in making a distinction between the thing and its qualities. This really amounts to a theory of matter, i.e. of the nature of sense-data, their relation to the perceiving mind and their ultimate causes. The substance of this theory is as follows: 6 The sense objects (colours, sounds, etc.) are states of the perceiver’s mind, and as such excluded from nature regarded as something objective. For this reason they cannot be in any proper sense qualities of physical things. When I say, “The sky is blue”, it can only mean that the sky produces a blue sensation in my mind, and not that the colour blue is a quality found in the sky. As mental states they are impressions, that is to say, they are effects produced in us. The cause of these effects is matter, or material things acting through our sense organs, nerves, and brain on our mind. This physical cause acts by contact or 
impact; hence it must possess the qualities of shape, size, solidity 
and resistance. 
It was the philosopher Berkeley who first undertook to refute the theory of matter as the unknown cause of our sensations.7 In our own times Professor Whitehead– an eminent mathematician and scientist– has conclusively shown that the traditional theory of materialism is wholly untenable. It is obvious that, on the theory, colours, sounds, etc., are subjective states only, and form no part of Nature. What enters the eye and the ear is not colour or sound, but invisible ether waves and inaudible air waves. Nature is not what we know her to be; our perceptions are illusions and cannot be regarded as genuine disclosures of Nature, which, according to the theory, is bifurcated into mental impressions, on the one hand, and the unverifiable, imperceptible entities producing these impressions, on the other. If physics constitutes a really coherent and genuine knowledge of perceptively known objects, the traditional theory of matter must be rejected for the obvious reason that it reduces the evidence of our senses, on which alone the physicist, as observer and experimenter, must rely, to the mere impressions of the observer’s mind. Between Nature and the observer of Nature, the theory creates a gulf which he is compelled to bridge over by resorting to the doubtful hypothesis of an imperceptible something, occupying an absolute space like a thing in a receptacle and causing our sensation by some kind of impact. In the words of Professor Whitehead, the theory reduces one-half of Nature to a “dream” and the other half to a “conjecture”.8 Thus physics, finding it necessary to criticize its own foundations, has eventually found reason to break its own idol, and the empirical attitude which appeared to necessitate scientific materialism has finally ended in a revolt against matter. Since objects, then, are not subjective states caused by something imperceptible called matter, they are genuine phenomena which constitute the very substance of Nature and which we know as they are in Nature. But the concept of matter has received the greatest blow from the hand of Einstein– another eminent physicist, whose discoveries have laid the foundation of a far-reaching revolution in the entire domain of human thought. Mr. Russell says:9 
The theory of Relativity by merging time into space-time has 
damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of the philosophers. Matter, for common sense, is 
something which persists in time and moves in space. But for 
modern relativity-physics this view is no longer tenable. A piece of 
matter has become not a persistent thing with varying states, but a 
system of inter-related events. The old solidity is gone, and with it 
the characteristics that to the materialist made matter seem more 
real than fleeting thoughts. 
According to Professor Whitehead, therefore, Nature is not a static fact situated in an a-dynamic void, but a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow which thought cuts up into isolated immobilities out of whose mutual relations arise the concepts of space and time. Thus we see how modern science utters its agreement with Berkeley’s criticism which it once regarded as an attack on its very foundation. The scientific view of Nature as pure materiality is associated with the Newtonian view of space as an absolute void in which things are situated. This attitude of science has, no doubt, ensured its speedy progress; but the bifurcation of a total experience into two opposite domains of mind and matter has today forced it, in view of its own domestic difficulties, to consider the problems which, in the beginning of its career, it completely ignored. The criticism of the foundations of the mathematical sciences has fully disclosed that the hypothesis of a pure materiality, an enduring stuff situated in an absolute space, is unworkable. Is space an independent void in which things are situated and which would remain intact if all things were withdrawn? The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno approached the problem of space through the question of movement in space. His arguments for the unreality of movement are well known to the students of philosophy, and ever since his days the problem has persisted in the history of thought and received the keenest attention from successive generations of thinkers. Two of these arguments may be noted here.10 Zeno, who took space to be infinitely divisible, argued that movement in space is impossible. Before the moving body can reach the point of its destination it must pass through half the space intervening between the point of start and the point of destination; and before it can pass through that half it must travel through the half of the half; and so on to infinity. We cannot move from one point of space to another without passing through an infinite number of points in the intervening space. But it is impossible to pass through an 
The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience infinity of points in a finite time. He further argued that the flying arrow does not move, because at any time during the course of its flight it is at rest in some point of space. Thus Zeno held that movement is only a deceptive appearance and that Reality is one and immutable. The unreality of movement means the unreality of an independent space. Muslim thinkers of the school of al-Ash‘ar. did not believe in the infinite divisibility of space and time. With them space, time, and motion are made up of points and instants which cannot be further subdivided. Thus they proved the possibility of movement on the assumption that infinitesimals do exist; for if there is a limit to the divisibility of space and time, movement from one point of space to another point is possible in a finite time.11 Ibn Hazm, however, rejected the Ash‘arite notion of infinitesimals,12 and modern mathematics has confirmed his view. The Ash‘arite argument, therefore, cannot logically resolve the paradox of Zeno. Of modern thinkers the French philosopher Bergson and the British mathematician Bertrand Russell have tried to refute Zeno’s arguments from their respective standpoints. To Bergson movement, as true change, is the fundamental Reality. The paradox of Zeno is due to a wrong apprehension of space and time which are regarded by Bergson only as intellectual views of movement. It is not possible to develop here the argument of Bergson without a fuller treatment of the metaphysical concept of life on which the whole argument is based.13 Bertrand Russell’s argument proceeds on Cantor’s theory of mathematical continuity14 which he looks upon as one of the most important discoveries of modern mathematics.15 Zeno’s argument is obviously based on the assumption that space and time consist of infinite number of points and instants. On this assumption it is easy to argue that since between two points the moving body will be out of place, motion is impossible, for there is no place for it to take place. Cantor’s discovery shows that space and time are continuous. Between any two points in space there is an infinite number of points, and in an infinite series no two points are next to each other. The infinite divisibility of space and time means the compactness of the points in the series; it does not mean that points are mutually isolated in the sense of having a gap between one another. Russell’s answer to Zeno, then, is as follows:16 
Zeno asks how can you go from one position at one moment to the next position at the next moment without in the transition being at no position at no moment? The answer is that there is no next position to any position, no next moment to any moment because between any two there is always another. If there were, infinitesimals movement would be impossible, but there are none. Zeno therefore is right in saying that the arrow is at rest at every moment of its flight, wrong in inferring that therefore it does not move, for there is a one-one correspondence in a movement between the infinite series of positions and the infinite series of instants. According to this doctrine, then it is possible to affirm the reality of space, time, and movement, and yet avoid the paradox in Zeno’s arguments. Thus Bertrand Russell proves the reality of movement on the 
basis of Cantor’s theory of continuity. The reality of movement means the independent reality of space and the objectivity of Nature. But the identity of continuity and the infinite divisibility of space is no solution of the difficulty. Assuming that there is a one-one correspondence between the infinite multiplicity of instants in a finite interval of time and an infinite multiplicity of points in a finite portion of space, the difficulty arising from the divisibility remains the same. The mathematical conception of continuity as infinite series applies not to movement regarded as an act, but rather to the picture of movement as viewed from the outside. The act of movement, i.e. movement as lived and not as thought, does not admit of any divisibility. The flight of the arrow observed as a passage in space is divisible, but its flight regarded as an act, apart from its realization in space, is one and incapable of partition into a multiplicity. In partition lies its destruction. 
With Einstein space is real, but relative to the observer. He rejects the Newtonian concept of an absolute space. The object observed is variable; it is relative to the observer; its mass, shape, and size change as the observer’s position and speed change. Movement and rest, too, are relative to the observer. There is, therefore, no such thing as a self-subsistent materiality of classical physics. It is, however, necessary here to guard against a misunderstanding. The use of the word “observer” in this connexion has misled Wildon Carr into the view that the Theory of Relativity inevitably leads to Monadistic Idealism. It is true that according to the theory the shapes, sizes, and durations of phenomena are not absolute. But as Professor Nunn points out, The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience the space-time frame does not depend on the observer’s mind; it depends on the point of the material universe to which his body is attached. In fact, the “observer” can be easily replaced by a recording apparatus.17 Personally, I believe that the ultimate character of Reality is spiritual: but in order to avoid a widespread misunder­standing it is necessary to point out that Einstein’s theory, which, as a scientific theory, deals only with the structure of things, throws no light on the ultimate nature of things which possess that structure. The philosophical value of the theory is twofold. First, it destroys, not the objectivity of Nature, but the view of substance as simple location in space– a view which led to materialism in Classical Physics. “Substance” for modern Relativity-Physics is not a persistent thing with variable states, but a system of interrelated events. In Whitehead’s presentation of the theory the notion of “matter” is entirely replaced by the notion of “organism”. Secondly, the theory makes space dependent on matter. The universe, according to Einstein, is not a kind of island in an infinite space; it is finite but boundless; beyond it there is no empty space. In the absence of matter the universe would shrink to a point. Looking, however, at the theory from the standpoint that I have taken in these lectures, Einstein’s Relativity presents one great difficulty, i.e. the unreality of time. A theory which takes time to be a kind of fourth dimension of space must, it seems, regard the future as something already given, as indubitably fixed as the past.18 Time as a free creative movement has no meaning for the theory. It does not pass. Events do not happen; we simply meet them. It must not, however, be forgotten that the theory neglects certain characteristics of time as experienced by us; and it is not possible to say that the nature of time is exhausted by the characteristics which the theory does note in the interests of a systematic account of those aspects of Nature which can be mathematically treated. Nor is it possible for us laymen to understand what the real nature of Einstein’s time is. It is obvious that Einstein’s time is not Bergson’s pure duration. Nor can we regard it as serial time. Serial time is the essence of causality as defined by Kant. The cause and its effect are mutually so related that the former is chronologically prior to the latter, so that if the former is not, the latter cannot be. If mathematical time is serial time, then on the basis of the theory it is possible, by a careful choice of the velocities of the observer and the system in which a given set of events is happening, to make the effect precede its cause.19 It appears to me that time regarded as a fourth dimension of space really ceases to be time. A modern Russian writer, Ouspensky, in his book called Tertium Organum, conceives the fourth dimension to be the movement of a three-dimensional figure in a direction not contained in itself.20 Just as the movement of the point, the line and the surface in a direction not contained in them gives us the ordinary three dimensions of space, in the same way the movement of the three-dimensional figure in a direction not contained in itself must give us the fourth dimension of space. And since time is the distance separating events in order of succession and binding them in different wholes, it is obviously a distance lying in a direction not contained in the three-dimensional space. As a new dimension this distance, separating events in the order of succession, is incommensurable with the dimensions of three-dimensional space, as a year is incommensurable with St. Petersburg. It is perpendicular to all directions of three-dimensional space, and is not parallel to any of them. Elsewhere in the same book Ouspensky describes our time-sense as a misty space-sense and argues, on the basis of our psychic constitution, that to one-, two-, or three-dimensional beings the higher dimension must always appear as succession in time. This obviously means that what appears to us three-dimensional beings as time is in reality an imperfectly sensed space-dimension which in its own nature does not differ from the perfectly sensed dimensions of Euclidean space. In other words, time is not a genuine creative movement; and that what we call future events are not fresh happenings, but things already given and located in an unknown space. Yet in his search for a fresh direction, other than the three Euclidean dimensions, Ouspensky needs a real serial time, i.e. a distance separating events in the order of succession. Thus time which was needed and consequently viewed as succession for the purposes of one stage of the argument is quietly divested, at a later stage, of its serial character and reduced to what does not differ in anything from the other lines and dimensions of space. It is because of the serial character of time that Ouspensky was able to regard it as a genuinely new direction in space. If this characteristic is in reality an illusion, how can it fulfil Ouspensky’s requirements of an original dimension? 
Passing now to other levels of experience– life and consciousness. Consciousness may be imagined as a deflection from life. Its function is to provide a luminous point in order to enlighten the forward rush of life.21 It is a case of tension, a state of self concentration, by means of which life manages to shut out all memories and associations which have no bearing on a present action. It has no well-defined fringes; it shrinks and expands as the occasion demands. To describe it as an epiphenomenon of the processes of matter is to deny it as an independent activity, and to deny it as an independent activity is to deny the validity of all knowledge which is only a systematized expression of consciousness. Thus consciousness is a variety of the purely spiritual principle of life which is not a substance, but an organizing principle, a specific mode of behaviour essentially different to the behaviour of an externally worked machine. Since, however, we cannot conceive of a purely spiritual energy, except in association with a definite combination of sensible elements through which it reveals itself, we are apt to take this combination as the ultimate ground of spiritual energy. The discoveries of Newton in the sphere of matter and those of Darwin in the sphere of Natural History reveal a mechanism. All problems, it was believed, were really the problems of physics. Energy and atoms, with the properties self-existing in them, could explain everything including life, thought, will, and feeling. The concept of mechanism– a purely physical concept– claimed to be the all-embracing explanation of Nature. And the battle for and against mechanism is still being fiercely fought in the domain of Biology. The question, then, is whether the passage to Reality through the revelations of sense-perception necessarily leads to a view of Reality essentially opposed to the view that religion takes of its ultimate character. Is Natural Science finally committed to materialism? There is no doubt that the theories of science constitute trustworthy knowledge, because they are verifiable and enable us to predict and control the events of Nature. But we must not forget that what is called science is not a single systematic view of Reality. It is a mass of sectional views of Reality– fragments of a total experience which do not seem to fit together. Natural Science deals with matter, with life, and with mind; but the moment you ask the question how matter, life, and mind are mutually related, you begin to see the sectional character of the various sciences that deal with them and the inability of these sciences, taken singly, to furnish a complete answer to your question. In fact, the various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh. Nature as the subject of science is a highly artificial affair, and this artificiality is the result of that selective process to which science must subject her in the interests of precision. The moment you put the subject of science in the total of human experience it begins to disclose a different character. Thus religion, which demands the whole of Reality and for this reason must occupy a central place in any synthesis of all the data of human experience, has no reason to be afraid of any sectional views of Reality. Natural Science is by nature sectional; it cannot, if it is true to its own nature and function, set up its theory as a complete view of Reality. The concepts we use in the organization of knowledge are, therefore, sectional in character, and their application is relative to the level of experience to which they are applied. The concept of “cause”, for instance, the essential feature of which is priority to the effect, is relative to the subject-matter of physical science which studies one special kind of activity to the exclusion of other forms of activity observed by others. When we rise to the level of life and mind the concept of cause fails us, and we stand in need of concepts of a different order of thought. The action of living organisms, initiated and planned in view of an end, is totally different to causal action. The subject-matter of our inquiry, therefore, demands the concepts of “end” and “purpose”, which act from within unlike the concept of cause which is external to the effect and acts from without. No doubt, there are aspects of the activity of a living organism which it shares with other objects of Nature. In the observation of these aspects the concepts of physics and chemistry would be needed; but the behaviour of the organism is essentially a matter of inheritance and incapable of sufficient explanation in terms of molecular physics. However, the concept of mechanism has been applied to life and we have to see how far the attempt has succeeded. Unfortunately, I am not a biologist and must turn to biologists themselves for support. After telling us that the main difference between a living organism and a machine is that the former is self-maintaining and self-reproducing, J. S. Haldane says:22 
The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience It is thus evident that although we find within the living body many phenomena which, so long as we do not look closely, can be interpreted satisfactorily as physical and chemical mechanism, there are side by side other phenomena [i.e. self-maintenance and reproduction] for which the possibility of such interpretation seems to be absent. The mechanists assume that the bodily mechanisms are so constructed as to maintain, repair, and reproduce themselves. In the long process of natural selection, mechanisms of this sort have, they suggest, been evolved gradually. Let us examine this hypothesis. When we state an event in mechanical terms we state it as a necessary result of certain simple properties of separate parts which interact in the event.... The essence of the explanation or re-statement of the event is that after due investigation we have assumed that the parts interacting in the event have certain simple and definite properties, so that they always react in the same way under the same conditions. For a mechanical explanation the reacting parts must first be given. Unless an arrangement of parts with definite properties is given, it is meaningless to speak of mechanical explanation. To postulate the existence of a self-producing or self-maintaining mechanism is, thus, to postulate something to which no meaning can be attached. Meaningless terms are sometimes used by physiologists; but there is none so absolutely meaningless as the expression “mechanism of reproduction”. Any mechanism there may be in the parent organism is absent in the process of reproduction, and must re-constitute itself at each generation, since the parent organism is reproduced from a mere tiny speck of its own body. There can be no mechanism of reproduction. The idea of a mechanism which is constantly maintaining or reproducing its own structure is self-contradictory. A mechanism which reproduced itself would be a mechanism without parts, and, therefore, not a mechanism. Life is, then, a unique phenomenon and the concept of mechanism is inadequate for its analysis. Its “factual wholeness”, to use an expression of Driesch– another notable biologist– is a kind of unity which, looked at from another point of view, is also a plurality. In all the purposive processes of growth and adaptation to its environment, whether this adaptation is secured by the formation of fresh or the modification of old habits, it possesses a career which is unthinkable in the case of a machine. And the possession of a career means that the sources of its activity cannot be explained except in reference to a remote past, the origin of which, therefore, must be sought in a spiritual 
reality revealable in, but non-discoverable by, any analysis of spatial experience. It would, therefore, seem that life is foundational and anterior to the routine of physical and chemical processes which must be regarded as a kind of fixed behaviour formed during a long course of evolution. Further, the application of the mechanistic concepts to life, necessitating the view that the intellect itself is a product of evolution, brings science into conflict with its own objective principle of investigation. On this point I will quote a passage from Wildon Carr, who has given a very pointed expression to this conflict:23 
If intellect is a product of evolution the whole mechanistic concept of the nature and origin of life is absurd, and the principle which science has adopted must clearly be revised. We have only to state it to see the self-contradiction. How can the intellect, a mode of apprehending reality, be itself an evolution of something which only exists as an abstraction of that mode of apprehending, which is the intellect? If intellect is an evolution of life, then the concept of the life which can evolve intellect as a particular mode of apprehending reality must be the concept of a more concrete activity than that of any abstract mechanical movement which the intellect can present to itself by analyzing its apprehended content. And yet further, if the intellect be a product of the evolution of life, it is not absolute but relative to the activity of the life which has evolved it; how then, in such case, can science exclude the subjective aspect of the knowing and build on the objective presentation as an absolute? Clearly the biological sciences necessitate a reconsideration of the scientific principle. I will now try to reach the primacy of life and thought by 
another route, and carry you a step farther in our examination of experience. This will throw some further light on the primacy of life and will also give us an insight into the nature of life as a psychic activity. We have seen, that Professor Whitehead describes the universe, not as something static, but as a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow. This quality of Nature’s passage in time is perhaps the most significant aspect of experience which the Qur’an especially emphasizes and which, as I hope to be able to show in the sequel, offers the best clue to the ultimate nature of Reality. To some of the verses (3: 190-91; 2: 164; 24: 44)24 bearing on the point I have already drawn your attention. In view of the great importance of the subject I will add here a few more: 
Verily, in the alternations of night and of day and in all that God hath created in the Heavens and in the earth are signs to those who fear him (10: 6). And it is He Who hath ordained the night and the day to succeed one another for those who desire to think on God or desire to be thankful (25:62). 
Seest thou not that God causeth the night to come in upon the day, and the day to come in upon the night; and that He hath subjected the sun and the moon to laws by which each speedeth along to an appointed goal (31: 29). 
It is of Him that the night returneth on the day, and that the day returneth on the night (39: 5). 
And of Him is the change of the night and of the day (23: 80). 
There is another set of verses which, indicating the relativity of our reckoning of time, suggests the possibility of unknown levels of consciousness;25 but I will content myself with a discussion of the familiar, yet deeply significant, aspect of experience alluded to in the verses quoted above. Among the representatives of contemporary thought, Bergson is the only thinker who has made a keen study of the phenomenon of duration in time. I will first briefly explain to you his view of duration and then point out the inadequacy of his analysis in order fully to bring out the implications of a completer view of the temporal aspect of existence. The ontological problem before us is how to define the ultimate nature of existence. That the universe persists in time is not open to doubt. Yet, since it is external to us, it is possible to be sceptical about its existence. In order completely to grasp the meaning of this persistence in time we must be in a position to study some privileged case of existence which is absolutely unquestionable and gives us the further assurance of a direct vision of duration. Now my perception of things that confront me is superficial and external; but my perception of my own self is internal, intimate, and profound. It follows, therefore, that conscious experience is that privileged case of existence in which we are in absolute contact with Reality, and an analysis of this privileged case is likely to throw a flood of light on the ultimate meaning of existence. What do I find when I fix my gaze on my own conscious experience? In the words of Bergson:26 
I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold. I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas– such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which colour it in 
turns. I change then, without ceasing. 
Thus, there is nothing static in my inner life; all is a constant mobility, an unceasing flux of states, a perpetual flow in which there is no halt or resting place. Constant change, however, is unthinkable without time. On the analogy of our inner experience, then, conscious existence means life in time. A keener insight into the nature of conscious experience, however, reveals that the self in its inner life moves from the centre outwards. It has, so to speak, two sides which may be described as appreciative and efficient. On its efficient side it enters into relation with what we call the world of space. The efficient self is the subject of associationist psychology– the practical self of daily life in its dealing with the external order of things which determine our passing states of consciousness and stamp on these states their own spatial feature of mutual isolation. The self here lives outside itself as it were, and, while retaining its unity as a totality, discloses itself as nothing more than a series of specific and consequently numberable states. The time in which the efficient self lives is, therefore, the time of which we predicate long and short. It is hardly distinguishable from space. We can conceive it only as a straight line composed of spatial points which are external to one another like so many stages in a journey. But time thus regarded is not true time, according to Bergson. Existence in spacialized time is spurious existence. A deeper analysis of conscious experience reveals to us what I have called the appreciative side of the self. With our absorption in the external order of things, necessitated by our present situation, it is extremely difficult to catch a glimpse of the appreciative self. In our constant pursuit after external things we weave a kind of veil round the appreciative self which thus becomes completely alien to us. It is only in the moments of profound meditation, when the efficient self is in abeyance, that we sink into our deeper self and reach the inner centre of experience. In the life-process of this deeper ego the states of consciousness melt into each other. The unity of the appreciative ego is like the unity of the germ in which the experiences of its individual ancestors exist, not as a plurality, but as a unity in which every experience permeates the whole. There is no numerical distinctness of states in the totality of the ego, the 
The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience multiplicity of whose elements is, unlike that of the efficient self, wholly qualitative. There is change and movement, but change and movement are indivisible; their elements interpenetrate and are wholly non-serial in character. It appears that the time of the appreciative-self is a single “now” which the efficient self, in its traffic with the world of space, pulverizes into a series of “nows” like pearl beads in a thread. Here is, then, pure duration unadulterated by space. The Qur’an with its characteristic simplicity alludes to the serial and non-serial aspects of duration in the following verses: 
And put thou thy trust in Him that liveth and dieth not, and celebrate His praise Who in six days created the Heavens and the earth, and what is between them, then mounted His Throne; the God of mercy (25: 58-59). 
All things We have created with a fixed destiny: Our command was 
but one, swift as the twinkling of an eye (54: 49-50). 
If we look at the movement embodied in creation from the outside, that is to say, if we apprehend it intellectually, it is a process lasting through thousands of years; for one Divine day, in the terminology of the Qur’an, as of the Old Testament, is equal to one thousand years.27 From another point of view, the process of creation, lasting through thousands of years, is a single indivisible act, “swift as the twinkling of an eye”. It is, however, impossible to express this inner experience of pure duration in words, for language is shaped on the serial time of our daily efficient self. Perhaps an illustration will further elucidate the point. According to physical science, the cause of your sensation of red is the rapidity of wave motion the frequency of which is 400 billions per second. If you could observe this tremendous frequency from the outside, and count it at the rate of 2,000 per second, which is supposed to be the limit of the perceptibility of light, it will take you more than six thousand years to finish the enumeration.28 Yet in the single momentary mental act of perception you hold together a frequency of wave motion which is practically incalculable. That is how the mental act transforms succession into duration. The appreciative self, then, is more or less corrective of the efficient self, inasmuch as it synthesizes all the “heres” and “nows”– the small changes of space and time, indispensable to the efficient self– into the coherent wholeness of personality. Pure time, then, as revealed by a deeper analysis of our conscious experience, is not a string of separate, reversible instants; it is an organic whole in which the past is not left behind, but is moving along with, and operating in, the present. And the future is given to it not as lying before, yet to be traversed; it is given only in the sense that it is present in its nature as an open possibility.29 It is time regarded as an organic whole that the Qur’an describes as Taqdir or the destiny– a word which has been so much misunderstood both in and outside the world of Islam. Destiny is time regarded as prior to the disclosure of its possibilities. It is time freed from the net of causal sequence– the diagrammatic character which the logical understanding imposes on it. In one word, it is time as felt and not as thought and calculated. If you ask me why the Emperor 
Hum.y.n and Shah Tahm.sp of Persia were contemporaries, I 
can give you no causal explanation. The only answer that can possibly be given is that the nature of Reality is such that among its infinite possibilities of becoming, the two possibilities known as 
the lives of Hum.y.n and Shah Tahm.sp should realize themselves 
together. Time regarded as destiny forms the very essence of things. As the Qur’an says: “God created all things and assigned to each its destiny.”30 The destiny of a thing then is not an unrelenting fate working from without like a task master; it is the inward reach of a thing, its realizable possibilities which lie within the depths of its nature, and serially actualize themselves without any feeling of external compulsion. Thus the organic wholeness of duration does not mean that full-fledged events are lying, as it were, in the womb of Reality, and drop one by one like the grains of sand from the hour-glass. If time is real, and not a mere repetition of homogeneous moments which make conscious experience a delusion, then every moment in the life of Reality is original, giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable. “Everyday doth some new work employ Him”,31 says the Qur’an. To exist in real time is not to be bound by the fetters of serial time, but to create it from moment to moment and to be absolutely free and original in creation. In fact, all creative activity is free activity. Creation is opposed to repetition which is a characteristic of mechanical action. That is why it is impossible to explain the creative activity of life in terms of mechanism. Science seeks to establish uniformities of experience, i.e. the laws of mechanical repetition. Life with its intense feeling of spontaneity constitutes a centre of indetermi­The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience nation, and thus falls outside the domain of necessity. Hence science cannot comprehend life. The biologist who seeks a mechanical explanation of life is led to do so because he confines his study to the lower forms of life whose behaviour discloses resemblances to mechanical action. If he studies life as manifested in himself, i.e. his own mind freely choosing, rejecting, reflecting, surveying the past and the present, and dynamically imagining the future, he is sure to be convinced of the inadequacy of his mechanical concepts. 
On the analogy of our conscious experience, then, the universe is a free creative movement. But how can we conceive a movement independent of a concrete thing that moves? The answer is that the notion of “thing” is derivative. We can derive “things” from movement; we cannot derive movement from immobile things. If, for instance, we suppose material atoms, such as the atoms of Democritus, to be the original Reality we must import movement into them from the outside as something alien to their nature. Where as if we take movement as original, static things may be derived from it. In fact, physical science has reduced all things to movement. The essential nature of the atom in modern science is electricity and not something electrified. Apart from this, things are not given in immediate experience as things already possessing definite contours, for immediate experience is a continuity without any distinctions in it. What we call things are events in the continuity of Nature which thought spatializes and thus regards as mutually isolated for purposes of action. The universe which seems to us to be a collection of things is not a solid stuff occupying a void. It is not a thing but an act. The nature of thought according to Bergson is serial; it cannot deal with movement, except by viewing it as a series of stationary points. It is, therefore, the operation of thought, working with static concepts, that gives the appearance of a series of immobilities to what is essentially dynamic in its nature. The co-existence and succession of these immobilities is the source of what we call space and time. 
According to Bergson, then, Reality is a free unpredictable, creative, vital impetus of the nature of volition which thought spatializes and views as a plurality of “things”. A full criticism of this view cannot be undertaken here. Suffice it to say that the vitalism of Bergson ends in an insurmountable dualism of will and thought. This is really due to the partial view of intelligence that he takes. Intelligence, according to him, is a spatializing activity; it is shaped on matter alone, and has only mechanical categories at its disposal. But, as I pointed out in my first lecture, thought has a deeper movement also.32 While it appears to break up Reality into static fragments, its real function is to synthesize the elements of experience by employing categories suitable to the various levels which experience presents. It is as much organic as life. The movement of life, as an organic growth, involves a progressive synthesis of its various stages. Without this synthesis it will cease to be organic growth. It is determined by ends, and the presence of ends means that it is permeated by intelligence. Nor is the activity of intelligence possible without the presence of ends. In conscious experience life and thought permeate each other. They form a unity. Thought, therefore, in its true nature, is identical with life. Again, in Bergson’s view the forward rush of the vital impulse in its creative freedom is unilluminated by the light of an immediate or a remote purpose. It is not aiming at a result; it is wholly arbitrary, undirected, chaotic, and unforeseeable in its behaviour. It is mainly here that Bergson’s analysis of our conscious experience reveals its inadequacy. He regards conscious experience as the past moving along with and operating in the present. He ignores that the unity of consciousness has a forward looking aspect also. Life is only a series of acts of attention, and an act of attention is inexplicable without reference to a purpose, conscious or unconscious. Even our acts of perception are determined by our immediate interests and 
purposes. The Persian poet ‘Urf. has given a beautiful expression 
Ê
 .

to this aspect of human perception. He says:33 
ÈÈ




Ò
... ÏÇäÚÞá
Ò

Î
ìÈ
È

Ç


Ò.....ÇÈ
ÑÏ

Ñ
If your heart is not deceived by the mirage, be not proud of the 
sharpness of your understanding; 
for your freedom from this optical illusion is due to your 
imperfect thirst. 

The poet means to say that if you had a vehement desire for drink, the sands of the desert would have given you the impression of a lake. Your freedom from the illusion is due to the absence of a keen desire for water. You have perceived the thing as it is because you were not interested in perceiving it as it is not. Thus ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the warp and woof of our conscious experience. And the notion of purpose cannot be The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience understood except in reference to the future. The past, no doubt, abides and operates in the present; but this operation of the past in the present is not the whole of consciousness. The element of purpose discloses a kind of forward look in consciousness. Purposes not only colour our present states of consciousness, but also reveal its future direction. In fact, they constitute the forward push of our life, and thus in a way anticipate and influence the states that are yet to be. To be determined by an end is to be determined by what ought to be. Thus past and future both operate in the present state of consciousness, and the future is not wholly undetermined as Bergson’s analysis of our conscious experience shows. A state of attentive consciousness involves both memory and imagination as operating factors. On the analogy of our conscious experience, therefore, Reality is not a blind vital impulse wholly unilluminated by idea. Its nature is through and through teleological. 
Bergson, however, denies the teleological character of Reality on the ground that teleology makes time unreal. According to him “the portals of the future must remain wide open to Reality.” Otherwise, it will not be free and creative. No doubt, if teleology means the working out of a plan in view of a predetermined end or goal, it does make time unreal. It reduces the universe to a mere temporal reproduction of a pre-existing eternal scheme or structure in which individual events have already found their proper places, waiting, as it were, for their respective turns to enter into the temporal sweep of history. All is already given somewhere in eternity; the temporal order of events is nothing more than a mere imitation of the eternal mould. Such a view is hardly distinguishable from mechanism which we have already rejected.34 In fact, it is a kind of veiled materialism in which fate or destiny takes the place of rigid determinism, leaving no scope for human or even Divine freedom. The world regarded as a process realizing a preordained goal is not a world of free, responsible moral agents; it is only a stage on which puppets are made to move by a kind of pull from behind. There is, however, another sense of teleology. From our conscious experience we have seen that to live is to shape and change ends and purposes and to be governed by them. Mental life is teleological in the sense that, while there is no far-off distant goal towards which we are moving, there is a progressive formation of fresh ends, purposes, and ideal scales of value as the process of life grows and expands. We become by ceasing to be what we are. Life is a passage through a series of deaths. But there is a system in the continuity of this passage. Its various stages, in spite of the apparently abrupt changes in our evaluation of things, are organically related to one another. The life-history of the individual is, on the whole, a unity and not a mere series of mutually ill-adapted events. The world-process, or the movement of the universe in time, is certainly devoid of purpose, if by purpose we mean a foreseen end– a far-off fixed destination to which the whole creation moves. To endow the world-process with purpose in this sense is to rob it of its originality and its creative character. Its ends are terminations of a career; they are ends to come and not necessarily premeditated. A time-process cannot be conceived as a line already drawn. It is a line in the drawing– an actualization of open possibilities. It is purposive only in this sense that it is selective in character, and brings itself to some sort of a present fulfilment by actively preserving and supplementing the past. To my mind nothing is more alien to the Qur’anic outlook than the idea that the universe is the temporal working out of a preconceived plan. As I have already pointed out, the universe, according to the Qur’an, is liable to increase.35 It is a growing universe and not an already completed product which left the hand of its maker ages ago, and is now lying stretched in space as a dead mass of matter to which time does nothing, and consequently is nothing. 
We are now, I hope, in a position to see the meaning of the verse– “And it is He Who hath ordained the night and the day to succeed one another for those who desire to think on God or desire to be thankful.”36 A critical interpretation of the sequence of time as revealed in our selves has led us to a notion of the Ultimate Reality as pure duration in which thought, life, and purpose interpenetrate to form an organic unity. We cannot conceive this unity except as the unity of a self– an all-embracing concrete self– the ultimate source of all individual life and thought. I venture to think that the error of Bergson consists in regarding pure time as prior to self, to which alone pure duration is predicable. Neither pure space nor pure time can hold together the multiplicity of objects and events. It is the appreciative act of an enduring self only which can seize the multiplicity of duration– broken up into an infinity of instants– and transform it to the organic wholeness of a The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience synthesis. To exist in pure duration is to be a self, and to be a self is to be able to say “I am”. Only that truly exists which can say “I am”. It is the degree of the intuition of “I-amness” that determines the place of a thing in the scale of being. We too say “I am”. But our “I-amness” is dependent and arises out of the distinction between the self and the not-self. The Ultimate Self, in the words of the Qur’an, “can afford to dispense with all the worlds.”37 To Him the not-self does not present itself as a confronting “other”, or else it would have to be, like our finite self, in spatial relation with the confronting “other”. What we call Nature or the not-self is only a fleeting moment in the life of God. His “I-amness” is independent, elemental, absolute.38 Of such a self it is impossible for us to form an adequate conception. As the Qur’an says, “Naught is like Him”; yet “He hears and sees.”39 Now a self is unthinkable without a character, i.e. a uniform mode of behaviour. Nature, as we have seen, is not a mass of pure materiality occupying a void. It is a structure of events, a systematic mode of behaviour, and as such organic to the Ultimate Self. Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self. In the picturesque phrase of the Qur’an it is the habit of Allah.40 From the human point of view it is an interpretation which, in our present situation, we put on the creative activity of the Absolute Ego. At a particular moment in its forward movement it is finite; but since the self to which it is organic is creative, it is liable to increase, and is consequently boundless in the sense that no limit to its extension is final. Its boundlessness is potential, not actual. Nature, then, must be understood as a living, ever-growing organism whose growth has no final external limits. Its only limit is internal, i.e. the immanent self which animates and sustains the whole. As the Qur’an says: “And verily unto thy Lord is the limit.” (53: 42) Thus the view that we have taken gives a fresh spiritual meaning to physical science. The knowledge of Nature is the knowledge of God’s behaviour. In our observation of Nature we are virtually seeking a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego; and this is only another form of worship.41 
The above discussion takes time as an essential element in the Ultimate Reality. The next point before us, therefore, is to consider the late Doctor McTaggart’s argument relating to the unreality of time.42 Time, according to Doctor McTaggart, is unreal because every event is past, present, and future. Queen Anne’s death, for instance, is past to us; it was present to her contemporaries and future to William III. Thus the event of Anne’s death combines characteristics which are incompatible with each other. It is obvious that the argument proceeds on the assumption that the serial nature of time is final. If we regard past, present, and future as essential to time, then we picture time as a straight line, part of which we have travelled and left behind, and part lies yet untravelled before us. This is taking time, not as a living creative moment, but as a static absolute, holding the ordered multiplicity of fully-shaped cosmic events, revealed serially, like the pictures of a film, to the outside observer. We can indeed say that Queen Anne’s death was future to William III, if this event is regarded as already fully shaped, and lying in the future, waiting for its happening. But a future event, as Broad justly points out, cannot be characterized as an event.43 Before the death of Anne the event of her death did not exist at all. During Anne’s life the event of her death existed only as an unrealized possibility in the nature of Reality which included it as an event only when, in the course of its becoming, it reached the point of the actual happening of that event. The answer to Doctor McTaggart’s argument is that the future exists only as an open possibility, and not as a reality. Nor can it be said that an event combines incompatible characteristics when it is described both as past and present. When an event X does happen it enters into an unalterable relation with all the events that have happened before it. These relations are not at all affected by the relations of X with other events which happen after X by the further becoming of Reality. No true or false proposition about these relations will ever become false or true. Hence there is no logical difficulty in regarding an event as both past and present. It must be confessed, however, that the point is not free from difficulty and requires much further thinking. It is not easy to solve the mystery of time.44 Augustine’s profound words are as true today as they were when they were uttered: “If no one questions me of time, I know it: if I would explain to a questioner I know it not.”45 Personally, I am inclined to think that time is an essential element in Reality. But real time is not serial time to which the distinction of past, present, and future is essential; it is pure duration, i.e. change without succession, which McTaggart’s argument does not touch. Serial time is pure duration pulverized by thought– a kind of device by The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience which Reality exposes its ceaseless creative activity to quantitative measurement. It is in this sense that the Qur’an says: “And of Him is the change of the night and of the day.”46 
But the question you are likely to ask is– “Can change be predicated of the Ultimate Ego?” We, as human beings, are functionally related to an independent world-process. The conditions of our life are mainly external to us. The only kind of life known to us is desire, pursuit, failure, or attainment– a continuous change from one situation to another. From our point of view life is change, and change is essentially imperfection. At the same time, since our conscious experience is the only point of departure for all knowledge, we cannot avoid the limitation of interpreting facts in the light of our own inner experience. An anthropomorphic conception is especially unavoidable in the apprehension of life; 
for life can be apprehended from within only. As the poet N.sir ‘Al. of Sirhind imagines the idol saying to the Brahmin: 
Î ÂÑìÏì
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. Â
Ñ


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Ç
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æäÇ

Thou hast made me after Thine own image! 
After all what hast Thou seen beyond Thyself?47 
It was the fear of conceiving Divine life after the image of human life that the Spanish Muslim theologian Ibn Hazm hesitated to predicate life of God, and ingeniously suggested that God should be described as living, not because He is living in the sense of our experience of life, but only because He is so described in the Qur’an.48 Confining himself to the surface of our conscious experience and ignoring its deeper phases, Ibn Hazm must have taken life as a serial change, a succession of attitudes towards an obstructing environment. Serial change is obviously a mark of imperfection; and, if we confine ourselves to this view of change, the difficulty of reconciling Divine perfection with Divine life becomes insuperable. Ibn Hazm must have felt that the perfection of God can be retained only at the cost of His life. There is, however, a way out of the difficulty. The Absolute Ego, as we have seen, is the whole of Reality. He is not so situated as to take a perspective view of an alien universe; consequently, the phases of His life are wholly determined from within. Change, therefore, in the sense of a movement from an imperfect to a relatively perfect state, or vice versa, is obviously inapplicable to His life. But change in this sense is not the only possible form of life. A deeper insight into our conscious experience shows that beneath the appearance of serial duration there is true duration. The Ultimate Ego exists in pure duration wherein change ceases to be a succession of varying attitudes, and reveals its true character as continuous creation, “untouched by weariness”49 and unseizable “by slumber or sleep”.50 To conceive the Ultimate Ego as changeless in this sense of change is to conceive Him as utter inaction, a motiveless, stagnant neutrality, an absolute nothing. To the Creative Self change cannot mean imperfection. The perfection of the Creative Self consists, not in a mechanistically conceived immobility, as Aristotle might have led Ibn Hazm to think. It consists in the vaster basis of His creative activity and the infinite scope of His creative vision. God’s life is self-revelation, not the pursuit of an ideal to be reached. The “not­yet” of man does mean pursuit and may mean failure; the “not­yet” of God means unfailing realization of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process. 
In the Endless, self-repeating 
flows for evermore The Same. 
Myriad arches, springing, meeting, 
hold at rest the mighty frame. 
Streams from all things love of living, 
grandest star and humblest clod. 
All the straining, all the striving 
is eternal peace in God.51 (Goethe) 
Thus a comprehensive philosophical criticism of all the facts of experience on its efficient as well as appreciative side brings us to the conclusion that the Ultimate Reality is a rationally directed creative life. To interpret this life as an ego is not to fashion God after the image of man. It is only to accept the simple fact of experience that life is not a formless fluid, but an organizing principle of unity, a synthetic activity which holds together and focalizes the dispersing dispositions of the living organism for a constructive purpose. The operation of thought which is essentially symbolic in character veils the true nature of life, and can picture it only as a kind of universal current flowing through all things. The result of an intellectual view of life, therefore, is necessarily pantheistic. But we have a first-hand knowledge of The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience the appreciative aspect of life from within. Intuition reveals life as a centralizing ego. This knowledge, however imperfect as giving us only a point of departure, is a direct revelation of the ultimate nature of Reality. Thus the facts of experience justify the inference that the ultimate nature of Realty is spiritual, and must be conceived as an ego. But the aspiration of religion soars higher than that of philosophy. Philosophy is an intellectual view of things; and, as such, does not care to go beyond a concept which can reduce all the rich variety of experience to a system. It sees Reality from a distance as it were. Religion seeks a closer contact with Reality. The one is theory; the other is living experience, association, intimacy. In order to achieve this intimacy thought must rise higher than itself, and find its fulfilment in an attitude of mind which religion describes as prayer– one of the last words on the lips of the Prophet of Islam.52 
III 
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND THE 
MEANING OF PRAYER 

WE have seen that the judgment based upon religious experience fully satisfies the intellectual test. The more important regions of experience, examined with an eye on a synthetic view, reveal, as the ultimate ground of all experience, a rationally directed creative will which we have found reasons to describe as an ego. In order to emphasize the individuality of the Ultimate Ego the Qur’an gives Him the proper name of Allah, and further defines Him as follows: 
Say: Allah is One: 
All things depend on Him; 
He begetteth not, and He is not begotten; 
And there is none like unto Him (112: 1-4) 

But it is hard to understand what exactly is an individual. As Bergson has taught us in his Creative Evolution, individuality is a matter of degrees and is not fully realized even in the case of the apparently closed off unity of the human being.1 “In particular, it may be said of individuality”, says Bergson: 2 
that while the tendency to individuate is everywhere present in the organized world, it is everywhere opposed by the tendency towards reproduction. For the individuality to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is reproduction but the building up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old? Individuality, therefore, harbours its own enemy at home. 
In the light of this passage it is clear that the perfect individual, closed off as an ego, peerless and unique, cannot be conceived as The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer harbouring its own enemy at home. It must be conceived as superior to the antagonistic tendency of reproduction. This characteristic of the perfect ego is one of the most essential elements in the Qur’anic conception of God; and the Qur’an mentions it over and over again, not so much with a view to attack the current Christian conception as to accentuate its own view of a perfect individual.3 It may, however, be said that the history of religious thought discloses various ways of escape from an individualistic conception of the Ultimate Reality which is conceived as some vague, vast, and pervasive cosmic element,4 such as light. This is the view that Farnell has taken in his Gifford Lectures on the Attributes of God. I agree that the history of religion reveals modes of thought that tend towards pantheism; but I venture to think that in so far as the Qur’anic identification of God with light is concerned Farnell’s view is incorrect. The full text of the verse of which he quotes a portion only is as follows: 5 
God is the light of the Heavens and of the earth. His light is like a niche in which is a lamp– the lamp encased in a glass– the glass, as it were, a star (24: 35). No doubt, the opening sentence of the verse gives the 
impression of an escape from an individualistic conception of God. But when we follow the metaphor of light in the rest of the verse, it gives just the opposite impression. The development of the metaphor is meant rather to exclude the suggestion of a formless cosmic element by centralizing the light in a flame which is further individualized by its encasement in a glass likened unto a well-defined star. Personally, I think the description of God as light, in the revealed literature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, must now be interpreted differently. The teaching of modern physics is that the velocity of light cannot be exceeded and is the same for all observers whatever their own system of movement. Thus, in the world of change, light is the nearest approach to the Absolute. The metaphor of light as applied to God, therefore, must, in view of modern knowledge, be taken to suggest the Absoluteness of God and not His Omnipresence which easily lends itself to a pantheistic interpretation. 
There is, however, one question which will be raised in this connexion. Does not individuality imply finitude? If God is an ego and as such an individual, how can we conceive Him as infinite? The answer to this question is that God cannot be conceived as infinite in the sense of spatial infinity. In matters of spiritual valuation mere immensity counts for nothing. Moreover, as we have seen before, temporal and spatial infinities are not absolute. Modern science regards Nature not as something static, situated in an infinite void, but a structure of interrelated events out of whose mutual relations arise the concepts of space and time. And this is only another way of saying that space and time are interpretations which thought puts upon the creative activity of the Ultimate Ego. Space and time are possibilities of the Ego, only partially realized in the shape of our mathematical space and time. Beyond Him and apart from His creative activity, there is neither time nor space to close Him off in reference to other egos. The Ultimate Ego is, therefore, neither infinite in the sense of spatial infinity nor finite in the sense of the space-bound human ego whose body closes him off in reference to other egos. The infinity of the Ultimate Ego consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. In one word God’s infinity is intensive, not extensive.6 It involves an infinite series, but is not that series. 
The other important elements in the Qur’anic conception of God, from a purely intellectual point of view, are Creativeness, Knowledge, Omnipotence, and Eternity. I shall deal with them serially. 
Finite minds regard Nature as a confronting “other” existing per se, which the mind knows but does not make. We are thus apt to regard the act of creation as a specific past event, and the universe appears to us as a manufactured article which has no organic relation to the life of its maker, and of which the maker is nothing more than a mere spectator. All the meaningless theological controversies about the idea of creation arise from this narrow vision of the finite mind.7 Thus regarded the universe is a mere accident in the life of God and might not have been created. The real question which we are called upon to answer is this: Does the universe confront God as His “other”, with space intervening between Him and it? The answer is that, from the Divine point of view, there is no creation in the sense of a specific event having a “before” and an “after”. The universe cannot be regarded as an independent reality standing in 
The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer opposition to Him. This view of the matter will reduce both God and the world to two separate entities confronting each other in the empty receptacle of an infinite space. We have seen before that space, time, and matter are interpretations which thought puts on the free creative energy of God.8 They are not independent realities existing per se, but only intellectual modes of apprehending the life of God. The question of creation once arose among the disciples of the well-known saint B. Yaz.d of Bist.m. One of the disciples very pointedly put the common­sense view saying: “There was a moment of time when God existed and nothing else existed beside Him.” The saint’s reply was equally pointed. “It is just the same now”, said he, “as it was then.” The world of matter, therefore, is not a stuff co-eternal with God, operated upon by Him from a distance as it were. It is, in its real nature, one continuous act which thought breaks up into a plurality of mutually exclusive things. Professor Eddington has thrown further light on this important point, and I take the liberty to quote from his book, Space, Time and Gravitation:9 We have a world of point-events with their primary interval-relations. Out of these an unlimited number of more complicated relations and qualities can be built up mathematically, describing various features of the state of the world. These exist in nature in the same sense as an unlimited number of walks exist on an open moor. But the existence is, as it were, latent unless someone gives significance to the walk by following it; and in the same way the existence of any one of these qualities of the world only acquires significance above its fellows if a mind singles it out for recognition. 
Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of white light. Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory; and it appears from the mathematical study of relations that the only way in which mind can achieve her object is by picking out one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in, and, as a necessary consequence of this Hobson’s choice, the laws of gravitation and mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed. Is it too much to say that the mind’s search for permanence has created the world of physics? The last sentence in this passage is one of the deepest things 
in Professor Eddington’s book. The physicist has yet to discover by his own methods that the passing show of the apparently permanent world of physics which the mind has created in its search for permanence is rooted in something more permanent, conceivable only as a self which alone combines the opposite attributes of change and permanence, and can thus be regarded as both constant and variable. 
There is, however, one question which we must answer before we proceed further. In what manner does the creative activity of God proceed to the work of creation? The most orthodox and still popular school of Muslim theology, I mean the Ash‘arite, hold that the creative method of Divine energy is atomic; and they appear to have based their doctrine on the following verse of the Qur’an: 
And no one thing is here, but with Us are its store-houses; and We send it not down but in fixed quantities. (15: 21). 
The rise and growth of atomism in Islam– the first important indication of an intellectual revolt against the Aristotelian idea of a fixed universe– forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of Muslim thought. The views of the school of Basrah were first shaped by Ab. H.shim10 (A. D. 933) and those of the school of Baghdad by that most exact and daring theological thinker, Ab. Bakr B.qill.n.11 (A. D. 1013). Later in the beginning of the thirteenth century we find a thoroughly systematic description in a book called the Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides– a Jewish theologian who was educated in the Muslim universities of Spain.12 A French translation of this book was made by Munk in 1866, and recently Professor Macdonald of America has given an excellent account of its contents in the Isis from which Dr. Zwemer has reprinted it in The Moslem World of January 1928.13 Professor Macdonald, however, has made no attempt to discover the psychological forces that determined the growth of atomistic kal.m in Islam. He admits that there is nothing like the atomism of Islam in Greek thought, but, unwilling as he is to give any credit for original thought to Muslim thinkers,14 and finding a surface resemblance between the Islamic theory and the views of a certain sect of Buddhism, he jumps to the conclusion that the origin of the theory is due to Buddhistic influences on the thought of Islam.15 Unfortunately, a full discussion of the sources of this purely speculative theory is not possible in this lecture. I propose only to give you some of its The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer more salient features, indicating at the same time the lines on which the work of reconstruction in the light of modern physics ought, in my opinion, to proceed. 
According to the Ash‘arite school of thinkers, then, the world is compounded of what they call jaw.hir– infinitely small parts or atoms which cannot be further divided. Since the creative activity of God is ceaseless the number of the atoms cannot be finite. Fresh atoms are coming into being every moment, and the universe is therefore constantly growing. As the Qur’an says: “God adds to His creation what He wills.”16 The essence of the atom is independent of its existence. This means that existence is a quality imposed on the atom by God. Before receiving this quality the atom lies dormant, as it were, in the creative energy of God, and its existence means nothing more than Divine energy become visible. The atom in its essence, therefore, has no magnitude; it has its position which does not involve space. It is by their aggregation that atoms become extended and generate space.17 Ibn Hazm, the critic of atomism, acutely remarks that the language of the Qur’an makes no difference in the act of creation and the thing created. What we call a thing, then, is in its essential nature an aggregation of atomic acts. Of the concept of “atomic act”, however, it is difficult to form a mental picture. Modern physics too conceives as action the actual atom of a certain physical quantity. But, as Professor Eddington has pointed out, the precise formulation of the Theory of Quanta of action has not been possible so far; though it is vaguely believed that the atomicity of action is the general law and that the appearance of electrons is in some way dependent on it.18 
Again we have seen that each atom occupies a position which does not involve space. That being so, what is the nature of motion which we cannot conceive except as the atom’s passage through space? Since the Ash‘arites regarded space as generated by the aggregation of atoms, they could not explain movement as a body’s passage through all the points of space intervening between the point of its start and destination. Such an explanation must necessarily assume the existence of void as an independent reality. In order, therefore, to get over the difficulty of empty space, Nazz.m resorted to the notion of Tafrah or jump; and imagined the moving body, not as passing through all the discrete positions in space, but as jumping over the void between one position and another. Thus, according to him, a quick motion and a slow motion possess the same speed; but the latter has more points of rest.19 I confess I do not quite understand this solution of the difficulty. It may, however, be pointed out that modern atomism has found a similar difficulty and a similar solution has been suggested. In view of the experiments relating to Planck’s Theory of Quanta, we cannot imagine the moving atom as continuously traversing its path in space. “One of the most hopeful lines of explanation”, says Professor Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World, 20 
is to assume that an electron does not continuously traverse its path in space. The alternative notion as to its mode of existence is that it appears at a series of discrete positions in space which it occupies for successive durations of time. It is as though an automobile, moving at the average rate of thirty miles an hour along a road, did not traverse the road continuously, but appeared successively at the successive milestones, remaining for two minutes at each milestone. 
Another feature of this theory of creation is the doctrine of accident, on the perpetual creation of which depends the continuity of the atom as an existent. If God ceases to create the accidents, the atom ceases to exist as an atom.21 The atom possesses inseparable positive or negative qualities. These exist in opposed couples, as life and death, motion and rest, and possess practically no duration. Two propositions follow from this: (i) Nothing has a stable nature. (ii) There is a single order of atoms, i.e. what we call the soul is either a finer kind of matter, or only an accident. 
I am inclined to think that in view of the idea of continuous creation which the Ash‘arite intended to establish there is an element of truth in the first proposition. I have said before that in my opinion the spirit of the Qur’an is on the whole anticlassical. 22 I regard the Ash‘arite  thought on this point as a genuine effort to develop on the basis of an Ultimate Will or Energy a theory of creation which, with all its shortcomings, is far more true to the spirit of the Qur’an than the Aristotelian idea of a fixed universe.23 The duty of the future theologians of Islam is to reconstruct this purely speculative theory, and to bring it into closer contact with modern science which appears to be moving in the same direction. 
The second proposition looks like pure materialism. It is my 
The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer 57 belief that the Ash‘arite  view that the Nafs is an accident is opposed to the real trend of their own theory which makes the continuous existence of the atom dependent on the continuous creation of accidents in it. It is obvious that motion is inconceivable without time. And since time comes from psychic life, the latter is more fundamental than motion. No psychic life, no time: no time, no motion. Thus it is really what the Ash‘arite call the accident which is responsible for the continuity of the atom as such. The atom becomes or rather looks spatialized when it receives the quality of existence. Regarded as a phase of Divine energy, it is essentially spiritual. The Nafs is the pure act; the body is only the act become visible and hence measurable. In fact the Ash‘arite vaguely anticipated the modern notion of point-instant; but they failed rightly to see the nature of the mutual relation between the point and the instant. The instant is the more fundamental of the two; but the point is inseparable from the instant as being a necessary mode of its manifestation. The point is not a thing, it is 
only a sort of looking at the instant. R.m.: is far more true to the spirit of Islam than Ghaz.l. when he says:24


.ÇÒ
....Ç
ÇÈÏÀÇÒ
.... Ç

Reality is, therefore, essentially spirit. But, of course, there are degrees of spirit. In the history of Muslim thought the idea of degrees of Reality appears in the writings of Shih.budd.n Suhraward. Maqt.l. In modern times we find it worked out on a much larger scale in Hegel and, more recently, in the late Lord Haldane’s Reign of Relativity, which he published shortly before his death.25 I have conceived the Ultimate Reality as an Ego; and I must add now that from the Ultimate Ego only egos proceed. The creative energy of the Ultimate Ego, in whom deed and thought are identical, functions as ego-unities. The world, in all its details, from the mechanical movement of what we call the atom of matter to the free movement of thought in the human ego, is the self-revelation of the “Great I am”.26 Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is an ego. But there are degrees in the expression of egohood. Throughout the entire gamut of being runs the gradually rising note of egohood until it reaches its perfection in man. That is why the Qur’an declares the Ultimate Ego to be “nearer to man than his own neck-vein.”27 Like pearls do we live 

ÒæÒæ

58 The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam and move and have our being in the perpetual flow of Divine life. 
Thus a criticism, inspired by the best traditions of Muslim thought, tends to turn the Ash‘arite scheme of atomism into a spiritual pluralism, the details of which will have to be worked out by the future theologians of Islam. It may, however, be asked whether atomicity has a real seat in the creative energy of God, or presents itself to us as such only because of our finite mode of apprehension. From a purely scientific point of view I cannot say what the final answer to this question will be. From the psychological point of view one thing appears to me to be certain. Only that is, strictly speaking, real which is directly conscious of its own reality. The degree of reality varies with the degree of the feeling of egohood. The nature of the ego is such that, in spite of its capacity to respond to other egos, it is self-centred and possesses a private circuit of individuality excluding all egos other than itself.28 In this alone consists its reality as an ego. Man, therefore, in whom egohood has reached its relative perfection, occupies a genuine place in the heart of Divine creative energy, and thus possesses a much higher degree of reality than things around him. Of all the creations of God he alone is capable of consciously participating in the creative life of his Maker.29 Endowed with the power to imagine a better world, and to mould what is into what ought to be, the ego in him aspires, in the interests of an increasingly unique and comprehensive individuality, to exploit all the various environments on which he may be called upon to operate during the course of an endless career. But I would ask you to wait for a fuller treatment of this point till my lecture on the Immortality and Freedom of the Ego. In the meantime, I want to say a few words about the doctrine of atomic time which I think is the weakest part of the Ash‘arite theory of creation. It is necessary to do so for a reasonable view of the Divine attribute of Eternity. 
The problem of time has always drawn the attention of Muslim thinkers and mystics. This seems to be due partly to the fact that, according to the Qur’an, the alternation of day and night is one of the greatest signs of God, and partly to the Prophet’s identification of God with Dahr (time) in a well-known tradition referred to before.30 Indeed, some of the greatest Muslim Sufis believed in the mystic properties of the word Dahr. According to Muhyiddin Ibn al-‘Arab., Dahr is 
one of the beautiful names of God, and R.z. tells us in his 
commentary on the Qur’an that some of the Muslim saints had taught him to repeat the word Dahr, Daih.r, or Daih.r. The Ash‘arite theory of time is perhaps the first attempt in the history of Muslim thought to understand it philosophically. Time, according to the Ash‘arite, is a succession of individual “nows”. From this view it obviously follows that between every two individual “nows” or moments of time, there is an unoccupied moment of time, that is to say, a void of time. The absurdity of this conclusion is due to the fact that they looked at the subject of their inquiry from a wholly objective point of view. They took no lesson from the history of Greek thought, which had adopted the same point of view and had reached no results. In our own time Newton described time as “something which in itself and from its own nature flows equally.”31 The metaphor of stream implied in this description suggests serious objections to Newton’s equally objective view of time. We cannot understand how a thing is affected on its immersion in this stream, and how it differs from things that do not participate in its flow. Nor can we form any idea of the beginning, the end, and the boundaries of time if we try to understand it on the analogy of a stream. Moreover, if flow, movement, or “passage” is the last word as to the nature of time, there must be another time to time the movement of the first time, and another which times the second time, and so on to infinity. Thus the notion of time as something wholly objective is beset with difficulties. It must, however, be admitted that the practical Arab mind could not regard time as something unreal like the Greeks. Nor can it be denied that, even though we possess no sense-organ to perceive time, it is a kind of flow and has, as such, a genuine objective, that is to say, atomic aspect. In fact, the verdict of modern science is exactly the same as that of the Ash‘arite; for recent discoveries in physics regarding the nature of time assume the discontinuity of matter. The following passage from Professor Rougier’s Philosophy and New Physics is noteworthy in this connexion:32 
Contrary to the ancient adage, natura nihil facit per saltum (nature hates all sudden changes. Ed.) it becomes apparent that the universe varies by sudden jumps and not by imperceptible degrees. A physical system is capable of only a finite number of distinct states. . . . Since between two different and immediately consecutive states the world remains motionless, time is suspended, so that time itself 
is discontinuous: there is an atom of time. 
The point, however, is that the constructive endeavour of the Ash‘arite, as of the moderns, was wholly lacking in psychological analysis, and the result of this shortcoming was that they altogether failed to perceive the subjective aspect of time. It is due to this failure that in their theory the systems of material atoms and time-atoms lie apart, with no organic relation between them. It is clear that if we look at time from a purely objective point of view serious difficulties arise; for we cannot apply atomic time to God and conceive Him as a life in the making, as Professor Alexander appears to have done in his Lectures on Space, Time, and Deity.33 Later Muslim theologians 
fully realized these difficulties. Mull. Jal.ludd.n Daww.n. in a 
passage of his Zaur., which reminds the modern student of Professor Royce’s view of time, tells us that if we take time to be a kind of span which makes possible the appearance of events as a moving procession and conceive this span to be a unity, then we cannot but describe it as an original state of Divine activity, encompassing all the succeeding states of that activity. But the Mull. takes good care to add that a deeper insight into the nature of succession reveals its relativity, so that it disappears in the case of God to Whom all events are present in a single act of perception. The Sufi poet ‘Ir.q.34 has a similar way of looking at the matter. He conceives infinite varieties of time, relative to the varying grades of being, intervening between materiality and pure spirituality. The time of gross bodies which arises from the revolution of the heavens is divisible into past, present, and future; and its nature is such that as long as one day does not pass away the succeeding day does not come. The time of immaterial beings is also serial in character, but its passage is such that a whole year in the time of gross bodies is not more than a day in the time of an immaterial being. Rising higher and higher in the scale of immaterial beings we reach Divine time– time which is absolutely free from the quality of passage, and consequently does not admit of divisibility, sequence, and change. It is above eternity; it has neither beginning nor end. The eye of God sees all the visibles, and His ear hears all the audibles in one indivisible act of perception. The priority of God is not due to the priority of time; on the other hand, the priority of time is due to God’s priority.35 
The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer Thus Divine time is what the Qur’an describes as the “Mother of Books”36 in which the whole of history, freed from the net of causal sequence, is gathered up in a single super-eternal “now”. 
Of all the Muslim theologians, however, it is Fakhrudd.n R.z. 
who appears to have given his most serious attention to the problem of time. In his Eastern Discussions, R.z. subjects to a searching examination all the contemporary theories of time. He too is, in the main, objective in his method and finds himself unable to reach any definite conclusions. “Until now,” he says, 
I have not been able to discover anything really true with regard to the nature of time; and the main purpose of my book is to explain what can possibly be said for or against each theory without any spirit of partisanship, which I generally avoid, especially in connexion with the problem of time.37 
The above discussion makes it perfectly clear that a purely objective point of view is only partially helpful in our under­standing of the nature of time. The right course is a careful psychological analysis of our conscious experience which alone reveals the true nature of time. I suppose you remember the distinction that I drew in the two aspects of the self, appreciative and efficient. The appreciative self lives in pure duration, i.e. change without succession. The life of the self consists in its movement from appreciation to efficiency, from intuition to intellect, and atomic time is born out of this movement. Thus the character of our conscious experience our point of departure in all knowledge– gives us a clue to the concept which reconciles the opposition of permanence and change, of time regarded as an organic whole or eternity, and time regarded as atomic. If then we accept the guidance of our conscious experience, and conceive the life of the all-inclusive Ego on the analogy of the finite ego, the time of the Ultimate Ego is revealed as change without succession, i.e. an organic whole which appears atomic because of the creative movement of the ego. This is what M.r Muhammad B.qir D.m.d38 means when they say that time is born with the act of creation by which the Ultimate Ego realizes and measures, so to speak, the infinite wealth of His own undetermined creative possibilities. On the one hand, therefore, the ego lives in eternity, by which term I mean non-successional change; on the other, it lives in serial time, which I conceive as organically related to eternity in the sense that it is a measure of non-successional change. In this sense alone it is possible to understand the Qur’anic verse: “To God belongs the alternation of day and night.”39 But on this difficult side of the problem I have said enough in my preceding lecture. It is now time to pass on to the Divine attributes of Knowledge and Omnipotence. 
The word “knowledge”, as applied to the finite ego, always means discursive knowledge– a temporal process which moves round a veritable “other”, supposed to exist per se and confronting the knowing ego. In this sense knowledge, even if we extend it to the point of omniscience, must always remain relative to its confronting “other”, and cannot, therefore, be predicated of the Ultimate Ego who, being all-inclusive, cannot be conceived as having a perspective like the finite ego. The universe, as we have seen before, is not an “other” existing per se in opposition to God. It is only when we look at the act of creation as a specific event in the life-history of God that the universe appears as an independent “other”. From the standpoint of the all-inclusive Ego there is no “other”. In Him thought and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical. It may be argued that the ego, whether finite or infinite, is inconceivable without a confronting non-ego, and if there is nothing outside the Ultimate Ego, the Ultimate Ego cannot be conceived as an ego. The answer to this argument is that logical negations are of no use in forming a positive concept which must be based on the character of Reality as revealed in experience. Our criticism of experience reveals the Ultimate Reality to be a rationally directed life which, in view of our experience of life, cannot be conceived except as an organic whole, a something closely knit together and possessing a central point of reference. 40 This being the character of life, the ultimate life can be conceived only as an ego. Knowledge, in the sense of discursive knowledge, however infinite, cannot, therefore, be predicated of an ego who knows, and, at the same time, forms the ground of the object known. Unfortunately, language does not help us here. We possess no word to express the kind of knowledge which is also creative of its object. The alternative concept of Divine knowledge is omniscience in the sense of a single indivisible act of perception which makes God immediately aware of the entire sweep of history, regarded as an order of specific events, in an eternal “now”. This is how Jal.ludd.n Daww.n., ‘Ir.q., and Professor Royce in our own The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer times conceived God’s knowledge.41 There is an element of truth in this conception. But it suggests a closed universe, a fixed futurity, a predetermined, unalterable order of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for all determined the directions of God’s creative activity. In fact, Divine knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more than the inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a semblance of unity on things by holding them together, a sort of mirror passively reflecting the details of an already finished structure of things which the finite consciousness reflects in fragments only. Divine knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity to which the objects that appear to exist in their own right are organically related. By conceiving God’s knowledge as a kind of reflecting mirror, we no doubt save His fore­knowledge of future events; but it is obvious that we do so at the expense of His freedom. The future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole of God’s creative life, but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines. An illustration will perhaps help us in understanding what I mean. Suppose, as sometimes happens in the history of human thought, a fruitful idea with a great inner wealth of applications emerges into the light of your consciousness. You are immediately aware of the idea as a complex whole; but the intellectual working out of its numerous bearings is a matter of time. Intuitively all the possibilities of the idea are present in your mind. If a specific possibility, as such, is not intellectually known to you at a certain moment of time, it is not because your knowledge is defective, but because there is yet no possibility to become known. The idea reveals the possibilities of its application with advancing experience, and sometimes it takes more than one generation of thinkers before these possibilities are exhausted. Nor is it possible, on the view of Divine knowledge as a kind of passive omniscience, to reach the idea of a creator. If history is regarded merely as a gradually revealed photo of a predetermined order of events, then there is no room in it for novelty and initiation. Consequently, we can attach no meaning to the word “creation”, which has a meaning for us only in view of our own capacity for original action. The truth is that the whole theological controversy relating to predestination is due to pure speculation with no eye on the spontaneity of life, which is a fact of actual experience. No doubt, the emergence of egos endowed with the power of spontaneous and hence unforeseeable action is, in a sense, a limitation on the freedom of the all-inclusive Ego. But this limitation is not externally imposed. It is born out of His own creative freedom whereby He has chosen finite egos to be participators of His life, power, and freedom. 
But how, it may be asked, is it possible to reconcile limitation with Omnipotence? The word “limitation” needs not frighten us. The Qur’an has no liking for abstract universals. It always fixes its gaze on the concrete which the theory of Relativity has only recently taught modern philosophy to see. All activity, creational or otherwise, is a kind of limitation without which it is impossible to conceive God as a concrete operative Ego. 
Omnipotence, abstractly conceived, is merely a blind, capricious power without limits. The Qur’an has a clear and definite conception of Nature as a cosmos of mutually related forces.42 It, therefore, views Divine omnipotence as intimately related to Divine wisdom, and finds the infinite power of God revealed, not in the arbitrary and the capricious, but in the recurrent, the regular, and the orderly. At the same time, the Qur’an conceives God as “holding all goodness in His hands.”43 If, then, the rationally directed Divine will is good, a very serious problem arises. The course of evolution, as revealed by modern science, involves almost universal suffering and wrongdoing. No doubt, wrongdoing is confined to man only. But the fact of pain is almost universal, though it is equally true that men can suffer and have suffered the most excruciating pain for the sake of what they have believed to be good. Thus the two facts of moral and physical evil stand out prominent in the life of Nature. Nor can the relativity of evil and the presence of forces that tend to transmute it be a source of consolation to us; for, in spite of all this relativity and transmutation, there is something terribly positive about it. How is it, then, possible to reconcile the goodness and omnipotence of God with the immense volume of evil in His creation? This painful problem is really the crux of Theism. No modern writer has put it more accurately than Naümann in his Briefe überg Religion. “We possess”, he says: 44 
a knowledge of the world which teaches us a God of power and strength, who sends out life and death as simultaneously as shadow and light, and a revelation, a faith as to salvation which declares the same God to be father. The following of the world-God produces the morality of the struggle for existence, and the service of the Father of 
Jesus Christ produces the morality of compassion. And yet they are not 
two gods, but one God. Somehow or other, their arms intertwine. 
Only no mortal can say where and how this occurs. 
To the optimist Browning all is well with the world;45 to the pessimist Schopenhauer the world is one perpetual winter wherein a blind will expresses itself in an infinite variety of living things which bemoan their emergence for a moment and then disappear forever.46 The issue thus raised between optimism and pessimism cannot be finally decided at the present stage of our knowledge of the universe. Our intellectual constitution is such that we can take only a piecemeal view of things. We cannot understand the full import of the great cosmic forces which work havoc, and at the same time sustain and amplify life. The teaching of the Qur’an, which believes in the possibility of improvement in the behaviour of man and his control over natural forces, is neither optimism nor pessimism. It is meliorism, which recognizes a growing universe and is animated by the hope of man’s eventual victory over evil. 
But the clue to a better understanding of our difficulty is given in the legend relating to what is called the Fall of Man. In this legend the Qur’an partly retains the ancient symbols, but the legend is materially transformed with a view to put an entirely fresh meaning into it. The Qur’anic method of complete or partial transformation of legends in order to besoul them with new ideas, and thus to adapt them to the advancing spirit of time, is an important point which has nearly always been overlooked both by Muslim and non-Muslim students of Islam. The object of the Qur’an in dealing with these legends is seldom historical; it nearly always aims at giving them a universal moral or philosophical import. And it achieves this object by omitting the names of persons and localities which tend to limit the meaning of a legend by giving it the colour of a specific historical event, and also by deleting details which appear to belong to a different order of feeling. This is not an uncommon method of dealing with legends. It is common in non-religious literature. An instance in point is the legend of Faust, 47 to which the touch of Goethe’s genius has given a wholly new meaning. 
Turning to the legend of the Fall we find it in a variety of forms in the literatures of the ancient world. It is, indeed, 66 The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam impossible to demarcate the stages of its growth, and to set out clearly the various human motives which must have worked in its slow transformation. But confining ourselves to the Semitic form of the myth, it is highly probable that it arose out of the primitive man’s desire to explain to himself the infinite misery of his plight in an uncongenial environment, which abounded in disease and death and obstructed him on all sides in his endeavour to maintain himself. Having no control over the forces of Nature, a pessimistic view of life was perfectly natural to him. Thus, in an old Babylonian inscription, we find the serpent (phallic symbol), the tree, and the woman offering an apple (symbol of virginity) to the man. The meaning of the myth is clear– the fall of man from a supposed state of bliss was due to the original sexual act of the human pair. The way in which the Qur’an handles this legend becomes clear when we compare it with the narration of the Book of Genesis.48 The remarkable points of difference between the Qur’anic and the Biblical narrations suggest unmistakably the purpose of the Qur’anic narration. 
1. The Qur’an omits the serpent and the rib-story altogether. The former omission is obviously meant to free the story from its phallic setting and its original suggestion of a pessimistic view of life. The latter omission is meant to suggest that the purpose of the Qur’anic narration is not historical, as in the case of the Old Testament, which gives us an account of the origin of the first human pair by way of a prelude to the history of Israel. Indeed, in the verses which deal with the origin of man as a living being, the Qur’an uses the words Bashar or Ins.n, not Adam, which it reserves for man in his capacity of God’s vicegerent on earth. 49 The purpose of the Qur’an is further secured by the omission of proper names mentioned in the Biblical narration– Adam and Eve.50 The word Adam is retained and used more as a concept than as the name of a concrete human individual. This use of the word is not without authority in the Qur’an itself. The following verse is clear on the point: 
We created you; then fashioned you; then said We to the angels, ‘prostrate yourself unto Adam’ (7: 11). 
2. 
The Qur’an splits up the legend into two distinct episodes– the one relating to what it describes simply as “the 

tree”51 and the other relating to the “tree of eternity” and the “kingdom that faileth not.” 52 The first episode is mentioned in the 7th and the second in the 20th S.rah of the Qur’an. According to the Qur’an, Adam and his wife, led astray by Satan whose function is to create doubts in the minds of men, tasted the fruit of both the trees, whereas according to the Old Testament man was driven out of the Garden of Eden immediately after his first act of disobedience, and God placed, at the eastern side of the garden, angels and a flaming sword, turning on all sides, to keep the way to the tree of life.53 

3.
 The Old Testament curses the earth for Adam’s act of disobedience;54 the Qur’an declares the earth to be the “dwelling place” of man and a “source of profit” to him55 for the possession of which he ought to be grateful to God. 


And We have established you on the earth and given you therein the 
supports of life. How little do ye give thanks! (7: 10). 56 Nor is there any reason to suppose that the word Jannat (garden) as used here means the supersensual paradise from which man is supposed to have fallen on this earth. According to the Qur’an, man is not a stranger on this earth. “And We have caused you to grow from the earth”, says the Qur’an.57 The Jannat, mentioned in the legend, cannot mean the eternal abode of the righteous. In the sense of the eternal abode of the righteous, Jannat is described by the Qur’an to be the place “wherein the righteous will pass to one another the cup which shall engender no light discourse, no motive to sin.”58 It is further described to be the place “wherein no weariness shall reach the righteous, nor forth from it shall they be cast.”59 In the Jannat mentioned in the legend, however, the very first event that took place was man’s sin of disobedience followed by his expulsion. In fact, the Qur’an itself explains the meaning of the word as used in its own narration. In the second episode of the legend the garden is described as a place “where there is neither hunger, nor thirst, neither heat nor nakedness.”60 I am, therefore, inclined to think that the Jannat in the Qur’anic narration is the conception of a primitive state in which man is practically unrelated to his environment and consequently does not feel the sting of human wants the birth of which alone marks the beginning of human culture. 
Thus we see that the Qur’anic legend of the Fall has nothing to do with the first appearance of man on this planet. Its purpose is rather to indicate man’s rise from a primitive state of instinctive appetite to the conscious possession of a free self, capable of doubt and disobedience. The Fall does not mean any moral depravity; it is man’s transition from simple consciousness to the first flash of self-consciousness, a kind of waking from the dream of nature with a throb of personal causality in one’s own being. Nor does the Qur’an regard the earth as a torture-hall where an elementally wicked humanity is imprisoned for an original act of sin. Man’s first act of disobedience was also his first act of free choice; and that is why, according to the Qur’anic narration, Adam’s first transgression was forgiven.61 Now goodness is not a matter of compulsion; it is the self’s free surrender to the moral ideal and arises out of a willing co-operation of free egos. A being whose movements are wholly determined like a machine cannot produce goodness. Freedom is thus a condition of goodness. But to permit the emergence of a finite ego who has the power to choose, after considering the relative values of several courses of action open to him, is really to take a great risk; for the freedom to choose good involves also the freedom to choose what is the opposite of good. That God has taken this risk shows His immense faith in man; it is for man now to justify this faith. Perhaps such a risk alone makes it possible to test and develop the potentialities of a being who was created of the “goodliest fabric” and then “brought down to be the lowest of the low.”62 As the Qur’an says: “And for trial will We test you with evil and with good” (21: 35).63 Good and evil, therefore, though opposites, must fall within the same whole. There is no such thing as an isolated fact; for facts are systematic wholes the elements of which must be understood by mutual reference. Logical judgement separates the elements of a fact only to reveal their interdependence. 
Further, it is the nature of the self to maintain itself as a self. For this purpose it seeks knowledge, self-multiplication, and power, or, in the words of the Qur’an, “the kingdom that never faileth.” The first episode in the Qur’anic legend relates to man’s desire for knowledge, the second to his desire for self-multiplication and power. In connexion with the first episode it is necessary to point out two things. Firstly, the episode is mentioned immediately after the verses describing Adam’s superiority over the angels in remembering and reproducing the names of things. 64 The purpose of these verses, as I have shown before, is to bring out the conceptual character of human The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer knowledge.65 Secondly, Madame Blavatsky66 who possessed a remarkable knowledge of ancient symbolism, tells us in her book, called Secret Doctrine, that with the ancients the tree was a cryptic symbol for occult knowledge. Adam was forbidden to taste the fruit of this tree obviously because his finitude as a self, his sense-equipment, and his intellectual faculties were, on the whole, attuned to a different type of knowledge, i.e. the type of knowledge which necessitates the toil of patient observation and admits only of slow accumulation. Satan, however, persuaded him to eat the forbidden fruit of occult knowledge and Adam yielded, not because he was elementally wicked, but because being “asty” (‘Aj.l)67 by nature he sought a short cut to knowledge. The only way to correct this tendency was to place him in an environment which, however painful, was better suited to the unfolding of his intellectual faculties. Thus Adam’s insertion into a painful physical environment was not meant as a punishment; it was meant rather to defeat the object of Satan who, as an enemy of man, diplomatically tried to keep him ignorant of the joy of perpetual growth and expansion. But the life of a finite ego in an obstructing environment depends on the perpetual expansion of knowledge based on actual experience. And the experience of a finite ego to whom several possibilities are open expands only by method of trial and error. Therefore, error which may be described as a kind of intellectual evil is an indispensable factor in the building up of experience. 
The second episode of the Qur’anic legend is as follows: 
But Satan whispered him (Adam): said he, O Adam! shall I show thee the tree of Eternity and the Kingdom that faileth not? And they both ate thereof, and their nakedness appeared to them, and they began to sew of the leaves of the garden to cover them, and Adam disobeyed his Lord, and went astray. Afterwards his Lord chose him for Himself, and was turned towards him, and guided him. (20: 120-22). 
The central idea here is to suggest life’s irresistible desire for a lasting dominion, an infinite career as a concrete individual. As a temporal being, fearing the termination of its career by death, the only course open to it is to achieve a kind of collective immortality by self-multiplication. The eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of eternity is life’s resort to sex-differentiation by which it multiplies itself with a view to circumvent total extinction. It is as if life says to death: “If you sweep away one generation of living things, I will produce another”. The Qur’an rejects the phallic symbolism of ancient art, but suggests the original sexual act by the birth of the sense of shame disclosed in Adam’s anxiety to cover the nakedness of his body. Now to live is to possess a definite outline, a concrete individuality. It is in the concrete individuality, manifested in the countless varieties of living forms that the Ultimate Ego reveals the infinite wealth of His Being. Yet the emergence and multiplication of indi­vidualities, each fixing its gaze on the revelation of its own possibilities and seeking its own dominion, inevitably brings in its wake the awful struggle of ages. “Descend ye as enemies of one another”, says the Qur’an.68 This mutual conflict of opposing individualities is the world-pain which both illuminates and darkens the temporal career of life. In the case of man in whom individuality deepens into personality, opening up possibilities of wrongdoing, the sense of the tragedy of life becomes much more acute. But the acceptance of selfhood as a form of life involves the acceptance of all the imperfections that flow from the finitude of selfhood. The Qur’an represents man as having accepted at his peril the trust of personality which the heavens, the earth, and the mountains refused to bear: 
Verily We proposed to the heavens and to the earth and to the mountains to receive the “trust” but they refused the burden and they feared to receive it. Man undertook to bear it, but hath proved unjust, senseless! (33: 72). 
Shall we, then, say no or yes to the trust of personality with all its attendant ills? True manhood, according to the Qur’an, consists in “patience under ills and hardships.”69 At the present stage of the evolution of selfhood, however, we cannot understand the full import of the discipline which the driving power of pain brings. Perhaps it hardens the self against a possible dissolution. But in asking the above question we are passing the boundaries of pure thought. This is the point where faith in the eventual triumph of goodness emerges as a religious doctrine. “God is equal to His purpose, but most men know it not.” (12: 2 1). 
I have now explained to you how it is possible philosophically to justify the Islamic conception of God. But as I have said before, religious ambition soars higher than the ambition of The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer philosophy.70 Religion is not satisfied with mere conception; it seeks a more intimate knowledge of and association with the object of its pursuit. The agency through which this association is achieved is the act of worship or prayer ending in spiritual illumination. The act of worship, however, affects different varieties of consciousness differently. In the case of the prophetic consciousness it is in the main creative, i.e. it tends to create a fresh ethical world wherein the Prophet, so to speak, applies the pragmatic test to his revelations. I shall further develop this point in my lecture on the meaning of Muslim Culture.71 In the case of the mystic consciousness it is in the main cognitive. It is from this cognitive point of view that I will try to discover the meaning of prayer. And this point of view is perfectly justifiable in view of the ultimate motive of prayer. I would draw your attention to the following passage from the great American psychologist, Professor William James:72 
It seems probable that in spite of all that “science” may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius [its “great companion”] in an ideal world. ....most men, either continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the abyss of horror. I say “for most of us”, because it is probable that individuals differ a good deal in the degree in which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal spectator. It is a much more essential part of the consciousness of some men than of others. Those who have the most of it are possibly the most religious men. But I am sure that even those who say they are altogether without it deceive themselves, and really have it in some degree. 
Thus you will see that, psychologically speaking, prayer is instinctive in its origin. The act of prayer as aiming at knowledge resembles reflection. Yet prayer at its highest is much more than abstract reflection. Like reflection it too is a process of assimilation, but the assimilative process in the case of prayer