could not realise this point due to his objective approach. In the same way, as he presents the stratification of space, he gives different varieties of time relative to varying grades of beings.

The time of the gross bodies is serial-divisible into past, present and future. Its nature is such that as long as one day does not pass away the succeeding day does not appear. 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. The highest scale we have in the Divine Time, that is, absolutely free from the quality of passage and does not admit of divisibility, sequence and change. It has neither beginning nor end; it is above eternity.

History is regarded as days of God. It is the most essential teachings of the Quran that nations are collectively judged and suffer for their misdeeds here and now. According to the Quran, every nation has its fixed period. God’s judgment on nations is said to be more relentless than God’s judgment on individuals. When a nation perishes, its good members meet the same doom as its bad ones, for the former failed to check the spread of evil.

History has given us the most fundamental principle of historical criticism. Accuracy of facts is an important condition of history and it depends on the reporter’s personal character. The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason and finally a fuller realisation of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.

kill the broad human element in the art and literature of Europe. On the other hand, the aim of Islam as a social movement was to make the idea a living factor in the Muslim’s daily life.

Spengler’s main thesis is that each culture is a specific organism, having no point of contact with cultures that historically precede or follow it. He shows in his thesis that the spirit of European culture is ‘anticlassical’. This is entirely due to the specific genius of Europe and not to any inspiration it may have received from the culture of Islam. The anticlassical spirit of the modern world has really arisen out of the revolt of Islam against Greek mythology. According to him, a Magian crust has grown over Islam. "Magian culture" means the common culture associated with what he calls "Magian group of religions"—Judaism, ancient Chaldean religion, early Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam.

Iqbal’s main purpose in the lectures has been to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from its Magian overlaying, which have misled Spengler instead of seeking light from the history of Muslim thought and experience, he preferred to base his judgment on vulgar beliefs as to the beginning and end of time. According to Magian religion, there is a struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, with the power of evil prevailing in the middle period and the good finally triumphant on the Day of Judgment.

According to Iqbal, The ultimate ideal has its source in God and is directed towards God and is universal. Hence, it resolves all petty interests and selfish motives, knitting individuals into a most living unity.

When Muadh was appointed ruler of Yemen, the Prophet asked him as to how he would decide matters coming up before him. Muadh replied, "I will judge matters according to the Quran." ‘But if the Quran contains nothing to guide you," asked the Prophet. "Then I will act on the precedents of the Prophet of God," said Muadh. "But if the precedents fail," the Prophet questioned again. "Then I will exert to form my own judgment," answered the governor.

Iqbal expressed his views deeply regarding the first degree of Ijthihad. Sunnis had accepted the theoretical possibility of the first degree, but in practice it has always been denied ever since the establishment of the schools. This attitude is entirely against the dynamic outlook on life expressed by the Quran.

There are certain reasons of this intellectual attitude that have reduced the law of Islam practically to a state of immobility.

Personal revelation can bring living conviction and not the pure reason. The reason that pure thought has little influence upon men, while religion has always elevated individuals and transformed societies as a whole. The idealism of Europe never became a living factor in her life and the result is a perverted ego, seeking itself through mutually intolerant democracies whose sole function is to exploit the poor in the interest of the rich.

Europe today is the greatest hinderance in the way of man’s ethical advancement. Muslims have these ultimate ideas on the basis of revelation and with him the spiritual basis of life is a matter of conviction. Muslims ought to be spiritually one of the most emancipated peoples on the earth. Muslims today should appreciate their position, reconstruct their social life in the light of ultimate principles and evolve the spiritual democracy being the ultimate aim of Islam out of the partially revealed purpose of Islam. It is not a life of self-negation and self-effacement that is to be aimed at but a life full of struggle and creative activity directed towards the absorption of Divine attributes that leads ultimately to the perfection of the self and immortality.

Sense experience and intellectual pursuits, meditation and intuition, love and prayer, all characterise this struggle and creative activities. It is through this approach that Iqbal tries to lead society from a state of confusion and conflict to one of order and harmony from the realm of illusions to the kingdom of truth, from the chaotic whirl of appearance to stability within and outside.

We do not grow up in a finished world. The universe itself is growing and dynamic and we fully participate in its growth. For this purpose we need power and vision, both of which give not only life and vitality but restore that faith and hope which bring to life the greatest depth and ceaseless activity, well enlightened by and directed towards its source of the ideal God.

of God is achieved gradually through a definite course, only as religious consciousness expands in intensity and richness. Religion is not to be confused with mysticism. Higher religion is only a search for a higher life. It is essentially an experience, recognising the necessity of experience as its foundation, long before science came to practice. It is a genuine effort to clarify the human consciousness.

In the third period, metaphysics is displaced by psychology, and religious life develops the ambition to come into direct contact with the ultimate reality. Here religion becomes a matter of personal assimilation of life and power and the individual achieved a free personality not by releasing himself from the fetters of law, but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness. According to a Muslim Sufi: "No understanding of the Quran is possible until it is actually revealed to the believer just as it was revealed to Prophet. Unless the Book’s each verse and part, be revealed unto your heart, Interpreters though much profound, its subtle points cannot expound."

The Book is not imposed as something external but is revealed to a prophet. It belongs to the period of discovery or intuition. According to a Muslim Sufi philosopher: "God is a percept; the world is a concept." The external world is only an intellectual construction and that there are other levels of human experience capable of being systematised by other orders of space and time. These levels are in which concept and analysis do not play the same role as they do in the case of our normal experience. The level of experience to which concepts are inapplicable cannot generate any knowledge of a universal character because concepts alone are Nasiha Begum The Dialogue capable of being socialised. The standpoint of a man who relies on religious experience for capturing reality must always remain individual and incommunicable. It does not mean that the religious man’s pursuit is futile. In fact, the incommunicability of religious experience gives us a clue to the ultimate nature of the ego. Conservatism is very bad in religion because it shatters the ego’s creative freedom and closes up the paths of fresh spiritual enterprise. That is why the medieval mystic techniques can no longer produce original discoveries of ancient truths.

Religion in its higher manifestation does not imply a life denying and fact-avoiding attitude. It does not work as an external imposition on the free and spontaneous expression of human personality. On the contrary, it opens fresh and more fruitful direction to communicate with the ultimately real. It awakens and actualises the level lying close to the normal level, directing one’s vision to the inner side of the self. It regenerates the inner powers and possibilities of the human self. It expands and enriches the fields of human thought and emotion. It unlocks fresh spiritual sources. It confers upon man the power to overcome his intellectual reconstruction and to penetrate through the crust of causal sequence. It enables man to come into contact with the everlasting and eternal source of life and power.

We treat individuals as mere functions and do not try to reach the inmost individuality of men. The climax of religious life is the discovery of the ego as an individual deeper than his conceptually describable habitual selfhood. It is in contact with the ‘most real’ that the ego discovers its uniqueness, its metaphysical status and the possibility of improvement in that status. The experience that leads to this discovery is not a conceptually manageable intellectual fact, but a vital fact, and attitude consequent on an inner biological transformation cannot be captured in the net of logical categories.

The method of dealing with reality by means of concepts is not at all a serious way of dealing with it. Religion, being the mode of actual living, is the only serious way of handling reality. As a form of higher experience it is corrective of our concepts of philosophical theology or at least makes us suspicious of the purely rational process which forms these concepts.

Science can afford to ignore metaphysics altogether but religion cannot. There are potential types of consciousness, lying close to our Islam and Reconstruction of Religious Thought The Dialogue normal consciousness. If these types of consciousness open up possibilities of life giving and knowledge yielding experience, then religion as a form of higher experience is possible.

Every culture has a form of naturalism and every form of it ends in some sort of atomism. The ‘ultimate reality’ is knocking at the door of our conscience from other directions as well. The modern man’s naturalism has given him an unprecedented control over the forces of nature but has robbed him of faith in his own future. The modern man has ceased to live from within due to results of his intellectual activity. In the domain of thought he is living in open conflict with himself and in the domain of economic and political life he is living in open conflict with others. He is entirely cut off from the depths of his own being. The technique of medieval mysticism has taught man self-denial and made him perfectly satisfied with his ignorance and spiritual slavery instead of reintegrating the forces of the average man’s inner life and preparing him for being participant of history. Modern Muslim is busy in seeking fresh sources of energy in patriotism and nationalism that is sickness and the strongest force against culture.

Neither the technique of medieval mysticism, nor nationalism, nor atheistic socialism can cure ills of a despairing humanity. The modern world stands in need of biological renewal. Religion can alone ethically prepare the modern man for the greatest responsibility of scientific advancement and restore to him that attitude of faith is capable of winning a personality here and retaining it hereafter. It is only by rising to a fresh vision of his origin and future that man will eventually triumph over a society motivated by an inhuman competition and a civilisation that has lost its spiritual unity due to its inner conflict of religious and political values.

Our modern psychology has left us stand in a very deplorable condition about the nature of the religion. The result of these modern psychological theories is that religion does not relate the human ego, to any objective reality beyond oneself. It is a kind of biological device. Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego’s evolution. The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make the ego’s evolution towards the destiny of the ego. Higher religious life concentrating on special experiences of reality seriously affects the destiny of ego as a possible permanent element in the constitution of reality. The modern psychology has not yet touched even the outer fringe of religious life and is still far from religious experience.

Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi does not take intuition as the spiritual experience that at its highest stage leads to complete extinction and effacement of every finite existence and to complete absorption of the finite self into the all-comprehensive reality of God. The picture of such an experience is presented in the experience of Abdul Momin, which is described as follows:

"Would that he had lived in Ahmed’s time,

So that he might have attained eternal joy." Islam and Reconstruction of Religious Thought The Dialogue 88

And he himself could be Nietzsche’s spiritual mentor, were he be in Iqbal’s times:

A distinction must be made between experience as significant of the normally observable behavior of reality and experience that of the inner nature of reality. In the domain of science, its meaning is realized in reference to the external behavior of reality, while in the domain of religion it is taken as representative of some kind of reality and its meanings in reference mainly to the inner nature of that reality is discovered. The practical student of religious psychology has a keen sense of objectivity as that of the scientist in his own sphere of objectivity. Working as a critical analyst of experience strives to eliminate all subjective elements with a view finally to reach the absolute objective.

This final experience is the revelation of a new life process, which is original, essential and spontaneous. The eternal secret of the ego is that the moment he reaches this final revelation he recognizes it as the ultimate root of his being.

For Iqbal this growth and development is determined from within. It reveals the element of self-guidance and directive control in man. It discloses that the finite ego lives in pure duration, which implies that it is not fettered by the serial time, but is a creative and purposive reality. Elements of mystery and emotions are absolutely lacking in the religious experience. To secure a wholly non-emotional experience, the use of music in worship is forbidden and to Nasiha Begum The Dialogue emphasize the necessity of daily congregational prayers in order to counteract the possible anti-social effects of solitary contemplation.

The religious experience is perfectly nature and possesses a biological significance of the highest importance to the ego. The only danger to the ego in the Divine quest is the possible relaxation of his activity, caused by his enjoyment of and absorption in the preceding experiences.

The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something. It is in the ego’s effort to be something that he discovers his final opportunity to sharpen his objectivity and acquire a more fundamental "I am". Iqbal’s intuition promises to give the direct vision of the being. It promises to bring man face to face with the very essence of God.

The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation from the limitations of individuality. It is, on the other hand, a more precise definition of it. The final act is not an intellectual act, but a vital act deepens the whole being of the ego and sharpens his will with the creative assurance that the world is not something to be merely seen or known through concepts, but something to be made and remade by continuous action. It is a moment of supreme bliss and also a moment of the greatest trial for the ego.

According to Iqbal, we must participate in growth of the universe. This approach is essential for bringing man into touch with the everlasting fountain of life and power and for giving that vision which is essential for resolving all conflicts, inner and outer, in the socio-political domain, which is not possible without internalizing every apparent externality. It raises humanity above bondage and division, internal and external conflicts and all painful opposition; and it is so because it is based upon true and living experience, the religious experience.