Iqbal's Defense of the Prophet ﷺ

In a speech at the Aristotelian Society in London, Allamah Muhammad Iqbal defended accusations that the Prophet ﷺ was a madman or psychopath with this statement:

Muhammad, we are told, was a psychopath. Well, if a psychopath has the power to give a fresh direction to the course of human history, it is a point of the highest psychological interest to search his original experience which has turned slaves into leaders of men, and has inspired the conduct and shaped the career of whole races of mankind.

Judging from the various types of activity that emanated from the movement initiated by the Prophet of Islam, his spiritual tension and the kind of behaviour which issued from it, cannot be regarded as a response to a mere fantasy inside his brain. It is impossible to understand it except as a response to an objective situation generative of new enthusiasms, new organizations, new starting-points.

Iqbal’s defends the honor of the Holy Prophet ﷺ by pointing to an essential point: the civilization of Islam transformed human history. It introduced new modes of thinking in every science, from law, moral philosophy, politics, and more. It didn’t just borrow Greek thought, change it slightly, and pass it on. Instead, for Iqbal, the hallmark of its civilization was “the intellectual revolt of Islam against Greek philosophy.” And, to Iqbal, that intellectual revolt was not an organic growth of historical context; rather, it was a radical shift in thinking that resulted from the very ethos of the Quranic revelation.

“The Qur‘an,” Iqbal begins in his preface to the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, “is a book which emphasizes ‘deed‘ rather than ‘idea.’”

To Iqbal, that ethos of action drew Islamic thought into conflict with the parts of Greek tradition, mostly dominated by Platonic thought, that was prevalent in the ancient world leading up to Islam. Indeed, Christian thinkers much favored Plato’s more imaginative and abstract method over Aristotle’s method that was grounded in mutually intelligible everyday experience. It wasn’t until the advancements of Muslims across disciplines reached Europe that Aristotle was finally reintroduced and incorporated into the medieval Church tradition. For much of its history, as Nietzsche pointed out, “Christianity is Platonism for the masses.”

However, Muslim thought has been engaged in real-life grounded knowledge building since much before the translations of Aristotle became widely read and incorporated into Muslim thought. The sciences of Quran, hadith, law, theology, language, rhetoric, and prosody engaged in extensive inductive reasoning, bringing together disparate pieces of information in the real world to create categories and organize them into a taxonomy. To Iqbal, Aristotelian thought gave Muslims a systematic language as a framework for what they had already been doing; as Ibn Taymiyyah (RA) points out, one doesn’t need to study logic in order to think logically.

To Iqbal, this mode of thinking – the real-world focused, inductive, action-oriented knowledge production – was the greatest intellectual legacy of Muslim civilization which challenged prevailing philosophical milieus of the time. Its transference to the Latin speaking world created a revolution in thought in Western Europe, one which eventually led to the scientific revolution.

How does all this tie back into the Iqbal’s defense of the Prophet ﷺ? To Iqbal, Muslim civilization’s radical revolt against Greek thought was not a natural progression of historical process; illiterate Arab tribesmen could not singlehandedly transform the world’s philosophical milieu without some kind of direction that then shaped the rest of human history. That direction had to be otherworldly, and its otherworldliness was centered around the person of the Prophet ﷺ.

An atheist might reject God; but he cannot reject the grandeur of the man who transformed the world.

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