{"id":2930,"date":"2026-05-06T00:59:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T00:59:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?p=2930"},"modified":"2026-05-06T01:01:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T01:01:26","slug":"predicament-iqbal-or-iqbals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?p=2930","title":{"rendered":"Predicament: Iqbal or Iqbal\u2019s?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"2930\" class=\"elementor elementor-2930\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-6e80296a elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"6e80296a\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-209b1b\" data-id=\"209b1b\" 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.elementor-heading-title.elementor-size-xxl{font-size:59px}<\/style><h1 class=\"elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default\">Predicament: Iqbal or Iqbal\u2019s?<\/h1>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-e712b59 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"e712b59\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-621b9945\" data-id=\"621b9945\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-26cf697b elementor-widget elementor-widget-post-info\" data-id=\"26cf697b\" 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d=\"M0,30.15c0-6.34,5.14-11.49,11.49-11.49s11.49,5.14,11.49,11.49h-2.87c0-4.76-3.86-8.61-8.61-8.61S2.87,25.39,2.87,30.15H0Zm11.49-12.92c-4.76,0-8.61-3.86-8.61-8.61S6.73,0,11.49,0s8.61,3.86,8.61,8.61-3.86,8.61-8.61,8.61Zm0-2.87c3.17,0,5.74-2.57,5.74-5.74s-2.57-5.74-5.74-5.74-5.74,2.57-5.74,5.74,2.57,5.74,5.74,5.74Z\"><\/path><\/g><\/svg>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"elementor-icon-list-text elementor-post-info__item elementor-post-info__item--type-author\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAdnan Mahmud\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t<\/ul>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-73feac8 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con\" data-id=\"73feac8\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-settings=\"{&quot;content_width&quot;:&quot;boxed&quot;}\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-1d6c5a2 e-con-full e-flex e-con\" data-id=\"1d6c5a2\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-settings=\"{&quot;background_background&quot;:&quot;classic&quot;,&quot;content_width&quot;:&quot;full&quot;}\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-5666a67 elementor-widget elementor-widget-heading\" data-id=\"5666a67\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"heading.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t<p class=\"elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default\">Summary<\/p>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-770b167 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"770b167\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t<style>\/*! elementor - v3.14.0 - 26-06-2023 *\/\n.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-stacked .elementor-drop-cap{background-color:#69727d;color:#fff}.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-framed .elementor-drop-cap{color:#69727d;border:3px solid;background-color:transparent}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap{margin-top:8px}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap-letter{width:1em;height:1em}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap{float:left;text-align:center;line-height:1;font-size:50px}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap-letter{display:inline-block}<\/style>\t\t\t\t<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span data-path-to-node=\"2,0\">This article explores the tension between <b data-path-to-node=\"2,0\" data-index-in-node=\"42\">Muhammad Iqbal\u2019s<\/b> philological inaccuracies and his historical role as a catalyst for <b data-path-to-node=\"2,0\" data-index-in-node=\"127\">Muslim selfhood<\/b><\/span><span data-path-to-node=\"2,2\">. While Muhammad Faruque identifies systematic misreadings of premodern thinkers like al-J\u012bl\u012b and B\u012bdil, the author argues these &#8220;creative misreadings&#8221; were necessary to address the <b data-path-to-node=\"2,2\" data-index-in-node=\"182\">socio-existential crisis<\/b> of a colonized intelligentsia<\/span><span data-path-to-node=\"2,4\">. By framing Iqbal&#8217;s work through the &#8220;anxiety of influence,&#8221; the text suggests his departures from tradition were intentional &#8220;swerves&#8221; aimed at rendering Islamic thought intelligible within a <b data-path-to-node=\"2,4\" data-index-in-node=\"194\">modern European conceptual framework<\/b><\/span><span data-path-to-node=\"2,6\">. Ultimately, the piece posits that Iqbal\u2019s philosophical value lies not in his fidelity to the past, but in his attempt to reconstitute an identity under conditions of <b data-path-to-node=\"2,6\" data-index-in-node=\"169\">epistemic colonialism<\/b><\/span><span data-path-to-node=\"2,8\">.<\/span><\/p><p style=\"text-align: right;\">\u00a0<span style=\"background-color: #aa8664; font-family: 'Nanum Gothic Coding', sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: white;\">\u00a0\u00a0\u24d8 This summary is generated by Ai\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-79ca75c9 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"79ca75c9\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-43557d5a\" data-id=\"43557d5a\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-0d0d32b elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"0d0d32b\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p>When Muhammad Iqbal passed away in 1938, he left behind a legacy that continues to perplex scholars working on different eras across the spectrum of Islamic intellectual history. Regarded by some as the most significant Muslim philosopher-poet of the twentieth century, Iqbal has been subject to what can only be described as hagiographic veneration in South Asian scholarship. This uncritical reverence is characteristic of intellectuals who, grappling with the stark realities of their postcolonial condition, were compelled to project or forge a stabilizing identity within geopolitical contexts of nationalist hostility and material scarcity. Yet this very adulation has, paradoxically, impeded serious critical engagement with his work.<\/p><p>In this context, Muhammad Faruque\u2019s contemporary intervention, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/article\/857282\/pdf\">The Crisis of Modern Subjectivity: Rethinking Muhammad Iqb\u0101l and the Islamic Tradition<\/a>,\u201d represents a rare and necessary corrective to this unscholarly tendency. Faruque\u2019s examination of Iqbal\u2019s engagement with premodern Islamic thinkers (particularly his readings of \u02bfAbd al-Kar\u012bm al-J\u012bl\u012b, \u02bfAbd al-Q\u0101dir B\u012bdil, and Ma\u1e25m\u016bd Shabistar\u012b) reveals what he identifies as a pattern of philological error and anachronistic projection that calls into question Iqbal\u2019s credentials as a reliable interpreter of the Islamic intellectual tradition. The central thrust of Faruque\u2019s argument is deceptively simple but potentially devastating in its implications: Iqbal\u2019s much-vaunted \u201creconstruction\u201d of Islamic thought is built upon systematic misreadings of the very tradition he claims to represent; these \u201cmisconstructions\u201d are so fundamental that they undermine Iqbal\u2019s authority as a reformer altogether.<\/p><p>The evidence Faruque marshals is striking in its specificity. When Iqbal engages with al-J\u012bl\u012b\u2019s concept of the perfect human (<em>al-ins\u0101n al-k\u0101mil<\/em>), Faruque documents how he conflates distinct technical terms, mistranslates the fundamental Sufi concept of <em>tajall\u012b<\/em> as \u201cillumination\u201d rather than \u201cself-disclosure\u201d or \u201cmanifestation,\u201d and imports Hegelian categories such as \u201cPure Thought\u201d that have no basis in al-J\u012bl\u012b\u2019s text (51\u201352). These are not mere quibbles about translation choices but categorical errors that fundamentally distort the metaphysical architecture of al-J\u012bl\u012b\u2019s thought. Similarly, Faruque argues that Iqbal\u2019s reading of B\u012bdil through the lens of Bergson\u2019s philosophy of duration and <em>\u00e9lan vital<\/em> imposes a framework so alien onto the text that what emerges is a figure barely recognizable as the historical B\u012bdil (71). Perhaps most problematically, Iqbal\u2019s characterization of the Sufi concept of <em>fan\u0101\u02be<\/em> (annihilation of the self) as \u201cself-negation\u201d or \u201cabsorption in the Universal self of God\u201d represents what Faruque identifies, through careful textual analysis, as a fundamental misunderstanding of terminology that is simply absent from the Sufi lexicon in this form (52). This is because concepts such as negation or absorption are hardly found in Sufi discussions of <em>fan\u0101\u02be<\/em>, which denotes a complex progressive process of spiritual transformation rather than a simple erasure of individuality (52; 67\u201368). When one considers that Iqbal\u2019s virtually eponymous philosophy of <em>kh\u016bd\u012b<\/em> (selfhood) is constructed in explicit opposition to this particular construal of <em>fan\u0101\u02be <\/em>as ontological privation, the implications of Faruque\u2019s critique become clear: if his analysis is correct, the central pillar of Iqbal\u2019s philosophical edifice, namely, the search for selfhood, rests upon a foundation of misunderstanding.<\/p><p>Yet Faruque\u2019s critique extends beyond identifying such conceptual errors to interrogating Iqbal\u2019s methodology itself. The predicament, according to Faruque\u2019s analysis, is Iqbal\u2019s consistent tendency to read premodern Islamic texts through the lens of modern European philosophy rather than attempting to understand them on their own terms (57; 71). This approach is not merely methodologically questionable but represents what might be termed \u201cinterpretive colonialism\u201d: a framework in which a premodern Islamic text is denied its own voice, conceptual apparatus, and internal logic, and instead conscripted into service as a mere anticipation of Western modernity. Faruque supports this charge by noting that Iqbal reads \u201cB\u012bdil in light of Bergson, al-J\u012bl\u012b in light of Hegel, selfhood and consciousness in relation to Einstein\u2019s physics, and Sufism in conversation with Nietzsche\u201d (71). The irony that Faruque purports to identify is profound (and perhaps Shakespearean in its tragedy): writing explicitly to restore Muslim intellectual confidence in the face of colonial subjugation, Iqbal adopts a hermeneutic strategy that tacitly accepts the colonial narrative wherein \u201creal\u201d philosophy only happens in the West, and Islamic thought can only be validated by demonstrating that it somehow prefigured Western achievements (57). Faruque finds confirmation of this tendency in Iqbal\u2019s own admission that most of his \u201clife has been spent in the study of European philosophy and that viewpoint has become [his] second nature\u201d (qtd. in Faruque 49; see Iqbal, <em>Shikwa<\/em> 8). Crucially, Faruque is careful to note that his article \u201cdoes not attempt to discredit all of Iqbal\u2019s intellectual achievements or dismiss them out of hand,\u201d but rather intends \u201cto critically assess his ideas within the broader context of Islamic intellectual history\u201d (49).<\/p><p>The implications of Faruque\u2019s critique, though rightfully provocative to a stagnant and one-dimensional Iqbalian scholarship, are perhaps not as far-reaching for the protagonist himself as they appear at first glance. If Iqbal indeed systematically misread the premodern Islamic tradition and his translations are philologically untenable, what remains of his mantle as the \u2018reconstructor\u2019 of Islamic thought? To secure the claim of his enduring relevance, one must recognize that Iqbal\u2019s work serves as a profound hermeneutic map of the anxieties and aspirations defining the colonized Muslim intelligentsia of the early twentieth century. It is precisely in this historical situatedness that his work offers its most potent guidance for the contemporary Muslim subject, whether situated within the Western metropole, the transnational diaspora, or the traditional heartlands of the East.<\/p><p>It is here that the distinction animating this article\u2019s title demands articulation. The phrase \u2018Iqbal or Iqbal\u2019s\u2019 embodies a substantive bifurcation of two discrete intellectual predicaments that are often conflated. The first\u2014Iqbal Predicament\u2014is the question Faruque addresses with considerable philological rigour: was Iqbal a competent and faithful reader of the premodern Islamic intellectual tradition that he claimed to re-construct? So, did he understand al-J\u012bl\u012b on al-J\u012bl\u012b\u2019s terms, Shabistar\u012b on Shabistar\u012b\u2019s terms, and <em>fan\u0101\u02be<\/em> as the Sufi tradition itself articulated it? Faruque\u2019s answer, as we have seen, is largely negative, and the textual evidence he adduces is not easily dismissed. His critical intervention performs a genuinely necessary service to a field long resistant to such scrutiny. The second predicament, however\u2014Iqbal\u2019s Predicament\u2014is the question that Iqbal himself was labouring to resolve: how does a colonized Muslim intelligentsia reconstitute philosophical selfhood when the very categories through which this selfhood might be articulated have been colonized in advance? In its <em>cor cordium<\/em>, my argument states that these two predicaments, each meaningful in its own context of production, become intelligible only when read alongside one another. Thus, the Iqbal Predicament, pursued without sustained attention to Iqbal\u2019s Predicament, yields an account of the thinker that is philologically sharper but perhaps historically thinner, one better equipped to catalogue how Iqbal misread certain Islamic texts than explain why he bothered to read them at all.<\/p><p>At this juncture, I offer a framework that reviews Iqbal\u2019s relationship to his predecessors through a hermeneutic lens other than that of philological fidelity. Harold Bloom\u2019s theory of poetic influence offers a suggestive analogy. In <em>The Anxiety of Influence<\/em>, Bloom argues that the history of poetry, and, by extension, of intellectual production, is not advanced by dutiful inheritors who reproduce their predecessors faithfully, but by \u2018strong poets\u2019 who achieve originality precisely through their acts of creative misreading. Bloom terms the foundational mechanism of this process <em>clinamen<\/em>, a \u2018corrective movement\u2019 or \u2018poetic swerve\u2019 in which the later poet departs from the precursor not out of ignorance but out of the necessity of clearing up an imaginative space within which something genuinely new might be thought (14; 19\u201349). To be sure, to read Iqbal through this lens is not to excuse the specific philological errors Faruque justly anatomizes (the mistranslation of <em>tajall\u012b<\/em>, the Hegelian interpolation into al-J\u012bl\u012b\u2019s metaphysics, the flattening of <em>fan\u0101\u02be<\/em> into mere \u2018self-negation\u2019) but rather to ask whether these departures might be understood as the conscious or unselfconscious swerves of a thinker who recognised, perhaps more acutely than his critics may allow, that a faithful reproduction of the Sufi tradition as received would not answer the socio-existential crisis confronting his audience. Had Iqbal rendered <em>fan\u0101\u02be<\/em> with the nuance of a Sh\u0101h Wal\u012b All\u0101h by translating it as a complex, progressive interplay of annihilation and subsistence across multiple <em>la\u1e6d\u0101\u02beif<\/em> of consciousness (Faruque 67\u201368), he might indeed have produced a more accurate account, but it is far from certain that such an account would have possessed the rhetorical height and the philosophical depth necessary to galvanise a colonized Muslim population towards what he understood as the urgent work of self-reconstitution.<\/p><p>Crucially, this is not an a apologetical defence of an Iqbalian exceptionalism: precedents for such creative appropriation within the Islamic tradition are not too difficult to locate. As Frank Griffel has demonstrated, Ab\u016b \u1e24\u0101mid al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b\u2019s celebrated demolition of the Aristotelian philosophers in the <em>Tah\u0101fut al-Fal\u0101sifa<\/em> was itself a profoundly transformative engagement: far from simply refuting Avicennan philosophy, al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b retooled and reconfigured many of its core teachings within the apparatus of <em>kal\u0101m<\/em>, producing a new rationalist theology that the <em>fal\u0101sifa<\/em> he ostensibly dismantled would scarcely have recognised as a faithful account of their own positions (97\u2013101). Again, Mull\u0101 \u1e62adr\u0101\u2019s philosophical enterprise involved comparable manoeuvres; as Sajjad Rizvi has demonstrated, \u1e62adr\u0101 engaged in what might be termed creative appropriation, by conducting an \u2018intimate and anxious dialogue\u2019 with his predecessors in which \u2018he boldly attacks every school while he employs all of them in the construction of his own\u2019 (20). The Islamic tradition, then, is not a static monolith but a living palimpsest: new threads are woven into its matrix in dialogical contestation with the preexisting fabric. So, if subjected to the same type of philological scrutiny Faruque applies to Iqbal, the writings of both these figures would reveal comparable tensions between prior source and contemporary appropriation vis-\u00e0-vis their own sociohistorical contexts. This is not to suggest that all such readings are equally productive, nor that philological accountability is dispensable. It is rather to observe that the Islamic intellectual tradition has never advanced solely by means of accurate transmission; it has advanced, in some decisive moments, through acts of interpretive audacity that transformed the inherited material into something its originators may not have consciously intended but their historical moment required. Therefore, to speak aphoristically, fidelity is not the sole criterion of faith.<\/p><p>However, even if one concedes that the Bloomian framework offers a partial vindication of Iqbal\u2019s interpretive liberties, there remains the more disquieting dimension of Faruque\u2019s critique: the charge that Iqbal\u2019s hermeneutical strategy constitutes a form of what we have termed \u201cinterpretive colonialism\u201d, i.e., the subordination of Islamic intellectual categories to European philosophical standards. Faruque quite rightly contends that Iqbal reads \u2018B\u012bdil in light of Bergson, al-J\u012bl\u012b in light of Hegel, selfhood and consciousness in relation to Einstein\u2019s physics, and Sufism in conversation with Nietzsche\u2019 (71); the structural irony that an ostensibly anti-colonial thinker harnesses a thoroughly colonial hermeneutic remains stubbornly undeniable. What this framing does not sufficiently account for, however, is the question of audience. Iqbal was not writing for the <em>\u02bfulam\u0101<\/em> of Deoband or Bareilly, or the Sufi masters of the <em>kh\u0101nq\u0101h<\/em>s; he was consciously writing in English for a Muslim intelligentsia whose intellectual formation was already, irreversibly, European. The <em>Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam<\/em> (delivered originally as a series of lectures in English in Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh) addressed audiences for whom Bergson, Hegel, and Einstein were not foreign impositions but the very conceptual currency of educated discourse, the philosophical air they had been trained to breathe and inhabit. To read al-J\u012bl\u012b through Hegel was, in this context, not necessarily to subordinate the former to the latter; it was a creative attempt to render the former <em>intelligible<\/em> to a readership that had lost\u2014through no fault of its own, but through the systemic epistemicide undertaken by colonial education\u2014the capacity to encounter al-J\u012bl\u012b on his own terms. Iqbal himself seems to have understood this predicament with a lucidity that borders on anguish; his candid acknowledgment that the European viewpoint had become his \u2018second nature\u2019 reads less as an inadvertent confession than as a precise diagnosis of the very condition his philosophy was labouring to overcome. The question, then, is not whether Iqbal\u2019s distinctively European lens distorted the Islamic tradition, but whether any <em>undistorted<\/em> lens was available to a thinker in his position. Given that a translation is always-already an interpretation, the demand that thinkers in the past should have conducted the life of the mind with the vocabulary of our present may subtly enact a kind of anachronism: in this case, the expectation that an intellectual operating within the constraints of colonized milieus should have possessed, in 1926, the emerging decolonial methodological resources that yet remain underdeveloped in 2026.<\/p><p>There is a further dimension to this predicament that extends beyond Iqbal\u2019s particular historical circumstances and touches upon the conditions of interpretive possibility itself. Faruque\u2019s critique operates upon an implicit methodological premise\u2014premodern Islamic texts possess a recoverable core of intrinsic meaning, and Iqbal\u2019s failure consists in his inability or unwillingness to undertake this excavation. The premise is not unreasonable; indeed, it underwrites the entire discipline of intellectual history, but it is perhaps more fraught than Faruque\u2019s analysis allows. Who should (or could) claim to have understood al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b or \u1e62adr\u0101 on their own terms, while presenting their cosmologies in the contemporary terms of our twenty-first-century English idioms? The hermeneutical tradition, from Schleiermacher through Gadamer, has long recognised that no act of interpretation proceeds from a position of methodological innocence; every reader brings to the text what Gadamer terms a <em>Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewu\u00dftsein<\/em>, a historically-effected consciousness, that shapes the encounter before it begins (Gadamer 301\u201310). Iqbal\u2019s own historically-effected consciousness was quite European in its formation. But the question that follows is whether the historically-effected consciousness of contemporary Islamic studies\u2014a discipline that emerged within the institutional structures of Western academia, relies upon categories of periodisation, genre, and intellectual genealogy developed within European historiography, and communicates its findings overwhelmingly in European languages\u2014is as radically different from Iqbal\u2019s as the confidence of the corrective implies. This is emphatically not to suggest that Faruque\u2019s readings of al-J\u012bl\u012b or Shabistar\u012b are themselves compromised by their Anglo-American institutional contexts; his philological work is meticulous and stands on its own merits. It is rather to observe that the demand to read premodern Islamic texts \u2018on their own terms\u2019 is itself a methodological aspiration shaped by particular intellectual conditions; however, these were conditions that Iqbal did not share and that were, in the 1920s, scarcely available to anyone. The discipline that now possesses the tools to identify Iqbal\u2019s errors is, in no small measure, a discipline that Iqbal\u2019s generation of thinkers helped to make necessary. To acknowledge this inheritance is not to diminish the corrective but to resituate it: to recognise that the Iqbal Predicament and Iqbal\u2019s Predicament are not only distinct but historically sequential: our contemporary capacity to delineate the first with scholarly rigour is itself a consequence of the historical fact that the second was inhabited in real-world conditions.<\/p><p>What, then, is the nature of this predicament? Faruque\u2019s article performs an indispensable service: it dismantles the hagiographic insulation that has for too long shielded Iqbal\u2019s engagements with the premodern Islamic tradition from the scrutiny they deserve. The Iqbal Predicament, as we have termed it, has been posed with a precision and scholarly integrity that the field of Islamic Studies cannot afford to ignore, and one hopes that future Iqbalian scholarship will take Faruque\u2019s findings as a point of departure rather than an occasion for defensive retrenchment. However, I have argued that the Iqbal Predicament, if pursued in isolation, produces a portrait that is significantly incomplete. It tells us what Iqbal got wrong about al-J\u012bl\u012b, Shabistar\u012b, and <em>fan\u0101\u02be<\/em>; crucially, it fails to tell us why these particular misreadings took the form they did, yet proved so generative for a colonized Muslim intelligentsia in search of philosophical self-reconstitution, or why the questions Iqbal was attempting to answer remain, nearly a century later, so stubbornly unresolved. So, Iqbal\u2019s own Predicament, namely, the enduring crisis of Muslim subjectivity forged under the conditions of epistemic modernity did not end with Iqbal. The Muslim intellectual, situated today in the Western metropole, who navigates the competing claims of an inherited tradition and a dominant secular epistemology, inhabits a version of the same predicament that drove Iqbal to his admittedly imperfect reconstructions. That the tools now exist to diagnose his errors more precisely than he himself could have done is a mark of genuine scholarly progress; but that the condition he was responding to persists largely unaltered is a reminder that diagnostic precision, however necessary, is not yet a cure. The title of this article poses a disjunction\u2014Iqbal <em>or<\/em> Iqbal\u2019s\u2014but its argument has been that the disjunction is ultimately false. We cannot fully understand what Iqbal got wrong without understanding what he was trying to get right, and we cannot responsibly set aside his answers without first reckoning with the enduring force of his questions. The predicament, in the end, belongs to neither Iqbal alone nor to his critics alone: it is the predicament of anyone who seeks to produce knowledge under conditions that they themselves have not produced.<\/p><p><strong>Acknowledgment: <\/strong><em>I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to Prof. Ankur Barua of the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, whose enduring mentorship and illuminating conversation have shaped this article in ways my organon of articulation cannot adequately repay.<br \/><\/em><\/p><hr \/><p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>Reference<\/strong><\/span><\/p><p>Bloom, Harold. <em>The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry<\/em>. Oxford UP, 1973.<\/p><p>Faruque, Muhammad U. \u201cThe Crisis of Modern Subjectivity: Rethinking Muhammad Iqb\u0101l and the Islamic Tradition.\u201d <em>Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies<\/em>, vol. 6, no. 2, Nov. 2021, pp. 43\u201381.<\/p><p>Gadamer, Hans-Georg. <em>Truth and Method<\/em>. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed., Continuum, 2004.<\/p><p>Griffel, Frank. Al-Ghazali\u2019s Philosophical Theology. Oxford UP, 2009.<\/p><p>Iqbal, Muhammad. <em>Shikwa wa Jaw\u0101b-i Shikwa (Complaint and Answer): Iqbal\u2019s Dialogue with Allah<\/em>. Translated by Khushwant Singh, Oxford UP, 1981.<\/p><p>Rizvi, Sajjad H. Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics: Modulation of Being. 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<a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=epistemic-colonialism\" rel=\"tag\">Epistemic Colonialism<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=intellectual-history\" rel=\"tag\">Intellectual History<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=islamic-philosophy\" rel=\"tag\">Islamic Philosophy<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=khudi\" rel=\"tag\">Khudi<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=muhammad-faruque\" rel=\"tag\">Muhammad Faruque<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=muhammad-iqbal\" rel=\"tag\">Muhammad Iqbal<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=muslim-subjectivity\" rel=\"tag\">Muslim Subjectivity<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=postcolonialism\" rel=\"tag\">Postcolonialism<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=sufism\" rel=\"tag\">Sufism<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/?tag=the-reconstruction-of-religious-thought-in-islam\" rel=\"tag\">The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-2382b2a elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"2382b2a\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-de704ea\" data-id=\"de704ea\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-b3f3f49 heading-with-line elementor-widget elementor-widget-heading\" data-id=\"b3f3f49\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"heading.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t<h2 class=\"elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default\">Explore more articles<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summary This article explores the tension between Muhammad Iqbal\u2019s philological inaccuracies and his historical role as a catalyst for Muslim selfhood. While Muhammad Faruque identifies systematic misreadings of premodern thinkers like al-J\u012bl\u012b and B\u012bdil, the author argues these &#8220;creative misreadings&#8221; were necessary to address the socio-existential crisis of a colonized intelligentsia. By framing Iqbal&#8217;s work [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[148,149,150,152,144,138,145,135,151,146,137,147],"class_list":["post-2930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-al-jili","tag-bidil","tag-epistemic-colonialism","tag-intellectual-history","tag-islamic-philosophy","tag-khudi","tag-muhammad-faruque","tag-muhammad-iqbal","tag-muslim-subjectivity","tag-postcolonialism","tag-sufism","tag-the-reconstruction-of-religious-thought-in-islam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2930"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2942,"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2930\/revisions\/2942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projectmishkat.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}