IQBĀL’S APPROACH TO ISLAMIC THEOLOGY OF MODERNITY

This essay is a study of Iqbāl’s The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam as a continuation of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s quest for a framework to understand modernity from Islamic perspective. Khan’s Jadid ‘ilm al-kalam defined his approach to Islamic theology of modernity and later provided the basis for ‘Islamic modernism’. The essay argues that due to diverse experiences of modernity objectifications of modernity changed from science and nature in the nineteenth century to identity and autonomy of self in the twentieth century in Iqbāl’s approach to theology of modernity. The essay has three sections: the first explains the origins of the Islamic theology of modernity; the second offers an analysis of Iqbāl’s reconstruction of this theology, and the third reviews recent critique of Iqbāl’s approach. The essay concludes the discussion with an overview of contemporary theologies of modernity in the Muslim world.