Muhammad Iqbal: The Relevance of a Legacy

The intellectual legacy of the Pakistani philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) stands as a landmark in modern Islamic thought. His philosophic-theological magnum opus The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) has been widely studied and referred to and has been translated and re-translated into many languages until now.

This Symposium aims at bringing together a number of junior and senior scholars from different regions and research institutions worldwide to discuss Iqbal’s legacy, its relevance to current issues in philosophic theology. The symposium will kick off first as an online event, to take place on Friday-Saturday 09-10 February 2024. A physical sequel to the event will follow in due time.

Muhammad Iqbal sought to rethink the Islamic tradition differently. In the light of the modern moment, he tried to engage with modern questions philosophically and politically. Standing firm in his own Islamic tradition and relying on the Qur’an, besides being well-versed in Western philosophical thought, Iqbal introduces a novel metaphysics that he wished could serve as the foundation for a new Islamic philosophico-theological reading, new but at the same time rooted in his modern understanding of the Qur’an and parts of the past intellectual tradition. This reading, if re-examined and pushed further by new scholars, may help in addressing modern questions in theory and practice that not only Muslims but modern human beings at large are posing.

The aim of this symposium is thus to bring together junior and senior Iqbal scholars in order to revisit his intellectual legacy and investigate the potential in his thought for new philosophies and theologies from an Islamic perspective and in conversation with other non-Islamic intellectual traditions.

The symposium seeks to convene scholars who can read Iqbal’s legacy with significant focus on these issues that are cardinal questions in classical and modern Islamic theologies and philosophies:

·       Philosophy of religion in modern Islamic thought;

·       Human free will and the question of infallible divine fore-knowledge;

·       The problem of evil and the question of the existence of an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God;

·       Pluralism and religious truth claims;

·       Human liberty, human rights, and the rights of nature;

·       Process theology, existential theology, and eco-theology;

·       Time, space, and the challenge of artificial intelligence.

The symposium is open to receive contributors that touch on these issues, and related ones, comparatively, in conversations with philosophies and theologies of different traditions and periods of time.

We do plan to convert this first online initiative to a physical scholarly encounter and book project afterward.