Reconstruction Of Religious thoughts of Islam

Reconstruction Of Religious thoughts of Islam 

By

Dr Allama Iqba 

What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These questions are common to religion, philosophy, and higher poetry.

The teaching of the Qur'an that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.

since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man's loyalty to his own ideal nature. The ultimate  spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change. A society based on such a  conception of Reality must reconcile, in its life, the categories of permanence and change. It must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life, for the eternal gives us a foothold in the world of perpetual  change. But eternal principles when they are understood to exclude all possibilities of change which, according to the Qur'ān, is one of the greatest `signs' of God, tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile in its nature. The failure of the Europe in political and social sciences illustrates the former principle, the immobility of Islam during the last five hundred years illustrates the latter.
What then is the principle of movement in the structure of Islam? This is known as Ijtihād.

The teaching of the Qur'ān that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered  by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems

Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central
position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis. Nor is there any reason to suppose that thought and intuition are essentially opposed to each other. They spring up from the same root and complement each other. The one grasps Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its
wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation. Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals itself to them in accordance with their
function in life................................

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