Muhammad Iqbal – Reconstructing Islam along Occidental Lines of Thought

Abstract The philosopher Muhammad Iqbal is officially seen as the inventor of the idea of Pakistan and is considered to be the national poet of the country. Indeed, he is one of the most important Islamic modernists, a source of inspiration for enlightened Islam today, and one of the great philosophers of life in the first half of the 20th century. This article explains the main concepts of philosophy: “self”, “love”, “intuition”, his philosophy of time, his concept of Islam, and his critique of the West. It then traces the influences on his thought from Islamic thinkers, from the Western philosophers Fichte, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and the Influence of the Indian society he was living in. Iqbal claimed that all his ideas derived from his thorough reading of the Quran. However, the questions that shaped his answers were very much in the form of the European philosophy of the time, and in that of the discourses of his society too.