Project Reports

Iqbal’s fundamental beliefs are not merely based upon rationality rather they are based upon morality and creativity. His aesthetic and symbolic standards are dynamic. For a thinker like Iqbal, the building of a metaphor is not less than a secret. In order to explore an experience, he uses symbolic diversity. Abrahamic affiliation plays central role in the character building of an individual. Iqbal’s ideal human being carries two peculiar characteristics. One is to break the idols and the second is faith. A society needs such people whose training is followed by Abrahamic philosophy which enables them to think beyond conventional parameters. The west is thinking about educational paradigm shift. We should also revisit our old concepts. Scientific revolution has not only influenced humans intellectually but has also changed his social pattern. Technology has changed our views and values. By keeping in view this whole scenario, Iqbal says in one of his poems;

?? ?? ? ????? ??????? ?? ? ????? ??
??? ??? ????? ??? ?? ?????? ???????

Tyrants and flames once more on Abraham’s race have glared:
For whom this new ordeal, or by whose hand prepared?:

Iqbal criticized the Newtonian view of reality in 1929 in these words, “Classical physics has learned to criticize its own foundations. As a result of this criticism the kind of materialism, which it originally necessitated is rapidly disappearing; and the day is not far off when religion and science may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies”. Quantum mechanics suggested that the universe is not built out of atoms or any other absolute or indivisible particles but rather is a complex kind of interaction between energetic processes arising from the pure potentiality. It is in the Quranic Term stated as: ???? ????? i.e. The hidden potentiality.

It seems science and religion both have entered into a healthy relationship mutually based on a wise division of labor between science and religion. David Bohm provides us of one such model i.e. ‘reality with physical and metaphysical aspects’. David Bohm was a theorist who greatly impacted the scientific world view while opening new stars that forwarded towards viable model for connection between science and religion. Bohm argued that reality is interrelated and there is a facet of realty that science cannot see.

Iqbal said: the universe, composed of inter-relational events, is a more like cosmetic interference pattern. The similarity between Bohm’s view and certain traditional metaphysical doctrines suggests that science is bringing metaphysics out of mothballs. Bohm suggested Quantum theory must be incomplete in certain aspect. Similarly, Iqbal in 1929 said that instantaneous communication in the realm of metaphysics is somehow possible. Because now speed is altogether gone as the ideas of Bohm were that there is ‘implicate order’ of wholeness which is unobservable and cannot be measured while the observable ‘explicate order’ of reality arises out of implicate order of reality.

Title of this session was ‘Iqbal’s teachings for spiritual education and character building’. Reality, as was mentioned, is an ocean. The commander, the qalander and the ‘But Shikani’ are very deep things. So, breakings of the idols would be related to a sort of paradigm shift. The paradigm shift in the modern science is the challenge that science itself is not perhaps as material and fixed as we would think. But even the scientists are thinking within the ideal frames with limited envisioning of what is true. But scientific attitude is now aware that it has to be transcended ultimately.