A reader’s companion
The Context
Foundations, and Chapter I of Iqbal’s Reconstruction: Knowledge and Religious Experience
This guide prepares you to read Iqbal’s The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. The book moves quickly and assumes that the reader already knows many thinkers and ideas. Here they are introduced first, and then each paragraph of the first chapter is read with its context.
How to use this guide
- Foundations. Three questions behind every philosophy: how do we know, what exists, how should we live. Then four thinkers who answered them in the order they lived, Plato, Aristotle, Ghazali and Descartes, and a page on each question.
- Chapter I. Eleven pages, one for each paragraph of “Knowledge and Religious Experience.” Each page gives the people and ideas you need, then Iqbal’s own paragraph, a short summary, how Iqbal uses those ideas, and the crux.
- Reference. The People page collects everyone mentioned, and the Glossary defines the technical terms. Underlined terms in the text link to the glossary.
Page numbers refer to the book. Use Next at the bottom of each page to follow the reading path.
Chapter I at a glance
| Paragraph | Book pages |
|---|---|
| 1. Religion and philosophy | pages 3–5 |
| 2. The search for rational foundations | pages 5–7 |
| 3. Ghazali, Kant and the limits of thought | pages 7–9 |
| 4. Muslims and modern knowledge | pages 9–11 |
| 5. The Quran’s purpose | page 11 |
| 6. The ideal and the real | page 12 |
| 7. The Quran’s picture of the universe | pages 12–19 |
| 8. Inner experience as knowledge | pages 19–28 |
| 9. Psychology and the mystic state | pages 28–31 |
| 10. Religion and the sex-impulse | pages 31–32 |
| 11. Two tests of truth | page 32 |