A Survey of Muhammad Iqbal's Framework of Ijtihad and its Significance to the Social Development

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslim countries were occupied by Western powers that came across the local Muslim culture and traditions. Under the impact of imperialism, Western culture crept into the world of Islam. The Muslim world at that time was thrown into great crisis caused by the conflict between conservatism and modernism. The conservatives became rigid in their outlook and approach. They concluded that the only way to save Islamic culture and Muslim society in the conflict of the West was to stick to the past and guard the old establishment. This is called taqlÊd or blind imitation. Meanwhile, the modernists confined themselves to the imitation of the West, and argued for the adoption of Western culture and civilization, so that Muslim could emerge as a progressive nation. While the conservatives stood for rigid adherence to fiqh, the modernists wanted to change the entire law in the light of Western codes of law. IqbÉl argued that neither conservatism nor modernism were good. According to him, the conservatives’ approach was unrealistic because it rejects the ontological principle of change; i.e due to a process of continuous change of life, new situations arise and new problems occur. Meanwhile, the modernists’ approach is unrealistic because it has often ended up in the garb of westernization rather than modernization. IqbÉl took a balance approach between conservatism and modernism whereby he acknowledged conservatives’ approach which firmly anchored in the Muslim heritage, and the modernists’ approach which tailored to meet the challenge of modern times to maintain the dynamic character of Islam. In his synthetic approach, IqbÉl tried to reinterpret Islamic thought through the principle of ijtihÉd, and stressed its dynamic element in it rather than static. For IqbÉl, ijtihÉd was the only way to rescue Muslims from the stagnation of thought which had deprived them of religious, social, economic, educational, legal, and political ascendency in the world. This paper attempts at analyzing IqbÉl’s constructive approach to the principle of ijtihÉd, and its significance to social development