Prose and Reflections

Most of our theologians thought the doctrine of human freedom could not be reconciled with the fore-knowledge of God. They looked upon belief in freedom as veiled atheism. So thought Mahmud Shabistri. But the author of Gulshan-i-Raz made the tacit assumption of an absolute and independent Time like Newton . He did not see that if his view of Time were true, then the freedom of God would also disappear. Shabistri’s argument will not hold to-day; for God can be conceived as creating Time from moment to moment. If the Universe is an open one, there is no pre-existing future, and God does not know the future because there is nothing to know. -- Iqbal, Stray Thoughts 1925

[Image source: here ] The idea of Mi‘raj in Islam is face to face vision of Reality without the slightest displacement of your own ego. It is impossible to forget the words of the Muslim poet who said of the Prophet this much: * Iqbal translated the couplet in  The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam  as:  “Moses fainted away by a mere surface illumination of Reality:  Thou seest the very substance of Reality with a smile!”   KAS . -- Iqbal, Stray Thoughts 1925

Before you talk of self-sacrifice you must see whether you have got a self to sacrifice. The egotist alone is capable of self-sacrifice. -- Iqbal, Stray Thoughts 1925

The work of Waheed Murad is a 'Thought of the Powerful Man' which has a capability to develop a civilisation just as Iqbal wrote in his private notebook, Stray Reflections (1910); 'Civilization is a thought of the powerful man.'

[Image: Courtesy  Iqbal Academy Pakistan ] Nietzsche thinks that belief in God makes man feeble. The wisdom of Islam consists in exploiting the idea of God in the interest of Man, and transforming him into a source of power for the Tauhid of Islam means absolute freedom from fear and superstition in actual life. A mere intellectual belief in God does not count for much in Islam. -- Iqbal, Stray Thoughts 1925 * Tauhid refers to the Muslim belief in the oneness of God. In Arabic it means unity – KAS .

Knowledge partly contributes to the structure of what we call objective reality; but the character of events that drop out of the womb of Fate is wholly determined by the heart of man. It is the weak man who endows Fate with its sting. The strong man exploits his misfortunes, in as much as he enhances the force of his soul by maintaining an attitude of total indifference to them. -- Iqbal, Stray Thoughts 1925