The Phenomenology of Religious Experience and Muhammad Iqbal

Author: Rebecca Faulkner

"Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) was an Indian poet-philosopher whose work, in Urdu, Persian, and English (prose), outlines an active, dynamic, reflective, purposeful method for cultivation of the self in terms of religious experience... for Iqbal, social and political situations are deeply meaningful opportunities for exerting one's own (ethical) subjectivity. In this context questions about collective identity and governmentality arise, and in order to address them I have used a phenomenological approach to investigate the materiality of and lived experience of bodies in Iqbal's account. To ignore the importance of bodily experience is to undermine this critical element of Iqbal's life philosophy: his account of the modern Muslim self privileges the lived experience of the body and the body's importance in subject formation."