Iqbal, Nietzsche, and Nihilism: Reconstruction of Sufi Cosmology and Revaluation of Sufi Values in Asrar-i-Khudî

Abstract

Abstract While the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India, engagement with the problem of nihilism and his response to it from a Sufi perspective. Arguing that the existing literature on Iqbal fails to understand the deeper impact of Nietzsche’s ideas on Iqbal’s philosophy and the dramatic role “the problem of nihilism” played in causing changes in Iqbal’s philosophy, or on Iqbal’s intellectual development, in this article, I analyze how Iqbal’s encounter with the ideas of Nietzsche during his study period in Europe between 1905 and 1908 has introduced him to the problem of nihilism in its Nietzschean form, how this led Iqbal to a nihilistic mood/crisis from 1909 to 1913, and then how he later developed a response to nihilism by reconstructing the Sufi cosmology and by revaluating the Sufi values of the pantheistic/Persian type of Sufism – the outcome of which is found in his philosophical poem Asrar-i-Khudî (1915).