Excerpts from "Reconstruction of Religious Thought" of Iqbal

Nor is there any reason to suppose that the word Jannat (garden) as used here means the supersensual paradise from which man is supposed to have fallen on this earth. According to the Qur’an, man is not a stranger on this earth.

“And We have caused you to grow from the earth”, says the Qur’an.The Jannat, mentioned in the legend, cannot mean the eternal abode of the righteous. In the sense of the eternal abode of the righteous, Jannat isdescribed by the Qur’an to be the place “wherein the righteous will pass to one another the cup which shall engender no light discourse, no motive to sin.”It is further described to be the place “wherein no weariness shall reach the righteous, nor forth from it shall they be cast.”

In the Jannat mentioned in the legend, however, the very first event that took place was man’s sin of disobedience followed by his expulsion. In fact, the Qur’an itself explains the meaning of the word as used in its own narration. In the second episode of the legend the garden is described as a place “where there is neither hunger, nor thirst, neither heat nor nakedness.”

I am, therefore, inclined to think that the Jannat in the Qur’anic narration is the conception of a primitive state in which man is practically unrelated to his environment and consequently does not feel the sting of human wants the birth of which alone marks the beginning of human culture.



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aH: count factual errors in the below paragraph; it is a contiguous one, which i have separated for easy reading:
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Ibn Taimiyyah was brought up in Hanbalite tradition. Claiming freedom of Ijtihād for, himself he rose in revolt against the finality of the schools, and went back to first principles in order to make a fresh start.

Like Ibn Hazm– the founder of Zahirī school of law–he rejected the Hanafite principle of reasoning by analogy and Ijmā‘ as understood by older legists;for he thought agreement was the basis of all superstition. And there is no doubt that, considering the moral and intellectual decrepitude of his times, he was right in doing so.

In the sixteenth century Suyūtī claimed the same privilege of Ijtihād to which he added the idea of a renovator at the beginning of each century.

But the spirit of Ibn Taimīyyah’s teaching found a fuller expression in a movement of immense potentialities which arose in the eighteenth century, from the sands of Nejd, described by Macdonald as the “cleanest spot in the decadent world of Islam.” It is really the first throb of life in modern Islam. To the inspiration of this movement are traceable, directly or indirectly, nearly all the great modern movements of Muslim Asia and Africa, e.g. the Sanūsī movement, the Pan-Islamic movement,and the Bābī movement, which is only a Persian reflex of Arabian Protestantism.

The great puritan reformer, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, who was born in 1700,studied in Medina, travelled in Persia, and finally succeeded in spreading the fire of his restless soul throughout the whole world of Islam.

He was similar in spirit to Ghazālī’s disciple, Muhammad Ibn Tūmart– the Berber puritan reformer of Islam who appeared amidst the decay of Muslim Spain, and gave her a fresh inspiration. We are, however, not concerned with the political career of this movement which was terminated by the armies of Muhammad ‘Alī Pāshā.

The essential thing to note is the spirit of freedom manifested in it, though inwardly this movement, too, is conservative in its own fashion. While it rises in revolt against the finality of the schools, and vigorously asserts the right of private judgement, its vision of the past is wholly uncritical, and in matters of law it mainly falls back on the traditions of the Prophet.