Editing Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani (section)

== Allama Mohammad Iqbal on Afghani ==
Nevertheless, Iqbal held him in the highest esteem. He thought that had Jamaluddin Afghani not frittered away his energies on so many things, he could have succeeded better than the rest of his contemporaries in dispelling the intellectual bewilderment the ascendancy of the West had produced in the Islamic world and forging an active and operative link between the widely separated conceptual, moral, and spiritual values of Islam and the downright materialistic norms of the modern Western society. His versatile mind and his creative genius, in Iqbal’s view, made him eminently suited to the task. He had a natural aptitude for it. Thus, of him, Iqbal writes:

“The task of a modern Muslim is (therefore) immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past. Perhaps the first Muslim who felt the urge of a new spirit was Shah Wali Allah of Delhi. The man, however, who fully realized the importance and immensity of the task, and whose deep insight into the inner meaning of the history of Muslim thought and life, combined with a broad vision engineered by his wide experience of men and matters would have made him a living link between the past and the future, was Jamaluddin Afghani. In his indefatigable but divided energy could have been devoted entirely to Islam, as a system of human belief and conduct, the world of Islam, intellectually speaking, would have been on a much more solid ground today.” [Iqbal: Six Lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), pg. 136]