Touch Of The Real To The Ideal

With Islam, the ideal and the real are not two opposing forces which cannot be reconciled. The life of the ideal consists, not in a total breach with the real which would tend to shatter the organic wholeness of life into painful oppositions, but in the perpetual endeavour of the ideal to appropriate the real with a view eventually to absorb it, to convert it into itself and illuminate its whole being. It is the sharp opposition between the subject and the object, the mathematical without and the biological within, that impressed Christianity. Islam, however, faces the opposition with a view to overcome it. This essential difference in looking at a fundamental relation determinces the respective attitudes of these great religions towards the problem of human life in its present surroundings. Both demand the affirmation of the spritual self in man, with this difference only that Islam, recognizing the contact of the ideal with the real says 'yes' to the world of matter and points the way to master it with a view to dicover a basis for a realistic regulation of life.

Muhammad Iqbal - The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam