ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the understudied dimensions in Muhammad Iqbal's thought and situates his Hegelian 'beginnings' after the Second Boer War. It outlines Iqbal's affiliation with critique of British idealists by situating the poet-philosopher in the debates that informed British idealist philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries–chiefly the Second Boer War. The chapter also examines Iqbal's critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in relation to the Russian Revolution. It suggests that Iqbal's engagement with Henri Bergson allowed him to develop a philosophy of history that recuperates a Hegelian-Vichian concept of time that resonates with philosophers such as Theodor Adorno. Iqbal's Hegelian view of the whole concurs with the British idealist J. A. Smith who maintains "that the whole of what is Real is constantly in movement. Iqbal seeks to develop 'mutual harmonies' between Muslim and Western thought and saw these harmonies as particularly evident in Western humanism that was borrowed from the Muslim world.
