Time and Fatalism

Abstract

This chapter takes up G.W. Leibniz’s formulation of Islamic thought as a philosophy of fatalism: fatum mahometanum,or Turkish (or Islamic) fatalism. Against the prejudice that Islam is a doctrine of absolute predestination, founded on a cosmology of a closed work in which the future is already determined, this chapter shows Iqbal’s Quranic cosmology as a continuously emerging universe, open to the creative action of the human individual. Bergson’s philosophy, in its revolutionary reconfiguration of time as duration, is essential to the thought of such a cosmology; in this, Bergsonian thought allows an escape from the binds of fate and predestination and bears a deep affinity with the version of Islamic thought advanced by Iqbal.