A system with no capacity to change ossifies. A system with no permanent core dissolves. Iqbal argued Islam was built to avoid both failures at once.
Any tradition that claims permanent, unchanging values faces the same structural risk: apply those values too rigidly and the tradition stops being able to speak to a changing world, treating every past ruling as though it were itself divine rather than a human attempt to apply the divine to a particular moment. Muhammad Iqbal, philosopher-poet and one of the intellectual architects of modern Pakistan, diagnosed exactly this failure in the Muslim legal thought of his own time, and gave the proposed cure a name.
In the sixth of his seven 1928 to 1929 lectures, published as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), titled “The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam,” Iqbal argued that ijtihad is not merely a legal tool jurists occasionally use, it is the dynamic engine built into Islam’s own structure for reconciling permanence with change. His claim was that Islam’s core principles, revealed once, are meant to stay fixed, while every generation’s application of those principles to its own circumstances must be continuously re-derived through independent reasoning rather than simply inherited from the last generation’s answer. Treating a past jurist’s ruling as itself unchangeable, in Iqbal’s reading, mistakes a historically conditioned application for the eternal principle behind it.
This is a specific philosophical argument about ijtihad’s role, not a separate legal mechanism. Iqbal was not describing a different process from classical ijtihad, he was arguing for what ijtihad is for: the reasoning that keeps a permanent framework from calcifying into the “museum of accepted principles” he saw contemporary Muslim legal thought becoming. For the classical juristic concept itself, its sources, its conditions, and its historical relationship to taqlid, see the ijtihad entry directly.
Source: Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), Lecture VI.