Event Description

Hina says: Across the religious traditions that are today encompassed by the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’, a recurring motif is that the originative cause of the world is also the spiritual breath animating its return to its singular root. In this talk, I venture into the relatively unexplored terrain of a Hindu-Muslim comparative inquiry into the intimate presence of the divine reality to the finite world. I offer a comparative analysis of the conception of the infinite in the worldviews of two major philosopher-poets of the Indian subcontinent – Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). I argue that both Iqbal and Tagore, drawing on their distinctive religio-cultural inheritances, set forth the relation between the finite and the infinite as a dynamic entanglement, wherein the infinite stands not as a reifiable item in a cosmic inventory but as the ever-creative and sustaining ground of all that there is. I close by suggesting some of the implications of their cosmologies for their visions of human becoming – an existential undertaking that is, for both figures, firmly rooted in, and dynamically oriented to, the boundless divine reality.

Hina Khalid is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She is working on a comparative study of the theology and poetry of Muhammad Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore. She is particularly interested in the possibilities of comparative theology across Islamic and Indic traditions, and in the ways that shared devotional idioms have formed in and across the Indian subcontinent. Her publications have centred on a range of topics, including issues of embodiment, gender, and spirituality across the Christian, Islamic, and Indic worldviews.

The October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AL

Refreshments Provided