French scholar of Islam Louis Massignon (1883–1962) has declared that a deep convergence, or what he labelled ‘a Semitic affinity’,1 existed between the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and the Indian poet and thinker Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938). More recently, in an important work entitled Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview, in a chapter devoted to ‘Bergson and the Muslims’, Damian A. Howard notes that ‘[r]ecognizably Bergsonian ideas subtend a great deal of what Iqbal says and Iqbal frequently refers explicitly to the thought of the Frenchman’ (2011: 59). He then raises the question of the nature of that Bergsonian presence in Iqbal's thought – a ‘catalyst’ he asks, ‘a hermeneutical key’, or ‘a confirmation’ – before concluding that at any rate ‘Bergson's own input was decisive in shaping Iqbal's theology’ and that ‘Iqbal's reading of Bergson made a decisive difference’ (ibid.; emphasis in original).

On the other hand, in Iqbal: An Illustrated Biography, Khurram Ali Shafique is altogether dismissive of the whole notion of a ‘contribution of Western philosophy to the thought of Iqbal’, which has been, according to him, ‘exaggerated’ (2007: 45). Declaring that Iqbal himself had a ‘condescending attitude towards Western philosophers’, citing Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, he notes that ‘Bergson received more courtesy’ just to add that this was ‘maybe because he was still alive’ (ibid.).

Shafique needs not be so anxious and defensive as to consider that any indication of the simple fact that Bergson's concepts of time, individuality, creative evolution, creative humanity, and mysticism are central to Iqbal's Reconstruction of the Religious Thought of Islam would signify ‘deference’ of the Indian philosopher to the Frenchman. To evoke an ‘affinity’ between the two philosophers is certainly not the same as to affirm that ‘a decisive input’ from Bergson ‘shaped’ Iqbal's thought.