By Shaykh Abu ‘l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Nadwi
The great thinker and savant Shaykh Abu ‘l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Nadwi writes in his book, Western Civilization: Islam and Muslims:
Syed Jamaluddin Afghani had a forceful personality and a mind remarkable in many ways. He had traveled widely in Europe and made a close study of its people. But, in spite of the immense popularity he enjoyed, his life and work are shrouded in mystery; he has become something of an enigma. Divergent views and activities are attributed to him. What is left of his own writings and speeches, together with the accounts furnished by his disciples of his sayings and doings, throw a most unsatisfactory light on his life and ideas, and it is difficult to conclude on their basis about his attitude towards the West and its civilization.
Nevertheless, Iqbal held him in the highest esteem. He thought that had Jamaluddin Afghani not frittered away his energies on so many things, he could have succeeded better than the rest of his contemporaries in dispelling the intellectual bewilderment the ascendancy of the West had produced in the Islamic world and forging an active and operative link between the widely separated conceptual, moral, and spiritual values of Islam and the downright materialistic norms of the modern Western society. His versatile mind and his creative genius, in Iqbal’s view, made him eminently suited to the task. He had a natural aptitude for it. Thus, of him, Iqbal writes: