The Reconstruction: Muraqqa Edition

Introducing the second critical edition of Muhammad Iqbal's The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

Forty years after M. Saeed Sheikh's celebrated annotated edition of 1986, the Muraqqa Edition reproduces the original 1934 text in facsimile, along with a pioneering critical visual apparatus inspired by the muraqqa artform and manuscript culture of the classical Muslim world.

Contact Voices of the Muraqqa The editor

About the Work

Texts: Building upon the forty-nine source references already documented by scholarship, the edition reconstructs and verifies a network of around one hundred and thirty source references, providing an expanded foundation for textual, intellectual, and historical study. The volume employs complex multilingual typography, retaining original-language citations and source material across seventeen writing systems.
Visuals: The work is heavily illustrated and includes twenty double-sided full-page plates, incorporating archival materials and artworks from across Iqbal's world. These include manuscripts, early printed editions, and the art of Abdur Rahman Chughtai.
Album Logic: Combining rigorous scholarship with a unique word-art fusion of text, commentary, image and archival materials, the Muraqqa imports a fifteenth-century workshop approach to augment a twenty-first-century scholarly apparatus, via a non-linear, layered mode of reading.
Accessibility: With the use of marginalia, rubrication, sigla, and full-page plates, the Muraqqa's visual system creates a non-linear, layered mode of reading that breaks through the opacity of the original text and makes it more accessible to scholars and non-specialist readers alike.