Understanding the Self Through Muhammad Iqbal’s Philosophical and Political Thought

I would like to thank Professor Gregory Maxwell Bruce from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago for his insightful feedback and guidance, especially in his review of the Urdu and Persian poetry in this piece.

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What is ḳhūdī? For Muhammad Iqbal, one of the foremost celebrated intellectuals and poets of South Asia, his falsafa-e-ḳhūdī (philosophy of the self) is one of the most discussed elements of his intellectual thought. As a philosopher, poet, lawyer, and more, Iqbal is a prominent figure both in South Asian households and in scholarly circles, where he is frequently cited in the fields of South Asian studies, philosophy, theology, and literary studies. Above all, Iqbal’s profound insights into various aspects of the human condition, society, and spirituality remain deeply relevant today. But what makes it essential to engage with Iqbal in the contemporary world? In this essay, I will explore the enduring significance of Iqbal’s falsafa-e-ḳhūdī, a concept that lies at the heart of Iqbal’s poetry and philosophy.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who has written extensively on the self, identity, and morality, once said: “We must reread Iqbal. For a time we could imagine him forgotten, consigned to the oubliettes with the other figures of Islamic modernism from the beginning of this century. But he had to come back.”¹ Central to a reading and rereading of Iqbal is his falsafa-e-ḳhūdī, a concept that lies at the core of his intellectual thought that offers profound insights into our own existence and the world around us. 
As much as it is important for those in the subcontinent and in the diaspora (such as myself) to read Iqbal, it is also equally as vital to know how toread Iqbal and what we can learn from him. For the first endeavor, I defer to the brilliant Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and his piece “How to read Iqbal?” In this timeless piece, he considers the problems associated with “systematic misreadings” of Iqbal, misreadings that have emerged as a result of “his ‘art’ being studied separately, if at all, from his ‘thought.’”² As Shamsur Rahman Faruqi continues, “All we need to assert is that Iqbal’s poetry gives us imaginative entrée into more worlds of literary and creative tradition than any other poetry of the twentieth century.”³

In a social media age where Iqbal’s poetry and prose can be found anywhere and everywhere from Instagram to TikTok (or even found printed on woolen shawls or tote bags), Iqbal has fortunately become more accessible and visible to the average user. At the same time, such sharing, posting, and tweeting has unfortunately resulted in curated, surface-level interactions with Iqbal’s Urdu and Persian verse and philosophical writings. This culture of consumption—driven by the ages of social media and consumerism—has made it difficult to truly engage with Iqbal. It has transformed what was once an intellectual engagement with his thought, and Urdu more broadly, into something that can be packaged and commodified because we find something ‘aesthetic’ about his thought, and not because of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual value that his poetry and prose truly hold. Such a culture has ultimately left little space for critical reflection, silence, and genuine inquiry; it has fostered a culture of emotional immediacy, pushing us to shape our personal identities primarily through fleeting digital interactions.

In an era of digital immersion, engaging deeply with Iqbal—and by extension, Urdu literature—has become an increasingly difficult endeavor. The unfortunate outcome is a perpetuation of systematic misreadings of Iqbal that not only distort our understanding of his intellectual contributions but also our broader understanding of Urdu, “whose history suffered a major literary/culture discontinuity in the middle of the nineteenth century,” as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi remarked.⁴ Thus, if we are to truly read and learn from Iqbal, we must push ourselves to actively engage with his thought and resist the passive culture of consumption that has emerged surrounding Iqbal, a culture that risks diluting the richness and intimacy that comes with engaging with his intellect and aesthetics.

In this regard, I seek to engage in the second endeavor that I posed earlier: What can we learn from Iqbal? What does Iqbal tell us over a century later about the world we live in today? Ultimately, what does Iqbal teach us about ourselves? Ahmad Javaid, in one of his Urdu lectures discussing Iqbal’s meaning of ḳhūdī, reminds us exactly this: “That regardless of what state you are in, do not forget who you really are.”⁵ That said, to answer these questions, this essay will engage with Iqbal’s falsafa-e-ḳhūdī. Iqbal’s philosophy of the self has been rigorously examined at length by scholars such as Javed Majeed, Basit Bilal Koshul, Ebrahim Moosa, Iqbal Singh Sevea, Naveeda Khan, Ayesha Jalal, and Sajjad Rizvi. The point of this essay is not to provide an additional and alternative understanding of Iqbal’s falsafa-e-ḳhūdī, but to (re)present the broad contours of his philosophical thinking. It thus serves as an invitation for those who may be new to reading Iqbal, or even those who are well-equipped in his terms, to inquire and reflect upon one of Iqbal’s most thought-provoking ideas.

Several scholars have written on Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī, discussing its centrality in Iqbal’s philosophical thought. For example, as Javed Majeed writes in Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics, and Postcolonialism, ḳhūdī is the central theme of Iqbal’s poetry.⁶ Elsewhere, Ebrahim Moosa states that ḳhūdī is a “keystone concept” for Iqbal, who, having interpreted it in various forms, made ḳhūdī the “centrepiece of both his poetic and political aesthetics.” In addition, as Basit Bilal Koshul states, Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī is a “milestone in the history of human thought” that is of “immediate, enduring, and global relevance.”⁷ Finally, in an early essay published in the Iqbal Review, Mohammad Rafiuddin noted that ḳhūdī is “one concept alone” from which all of Iqbal’s thought originates: “All the philosophical ideas of Iqbal are derived from, and rationally and scientifically related to, this one concept, the concept of ‘Self’. This means not only that all his ideas are rationally and intellectually inter-related but also that they constitute a system of thought, each concept whereof is intellectually supported and strengthened by the rest.”⁸

To understand Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī, it is important to contextualize his intellectual sources and influences. Much has been written on the biographical details of Iqbal’s life. What is clear is that Iqbal was conversant in the language of Islamic philosophy as well as Western philosophy, having read the work of those such as the following: Ghazālī, Rūmī, Suhrawardī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī, Ibn ‘Arabī, Mullā Sadrā, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Nietzsche, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Descartes. In “Stray Reflections,” a collection of writings from Iqbal’s own private notebook, he wrote:

I confess I owe a great deal to Hegel, Goethe, Mirza Ghalib, Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil and Wordsworth. The first two led me into the “inside” of things; the third and fourth taught me how to remain oriental in spirit and expression after having assimilated foreign ideals of poetry, and the last saved me from atheism in my student days.⁹

On Aristotle, Iqbal similarly noted that he had “the greatest respect” for him “not only because I (living in the twentieth century) know him much better than the older generations of my community, but also because of his vast influence on the thought of my people.”¹⁰

Iqbal possessed a unique ability to traverse across wide-ranging philosophical terrain, seamlessly blending the thought of those who might be viewed as foreign to each other. As Charles Taylor writes, Iqbal established “a mutual and fruitful exchange between thinkers and texts that are quite distant from each other,” such as Nietzsche and Bergson as well as Hallaj and Rumi.¹¹ And as Robert Whittemore affirms, the “fusion of patterns of philosophical and religious thought foreign to each other” in works such as Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, symbolizes “an achievement possessing a philosophical importance far transcending the world of Islam.”¹²

Iqbal first introduced the concept of ḳhūdī in his first Persian work of philosophical poetry, Asrār-e khudī, which was published in 1915. In contrast to Asrār-e khudī, which largely focused on the individual and the idea of self-dependence, Iqbal discussed ḳhūdī’s relation to the development of the perfect Muslim community in Rumūz-e bēkhudī, published in 1918. An intellectual response to the decline of the Muslim community in the wake of British imperialism, Iqbal’s Asrār-e khudī emphasized the importance of self-development. By journeying upon various stages of growth and development, the principle of ḳhūdī could empower and re-instill dignity in Muslims. But it would be the Perfect Man, one who typified ḳhūdī in its most true essence, who would energize Muslims and lead them out of a state of depravity and incarceration under colonial rule.

In his “Note on Nietzsche,” Iqbal provides the most apt understanding of the word ḳhūdī, as well as why he utilized this term over others in his poetry and philosophical writings. As he wrote in this essay, ḳhūdī carries a “bad sense” in both Urdu and Persian, but nevertheless, has been used in the Persian language “in the sense of that indescribable feeling of ‘I’, which forms the basis of the uniqueness of each individual”:

Ethically the word ḳhūdī means (as used by me) self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence, self-preservation, and even self-assertion when such a thing is necessary, in the interests of life and the power to stick to the cause of truth, justice, duty, etc., etc., even in the face of death. Such behaviour is moral in my opinion because it helps in the integration of the forces of the Ego, thus hardening it, as against the forces of disintegration and dissolution (vide Reconstruction [of Religious Thought in Islam].; practically the metaphysical Ego is the bearer is the bearer of two main rights that it is the right to life and freedom as determined by the Divine Law.¹³

For Iqbal, then, ḳhūdī is essentially a theory of aspirational self-making. Yet to think of Iqbal’s understanding of ḳhūdī simply as a theory is to diminish its potential to be something more. For Iqbal, the task of philosophy was an active task. As Ebrahim Moosa puts it, the task of philosophy for Iqbal was to produce “new vistas of thinking.”¹⁴ As such, ḳhūdī is not merely a passive idea—it is an active principle for Muslims to better themselves and their societies and to imagine new futures, despite the world’s impermanent nature.

In the 1930s, with the independence from British colonial rule on the forefront, Iqbal was increasingly concerned with the status of the Muslim minority in the Indian subcontinent. With Muslims being a minority in some provinces of the subcontinent but a majority in other provinces, and the related issue of representational politics, Iqbal sought to rework the political to consider how the conditions of the ‘average Muslim’ could be improved, as he wrote in his 1937 letter to Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah.¹⁵ As he noted in his earlier address to the All-India Muslim League in 1930, Iqbal’s solution for Muslims was the creation of a Muslim India, with Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Balochistan amalgamated into a single state. ¹⁶ In Iqbal’s view, this self-governing state, reorganized so that Muslims were the majority, would be the “final destiny of Muslims” and would guarantee the survival of Islam and Muslims in India.¹⁷

In thinking about Iqbal’s falsafa-e-ḳhūdī, then, his view on the modern nation-state is particularly also relevant. Scholarship in the past decade on Iqbal point to the obvious problems that the nation-state posed for Iqbal, such as issues related to liberal economics or the undermining of the theological notion of ḳhatm-e-nubuwwat (the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood).¹⁸ However, in all of these interpretations, ḳhūdī fundamentally underlies Iqbal’s views on the nation-state. In particular, for Iqbal, ḳhūdī was a means to ensure freedom and sovereignty of the individual and the collective.

As part of his theory of “creative individuated selfhood,” Iqbal sought to articulate ḳhūdī in opposition to colonial and imperial domination.¹⁹ In particular, he saw ḳhūdī as a means for Muslims to free themselves from the incarcerating power of colonial rule. For Iqbal, this incarcerating power prevented individuals from fully possessing and asserting their agency. Thus the outward forces of imperialism forced Iqbal to consider a “renewed, self-conscious sense of being Muslim.”²⁰ As a result, the need to overcome colonial domination in Iqbal’s notion of ḳhūdī was a means to formulate the relationship between the individual Muslim and the larger Islamic community.²¹ For Iqbal, then, ḳhūdī was not only about reclaiming Muslim agency; it was also staunchly anti-colonial.

A discussion of Iqbal’s political thought, particularly his views on nationalism and imperialism, would be sorely remiss without a consideration of his poetry. For instance, in his 1922 Urdu poem Ḳhizr-e-Rah, Iqbal questioned the centrality of the state, labor, and capital:

زندگی کا راز کیا ہے سلطنت کیا چیز ہے
اور یہ سرمایہ ومحنت میں ہے کیسا خروش

zindagī kā rāz kyā hai salt̤anat kyā chīz hai
aur yah sarmāyah o miḥnat meñ hai kaisā ḳharosh

What is the mystery of life? What is this thing called the State?
And what noise is this in labor and capital?

Furthermore, in Rumūz-e Beḳhūdī, Iqbal pondered over the effects of nationalism in the West, as we can see below in his Persian verse:

تا سیاست مسند مذہب گرفت
این شجر در گلشن مغرب گرفت
قصۂ دین مسیحائی فسرد
شعلہ شمع کلیسائی فسرد

tā siyāsat masnad-e mażhab girift
īn shajar dar gulshan-e maġhrib girift
qiṣṣah-e dīn-e masīḥāʼī fusurd
shuʿlah-e shamʿ-e kalīsā’ī fusurd

“When politics [of nationalism] seized the throne of religion
It uprooted this tree in the Western garden
It froze the narrative of Christianity
It dimmed the Church’s flame.”²²

Here, we see how Iqbal’s resentment of nationalism stems from the fact that the liberal nation-state removed religion from the public domain, effectively establishing an illusory public-private divide in society.

Iqbal thus saw the modern nation-state, which paved the ontological path towards the fallacious categories of majority and minority as well as public and private, as detrimental to the future of Muslim politics in India. First, should the nation-state take root in India, Iqbal feared that Indian Muslims would be forever trapped in the category of minority. Under the fabric of the nation-state, the national struggle would ultimately be about one’s material interests and individual privilege. And in India, Iqbal feared that Muslims would be “condemned forever to the position of a minority trapped within the private sphere of a liberal constitution, with their public lives . . . alienated from and thus destructive of Islam as an ethical solidarity.”²³ Thus, under the political form of the modern nation-state, Muslims would not only be categorically entrapped as a minority but also lose all “historical and juridical privileges.”²⁴

Second, for Iqbal, the nation-state was ultimately problematic due to its disastrous effects on religion in society. The imposition of the nation-state not only led to a “radical transformation of the structure of Islam itself” but also a complete separation of society into public and private domains, or what Iqbal saw as the temporal and spiritual. This fallacious separation of the spiritual and temporal resulted in the exclusion of religion, namely Christianity, from the life of the modern European state, as Iqbal noted in his 1930 Address.²⁵ Iqbal feared that the same would happen should the “ideas set free by European political thinking” take root in India.²⁵ For Iqbal, the separation between the spiritual and temporal would result in human investment in political and national interests rather than truly human interests. This point is one that Iqbal emphasized in his 1930 Address:

The upshot of the intellectual movement initiated by such men as Rousseau and Luther was the break-up of the one into [the] mutually ill-adjusted many, the transformation of a human into a national outlook…If you begin with the conception of religion as complete other-worldliness, then what has happened to Christianity in Europe is perfectly natural.²⁵

Two years later, in his Presidential Address to the All-India Muslim Conference, Iqbal reiterated the same view, stressing that European nationalism, if brought to India, was composed of the “germs of atheistic materialism” that brought “danger to modern humanity.” For Iqbal, the nation-state’s primary issue was secularism, which was at odds with Islam: “Islam does not bifurcate the unity of man into an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter. In Islam, God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State, are organic to each other. Man is not the citizen of a profane world to be renounced in the interest of a world spirit situated elsewhere. To Islam, matter and spirit realize itself in space and time.”²⁶

To import the political ideology of the nation-state was to unequivocally accept colonial domination and intellectual hegemony, an idea unfathomable to Iqbal. Thus, the nation-state divested human freedom by not only relegating religious life to the private sphere (Iqbal spoke of the church and state as ‘organic to each other’ in his 1930 Address), but also by transforming the nature of the human condition by privileging material interests over human interests. The individual Muslim could not participate in Muslim politics if they were trapped in the position of a minority; the individual Muslim could not also participate in Muslim politics if the national struggle was viewed through the prism of private property and territorial belonging.²⁷ For Iqbal, self-making was incompatible with the nation-state, which “[counteracts] the humanizing work of Islam.”²⁵ Rooted steeply in the vocabularies of liberalism, the nation-state ultimately undermined the potential for human freedom. For Iqbal, the nation-state critically impeded the aspirational growth of individual personality and the collective Muslim community; the cultivation of ḳhūdī was a means to resist the material realities of the modern world, and this would be impossible under the fabric of the liberal nation-state.

Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī is also significant when it comes to his understanding of theology and religion, especially his views on Sufism. In a 1921 letter to the English oriental scholar R. A. Nicholson, Iqbal stated that his philosophy of ḳhūdī was a “direct development out of the experience and speculation of old Muslim Sufis and thinkers.”²⁸ To be clear, Iqbal did not outright reject Sufism, or what might be termed as tasavūf. Rather, he sought to reconstruct Sufi thought “in the light of his understanding of the Qur’anic perspective of the relationship of humanity to God and creation.”²⁹ For instance, as Javed Majeed notes, Iqbal articulated ḳhūdī against the dominant cosmological terms of Sufism, in particular fanāʾ, or the annihilation of the self in the presence of God.³⁰

For Iqbal, the traditional interpretation of mystical states such as fanāʾ, with its focus on the dissolution of the self for the achievement of baqāʾ (the state in which the individual is merged with the Divine) meant that the self was dispossessed of all agency. Thus, the self was also dispossessed of the freedom of action and self-realization. As such, by steering away Sufi thought from dispossession and steering it towards action, Iqbal sought to reorient an understanding of ḳhūdī, and of Sufism more generally, towards action. This, for Iqbal, was his way of reconstructing religious thought in Islam.

In this light, we can thus turn to Iqbal’s concluding remarks in his seminal work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. There, Iqbal points to the final goal of the self, which is premised on individual self-action:

The end of the ego’s quest is not emancipation from the limitations of individuality; it is, on the other hand, a more precise definition of it. The final act is . . . a vital act which deepens the whole being of the ego . . . [it is] something to be made and remade by continuous action.³¹

In describing the end of ego’s quest as a ‘vital act’, Iqbal saw ḳhūdī as a process and mode of self-development in which the self becomes more strongly individuated, active, and in charge of its own destiny.³² This ongoing process of self-individuation allows for individual sovereignty, one that is free from internal and external forces of domination.

By now, it is hopefully clear just how central the development of the individual and society is in Iqbal’s philosophy. For him, this development could only occur in a very particular political form, one constructed along religious lines. What, then, is the solution to Muslim politics if not the liberal nation-state? To put it briefly, Iqbal theorized a universalist political form—the millat—that addressed the aforementioned problems. At the heart of an Islamic worldview was for Iqbal a universalist message, one that was fully encapsulated by the millat, an alternative form of Muslim politics that was both non-temporal and non-territorial.³³ The millat, whose post-imperialist universality was driven by principles of Islamic solidarity, offered the possibility of ethical idealism in Muslim politics. Through the millat, Muslims would be defined as Muslims alone, fostering a sense of global solidarity. This “supra-territorial community of believers” thus counteracted the forces of modern society that reduced the individual down to mere fragments.³⁴ As a result, the millat provided the Muslim a means to reclaim their individual freedom and agency as Muslims. For Iqbal, then, the millat was both compatible with and fostered ḳhūdī.

Also illuminating in Iqbal’s political thought is his views on the finality of Prophet Muhammad, or ḳhatm-e-nubuwwat. As Iqbal himself noted, “This idea of Finality is perhaps the most original idea in the cultural history of mankind: its true significance can be understood only by those who carefully study the history of pre-Islamic Magian culture in Western and Middle Asia.”³⁵ The idea of the “continuity of prophethood,” found in other religions, left individuals “in a state of constant expectation.”³⁵ The “modern man,” however, was “spiritually far more emancipated” than others.³⁵ As Iqbal noted, Islam “which claims to weld all the various communities of the world into one single community, cannot reconcile itself to a movement which threatens its present solidarity and holds the promise of further rifts in human society.”³⁵ As he wrote in another letter dated in 1935, the finality of Prophet Muhammad “accurately draws the line of demarcation between Muslims and non-Muslims and enables one to decide whether a certain individual or group is a part of the community or not.”³⁶

For Iqbal, the acceptance or expectation of a prophet after Prophet Muhammad fundamentally altered Muslim selfhood. As Iqbal Singh Sevea notes in The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, “[t]he promise of a messiah served to sap the ḳhūdī’s will and destroy [the Muslim’s] desire for internal reform.”³⁷ For Iqbal, ḳhūdī enabled the Muslim to move to take action. In other words, it forced the Muslim “to stop looking towards the sky for new ideas,” and instead, look towards the self as the source of action.³⁸ Again, one can harken back towards Iqbal’s Asrār-e-Ḳhūdi and Rumūz-e-Beḳhūdī, notably his ideas on self-development and the development of the Perfect Man. Ultimately, the acceptance of expectation of a prophet after the Prophet Muhammad not only severely undermined the theological notion of ḳhatm-e-nubuwwat but it forced Muslims into “slavish surrender.”³⁸

Moreover, for Iqbal, ḳhatm-e-nubuwwat was less about transgressing a theological boundary that it was about the subverting the emancipatory power that the Prophet Muhammad opened up for his followers, as he noted in his 1935 correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru:

The cultural value of the idea of Finality in Islam I have fully explained elsewhere. Its meaning is simple: No spiritual surrender to any human being after Muhammad who emancipated his followers by giving them a law which is realisable as arising from the very core of human conscience.³⁹

In denying the emancipatory power that the Prophet Muhammad proffered upon Muslims following his final prophecy, individuals who accepted or awaited another prophet (such as the Ahmadis, who Iqbal was primarily referencing in this correspondence) essentially “[pluralized] the primary source of sovereignty, namely the Prophet [Muhammad].”⁴⁰

With the finality of Islamic prophecy, Iqbal essentially theorized freedom in the following sense: the culmination of Muhammad’s prophecy opened up human cognition to spiritual and mystical life but ended personal authority in religious life. The ending of personal authority for Iqbal broadened the scope and nature of individual freedom and sovereignty of the self. As Iqbal wrote in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, for the human to achieve “full self-consciousness,” or freedom, “man must be thrown back on his own resources.”⁴¹ The existence of “leading strings,” or the arrival of new prophets, would ultimately prevent Muslims from achieving this goal.⁴² For Iqbal, then, the “intellectual value” of the finality of Prophet Muhammad was rooted in the fact that it produced an “independent critical attitude towards mystic experience by generating the belief that all personal authority, claiming a supernatural origin, has come to an end in the history of man . . . The function of the idea is to open up fresh vistas of knowledge in the domain of man’s inner experience.”⁴³ And it is only in Islam and in the core belief in the finality of Prophet Muhammad that engendered the “birth of the inductive intellect” for all true believers.⁴³

Through ḳhūdī, Iqbal’s philosophy was an intellectual response to the most pressing social, political, and religious concerns facing Indian Muslims in the twentieth-century. But Iqbal’s political theology, ethicopolitical vision, and philosophical thought—however you may describe it—is not merely relevant to twentieth-century colonial India. It was and is much more. Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī transcends space and time and holds relevance irrespective of geography or historical context. Who are you? What can you be? How can you build and reconstruct your community? How might we envision a society, one driven by the principles and teachings of Islam? These are all the questions that Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī can answer for us today.

But ḳhūdī is not intellectually separated from Iqbal’s other ideas. In fact, it is intimately connected to a web of other ideas in Iqbal’s intellectual thought, one that reveals the importance of philosophical thinking both for Iqbal and for us today. Ultimately, Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī, though influenced by his intellectual engagements with Western philosophers, is purely rooted in Islam. Thinking about Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī—and his philosophy more generally—can serve as a means to understand ourselves not only as humans but also as Muslims.

Iqbal’s philosophy of ḳhūdī is merely a starting point—albeit a fundamental one—in how we might read and learn from Iqbal. The new meanings, vocabularies, and epistemologies that we can gain from reading Iqbal inform us about the history of the subcontinent in the twentieth-century. At the same time, Iqbal’s poetry and prose enable us to understand the human condition. Indeed, as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi puts it, Iqbal’s poetics remain indispensable in our world today: “More than any modern Urdu poet it is Iqbal who makes us respect and try to understand the foundations of our poetics. The structures of meaning that Iqbal makes for us exist in their own right and also as continuities.”⁴⁴ And in the words of Iqbal himself, he reminds us that discovering purpose and finding meaning is a never-ending exercise: “As knowledge advances and fresh avenues of thought are opened, other views, and probably sounder views than those set forth in these lectures, are possible. Our duty is carefully to watch the progress of human thought, and to maintain an independent critical attitude towards it.”⁴⁵

One need not be a philosopher or poet or scholar to learn from Iqbal. Rather, all that one needs is a “respectful and independent attitude” towards knowledge, an attitude that can enable Muslims to learn more about themselves as well as the teachings of Islam. Thus, Iqbal’s falsafa-e-ḳhūdī is not merely an idea that is beyond our reach. It is, in Hegelian terms, a spirit that is meant to be actualized. How can we strive to be our best selves in line with the teachings of Allah? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to foster spiritual solidarity and brotherhood in communities today? Iqbal’s falsafa-e-ḳhūdī is one mode through which we can answer these questions—critically, genuinely, and open-heartedly—to not only learn about Iqbal and Urdu, but also ourselves.

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Photo by Essay author, taken in December 2023 of Dabistan-e-Iqbal, in Lahore, Pakistan.

Disclaimer: Material published by Traversing Tradition is meant to foster scholarly inquiry and rich discussion. The views, opinions, beliefs, or strategies represented in published articles and subsequent comments do not necessarily represent the views of Traversing Tradition or any employee thereof.

References:

1.  Charles Taylor, preface to Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa 2010), xi. [↩]
2. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, ‘How to Read Iqbāl?’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 20: 1–33, 4 (2005). [↩]
3. Id., 21. [↩]
4. Id., 4. [↩]
5. Ahmad Javaid, “Freedom and Iqbal آزادی: اقبال کے حوالے سے,” YouTube, September 23, 2022, 8:58 to 9:06. [↩]
6. Javed Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics, and Postcolonialism (New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), 19. [↩]
7. Ebrahim Moosa, “The Human Person in Iqbal’s Thought”, in Chad Hillier & Basit Koshul (eds.), Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 13. [↩]
8. Basit Bilal Koshul, “The Contemporary Relevance of Muhammad Iqbal”, in Chad Hillier & Basit Koshul (eds.), Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 62, 86. [↩]
9. Muhammad Iqbal, Stray Reflections: The Private Notebook of Muhammad Iqbal, ed. Javid Iqbal (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1961), 53. [↩]
10. Id., 45. [↩]
11. Taylor, preface to Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, xi. [↩]
12. Robert Whittemore,. “Iqbal’s Panentheism,” The Review of Metaphysics 9, no. 4 (1956): 681–99, 682. [↩]
13. Muhammad Iqbal, “Note on Nietzsche,” in Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, ed. S. A. Vahid (Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf), 244. [↩]
14. Ebrahim Moosa, “The Human Person in Iqbal’s Thought,” 15. [↩]
15. Muhammad Iqbal, “Two Letters from Iqbal to Jinnah,” http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_tojinnah_1937.html. [↩]
16. Muhammad Iqbal, “1930 Presidential Address, All-India Muslim League” (Allahabad, December 29, 1930), http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html. [↩]
17. Iqbal, “1930 Presidential Address”. [↩]
18. These approaches include how Iqbal’s thought espoused a form of republican sovereignty (Kapila 2021); a cosmopolitan worldview (Devji 2013); and a critique against imperial domination (Sevea 2012). [↩]
19. Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal, 20. [↩]
20. Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal, 147. [↩]
21. Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal, 23–24. [↩]
22. Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal, 146; Iqbal, Kulliyāt-i Iqbāl; See also Arberry’s translation, where he translates the couplets as the following: “Politics dethroned religion; this tree first struck root within a Western garden, and the tale of Christianity was all rolled up, The radiance of the Churches’ lantern dimmed.” A.J. Arberry, The Mysteries of Selflessness: A Philosophical Poem (London: John Murray Publishers Ltd., 1953), 32. [↩]
23. Faisal Devji, “Secular Islam,” Political Theology 19, no. 8 (July 5, 2018): 705. [↩]
24. Faisal Devji, “Illiberal Islam,” in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, ed. Saurabh Dube (Delhi: Routledge India, 2009), 237. [↩]
25. Iqbal, “1930 Presidential Address.” [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
26. Muhammad Iqbal, “Separate Muslim Nationhood in India,” in Fateh Mohammad Malik (ed.), Muslim Political Thought: A Reconstruction (Islamabad: Alhamra Publishing, 2002), 193. [↩]
27. For Iqbal, the nation-state motivated a territorial attachment to land. Furthermore, the nation-state is not congruent with the borders of the Muslim nation, as Muslims were dispersed throughout the globe. With territory as the focal point of the nation-state, individuals would become motivated by capitalist interests. See Devji’s Muslim Zion (2013) and Sevea’s The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (2012). [↩]
28. Muhammad Iqbal, “Letter to Dr. Nicholson,” in Letters of Iqbal, ed. Bashir Ahmad Dar (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1978), 147. [↩]
29. Riffat Hassan, “Introduction”, in Chad Hillier & Basit Koshul (eds.), Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 7. [↩]
30. Javed Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics, and Postcolonialism (New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), 20. [↩]
31. Muhammad Iqbal, M. Saeed Sheikh (ed.), The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Encountering Traditions (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013), 157. [↩]
32. Hasan Azad, “Reconstructing the Muslim Self: Muhammad Iqbal, Khudi, and the Modern Self,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 2, no. 2 (October 1, 2014): 16. [↩]
33. Farzana Shaikh, “Azad and Iqbal: The Question for the Islamic ‘Good,’” in Islam and Indian Nationalism: Reflections on Abul Kalam Azad, ed. Mushirul Hasan (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2001), 65; S. A. Vahid, Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal (Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1964), 376. [↩]
34. Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, 143–147. [↩]
35. Muhammad Iqbal, “Islam and Qadianism,” in Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal (Lahore, Pakistan: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1995), 162. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
36. Muhammad Iqbal, “Islam and Qadianism,” in Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal (Lahore, Pakistan: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1995), 172. [↩]
37. Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2012), 123. [↩]
38. Moosa, “The Human Person in Iqbal’s Thought,” 18. [↩] [↩]
39. Muhammad Iqbal, “Islam and Ahmadism,” in Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal (Lahore, Pakistan: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1995), 182. [↩]
40. Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 217. [↩]
41. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 101. [↩]
42. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 113. [↩]
43. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 101. [↩] [↩]
44. Faruqi, ‘How to Read Iqbāl?’, 27. [↩]
45. Muhammad Iqbal, “Preface,” in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, xlvi. [↩]