Muhammad Iqbal's concept of Khudi

[2][3] As a Muslim sage he realized that the revival of man both as an individual and as a member of social group can only come from the ultimate central principle of his being, namely, the Self or Khudi.

[6] In his opinion the undeveloped condition and the miserable plight of the Muslim nations were due to lost real identity of Khudi and to keep distance from the true spirit of Islam.

[2] Various factors and principles-which are mostly the same positive and negative religio-moral qualities can strengthen or weaken Khudi in human beings until it reaches the highest stage of perfection, that is, Vicegerency of God on earth.

[7] Mir Hasan Shah, a Muslim savant and spiritual man, who undertook his education and training at an early age, nurtured him with the spirit of Islamic thought and literature.

His deep and wide knowledge of sociology and the history of different cultures convinced him that the main responsibility for oriental decadence lay at the door of those philosophical systems which inculcated self-negation and self -abandonment, i.e.the Vedanta school, the doctrine of unitism or wahdat-al-wujud in Sufism and Hellenic and neo- Platonic ideas which regarded the world as a mere illusion not worth striving for.

[7] As a Muslim sage, Iqbal realized that the revival of man both as an individual and as a member of a social group can only come from the ultimate central principal of his being, namely, the Self or Ego.

He, therefore, waged a constant war in his writings against the doctrine of self-negation and strongly criticized such an ideal of human life and as Reynold A. Nicholson has remarked, "developed a philosophy of his own" based on self-affirmation, under the unique name of Khudi.

[12] According to it, "peak experiences" are profound mystical moments of love, understanding, happiness or rapture, when a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world, more aware of truth, justice, harmony, goodness and so on.

Iqbal states in Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam: It is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which train us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal.

Only true love can instill faith in man’s soul and lead him to the deep apprehension of the Divine:[15] The luminous point whose name is the self, Is the life-spark beneath our dust.

[17] "His Perfect Man is democratic in origin, is a spiritual principle based on the assumption that every human being is centre of latent power, the possibilities of which are developed by cultivating a certain type of character".

As Schimmel writes it was understandable considering "the highly negative significance in Persian of the word Khudi, self,with its implications of selfishness, egotism and similar objectionable meanings".

[6] Iqbal was aware of this and admitted that the word Khudi was chosen with great difficulty and most reluctantly because from a literary point of view it has many shortcomings and ethically it is generally used in a bad sense both in Urdu and Persian.

"[21] Iqbal believes that Khudi is a real and pre-eminently significant entity which is the center and basis of entire organization of life and has various features and stages of development.

[21] In the first part of his Asrar under the title of "showing that the system of the universe originates in the self, and that the continuation of the life of all individuals depends on strengthening the self", he says: "The form of existence is an effect of the self, Whatsoever thou seest is a secret of the self.

Iqbal believes that such denial of the khudi taught by Hindu intellectualism and Islamic pantheism have led Muslims to inaction and destroyed the spirit of creativity in them.

[22] He, therefore, "throws himself with all his might against idealistic philosophers and pseudo-mystical poets , the authors , in his opinion, of the decay prevailing in Islam,and urges that only by self-affirmation, self-expression, and self-development can the Moslems once more become strong and free.

[27] Iqbal rejects the attitude of self-negation influenced by pseudo-mysticism, and in contrary, advocates an alive and active presence of man in society which would lead him to conquest of the material world.

"The withdrawal from the world of matter is not the end of true renunciation; It means the conquest of the earth and the heavens;I wash my hands of the ascetics faqr,Which is not but poverty and grieving.

[28] To his son he gives this advice: "Religion is a constant yearning for perfection, It begins in reverence and ends in love; It is a sin to utter hash words, for the believer and the unbeliever are alike children of God;What is Adamiyat?

"[29] In his Gabriel's Wing, Iqbal expresses his respect for truth and love for mankind in a vivid sense: "The God-intoxicated Faqir is neither of the East nor of the West, I belong neither to Delhi nor Isfahan nor Samarkand.

Iqbal's poetry gives this message that, unless individuals as well as the community develop self-reliance and evolve the inner richness of their own being, their potentialities will remain wraped and repressed, in a variety of beautiful forms.

[31] Just as creativity and originality strengthen the khudi, release its potential capacity for great needs, fear, which is the negation of them,weakens it and becomes the source of all kinds of corruption in the individual character.

[31] He says, "Grief ,like a lancet,pierces the soul's vein...Fear,save of God, is the dire enemy of works, The high way man that plundereth life's caravan.

[33][34] Obedience to law and self-control also play a great part in the fortification of khudi, but Iqbal prefers to regard them as representing milestones on the upward march towards the goal -Naab-.

The true interpretation of his experience, therefore, is not the drop slipping into the sea, but the realization and bold affirmation in an undying phrase of the reality and permanence of the human ego in a profounder personality.

Through the inner, creative tension of man, an evolutionary picture of his ascent is put forward by Iqbal, which borrows from Bergson’s élan vital and Nietzche’s will to power, whereby the fundamental driving force of humanity (and all of existence, in fact) is the achievement of endless perfection.

In this regard, Tomoko Masuzawa writes in The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism: Seen through the mystic kernel of Sufism, all the parochial and miserly laws, childish dogmas, and ceremonial encrustations that have constituted orthodox Islam seem to fall away.

[43] It is also important to consider that Orientalists, in the process of attempting to discover the "original" language(s) of Europe, constructed Greek "polytheism" as a fundamentally creative force in history, whose heir was Western Christianity.

All of these accusations are false…because they mistake the metaphysical doctrines of Ibn ‘Arabi for philosophy and do not take into consideration the fact that the way of gnosis is not separate from grace and sanctity.