Iqbal in Three Ideas
the essentialsKhudī
The self is not to be dissolved (as in some mysticism) but strengthened, until God himself asks man what he wills.
Reconstruction
Islam must be rethought dynamically, through ijtihād (independent reasoning), in the light of modern philosophy.
Sāre jahāṅ se acchā
His early anthem — “better than all the world is our Hindustan” — is still sung in India.
Muhammad Iqbal (9 November 1877 – 21 April 1938), known as Allāma Iqbāl, was a poet, philosopher and political thinker of British India, writing in Urdu and Persian, and one of the most important Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. Educated in Lahore, at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in Germany (PhD, Munich, 1908), he combined the Sufi poetry of Rūmī, the philosophy of Nietzsche, Bergson, Goethe and Hegel, and the Qur’an in a philosophy of khudī — the self, or selfhood — which, he argued, is not to be annihilated in God, as some mystics taught, but developed, strengthened and perfected through action, love and struggle, until the individual becomes God’s co-worker in creation. His Persian Asrār-e-Khudī (Secrets of the Self, 1915), his Urdu Bāng-e-Darā and Bāl-e-Jibrīl, and his lectures The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) called for a dynamic, modern Islam. His early poem “Sāre jahāṅ se acchā Hindostāṅ hamārā” (“Better than all the world is our India”) remains one of India’s best-loved patriotic songs; but in his 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad he proposed a separate Muslim state in north-western India, and he is honoured as the spiritual father of Pakistan, whose national poet he is.
Curiosities
did you know?- He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Munich (1908) on Persian metaphysics.
- His verse: ‘Raise your self so high that before every decree of destiny, God himself asks you: tell me, what is your will?’ (khudī ko kar buland itnā…).
- He is the national poet of Pakistan; ‘Sāre jahāṅ se acchā’ is played by the Indian army band and was sung by Rakesh Sharma from space.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Should the self be dissolved in God, or strengthened before him?
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