Iqbal's Concept of ‘Khudi' - 2
By Dr. Zafar M. Iqbal
Chicago , IL
If Iqbal thinks ‘khudi' didn't quite convey everything he had in mind, its English translations (‘self', ‘selfhood', ‘ego-hood', ‘I-ness'), including what Iqbal himself had used ("ego," "Slender-I") are, also unsatisfactory. Each term lacks clarity and/or adds confusion and is misleading, or not as "colorless" (free of emotions), as Iqbal wanted.
Having considered this to some extent in recent months, I think " Ipseity" [ipse, Latin, self] may come closer to ‘khudi' that Iqbal really had in mind. It is ‘colorless' enough. It implies identity and nature of the self, the absolute truth of Being, not just the essence but the "divine essence," all rolled into one single word, "ipseity" - the state of mind and soul that the Sufis may feel and imagine.
When Asrar-e-Khudi (1915) was translated from Persian into English ("The Secrets of the Self"), in 1920, by R. A. Nicholson it seemed to have been well received in England. It was even reviewed in the famous British science journal ‘Nature' (Vol 109, 370-371, 23 March 1922): "This poem has an interest beyond that of its artistic form or aesthetic content, for it reveals the effect on the oriental mind of contact with the culture and philosophy of the West. The writer is a firm and devout believer in Mahomet [Mohammed]." But it was not without criticism of Iqbal's views in the Western philosophical and literary circles.
Some critics found disturbing similarities between Iqbal's three-phases from a human being, going through ‘Ithaa-uth' (obeying the law) , Zabth-e-Nufs' (self-control) to become the ‘vice-regent' of Allah (niyabat-e-Alahi; or Insaan-e-kamil)] and those described by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in ‘Thus Spake Zarathushtra' (1883-1885) [ man's will to destruction, re-evaluation. destruction of old ideals and overcoming nihilism] to become an Ubermensch or ‘super-man.'
In 1883 when Ubermensch appeared as a concept, Iqbal was not quite a teenager in non-German-speaking Lahore, India, and the concept itself was in the German language, not English or Urdu or Persian. He must have come across it while he was in Europe (1905-1908), unless he did earlier in his college days. Critics of Asrar-e-khudi (1915) accused Iqbal of simply adopting Nietzsche's view or appropriating it as his own. Iqbal made clear that he wrote about Insaan-e-kamil, part of the Islamic mysticism, soon after leaving college, while still in Lahore.
After‘The Secrets of the Self' came out in 1920 and Iqbal became aware of the criticism in England, he wrote a long letter to his translator Nicholson ( 24 January 1921) in his defense. ( I now think, had he responded to the criticism in the British press or a literary journal he would have reached a much wider readership and the controversy would have died soon). His entire letter is included in ‘Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal’ (edited by Syed Abdul Vahid), in which Iqbal systematically dismantled this criticism.
Such influences in disciplines like Philosophy are nothing new, nor are the controversies. But the criticism itself was a bit ironic. Influence on Nietzsche's Ubermensch particularly by Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Over-Soul," for instance, has been well known in literary circles. In Nietzsche himself, footprints of other older philosophers like Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic, Schopenhauer and Wagner are easy to see. In a 1992 book on the "Elective Affinity" between Emerson and Nietzsche, George Stack argues that the "ideas and theories regarded by many as Nietzsche's original contribution to Western philosophy can actually be traced back to the ideas and theories of Emerson," which "influenced the development of Nietzsche's central ideas."
The critics perhaps forgot that Iqbal first wrote his PhD dissertation on "The Development of Metaphysics in Persia" (University of Munich, 1908). During the course of his doctoral studies, he became much familiar with Persian/Eastern mysticism. His ideas on khudi and insaan-e-kamil were further developed in the following seven years,before he wrote Asrar-e-Khudi (1915) in Persian which was later translated into English in 1920. Criticism on Iqbal was perhaps made without understanding the depth of Iqbal's extensive background in Persian metaphysics, the source of his concept of ‘khudi' and insaan-e-kamil.
Some points Iqbal made in his January 1921 letter to Nicholson:
(i) "I wrote on the Sufi doctrine of the Perfect Man (Insaan-e-Kamil) more than twenty years ago, long before I had read or heard anything of Nietzsche. This was then published in the Indian Antiquary of Bombay, and later in 1908 formed part of my Persian Metaphysics [topic of his PhD thesis from University of Munich, 1908].
(ii) Iqbal "deliberately' tried to present his views in Asrar, in light of Western thinkers-philosophers. That, he said, was to "facilitate" the Western understanding, without imposing the old Sufis and their philosophy -- something which, he could have easily done, scholarly steeped as he already was in that culture. He could have referred particularly to Al-Jili's idea of ‘Perfect Man' and the Pantheism of Ibn Arabi and Iraqi, and other Sufi bases for his thoughts. This, he said he had done "in my Hindustani introduction to the first edition of the Asrar."
Iqbal mentioned that little history could have put Western criticism in better perspective. Iqbal had read Al-Jili, an Islamic mystic (born 1365 - died 1403) - 5 centuries before Nietzsche. Al-Jili was famous for his doctrine "Al-Insān al-kāmil fi maʿrifat al-awākhir wa al-awā ʿil" aboutthe Perfect Man, a doctrine influenced by the pantheist Spanish mystic, Ibn al-Arabi (died 1240), about a century-and-a-half before Al-Jili himself.
Al-Jili believed that the perfect man can unite with the Divine Being. This unity can be achieved through the prophets, from Adam to Moḥammad, and by others who reach the highest level of Being ( wujūd) or the elite among elites, a level at which all conflicts and contradictions among men are resolved. This Perfect Man doctrine later devolved into a belief that all mystics and holy-men can achieve Divine contact. Even centuries later, such concepts were still novel to Western culture.
In his letter, Iqbal emphasized this to Nicholson: "I claim that the philosophy of the Asrar is a direct development out of the experience and speculation of old Muslim Sufis and thinkers. Even [Henri-Louis] Bergson's idea of time is not quite foreign to our Sufis." [Bergson (1859-1941), an anti-rationalist French philosopher and the 1927 Nobel Laureate in Literature, had some influence on Iqbal, but Iqbal did also criticize him later. Bergson believed that the intuition is deeper than the intellect.] Iqbal also saw similarities in Ubermensch and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Over-Soul," an essay Emerson had written in 1841, before Nietzsche's birth (1844), an essay that also had influenced Nietzsche.
(iii) To a critic in Athenaeum and a reviewer named ‘ Dickinson', Iqbal offered factual corrections and detailed defense of his philosophical position in Asrar, including references to other philosophers. For instance, Samuel Alexander, a British contemporary whose view, "If we could know what Deity is, how it feels to be Divine, we should have to become as Gods" was "much bolder than [Iqbal's]"). In Prof. J. S. Mackenzie's Introduction to "Social Philosophy" he says, "There can be no ideal society without ideal men....We need prophets as well as teachers, men like Carlyle or Ruskin or Tolstoy ...Perhaps we want a new Christ...." Iqbal added that "It is in the light of the above thoughts that I [Iqbal] want the British public to read my description of the ideal man."
(iv) On Nietzsche, Iqbal elaborated that "reality is a collection of individualities tending to become a harmonious whole through conflict which must inevitably lead to mutual adjustment. This conflict is a necessity in the interests of the evolution of higher forms of life, and of personal immortality. Nietzsche did not believe in personal immortality..... My [Iqbal's] interest in conflict is mainly ethical ...whereas Nietzsche's was probably only political." He then sharpened the difference: "Nietzsche does not at all believe in the spiritual fact which I have described as ‘Khudi', and that "[a]ccording to Nietzsche, the "I" is a fiction.
(v) The three-phase metamorphosis that leads to Nietzsche's Ubermensch: Camel (a symbol of load-bearing strength); then Lion (strength to kill without pity; pity being a vice to Nietzsche) and finally Child (being a law unto himself, having gone through good and evil). In this, Nietzsche's materialism is diametrically opposed to Iqbal's Asrar-e-khudi. Comparing the two, Iqbal said: To Nietzsche, Life is repetition, and to Asrar, creation; "To Nietzsche, there is no such thing as the eternal now"; Ubermensch is "a biological product"; Insaan-e-Kamil, on the other hand, "is the product of moral and spiritual forces."
(vi) Iqbal also pointed out: "It is unfortunate that the history of Muslim thought is so little known in the West."
(To be continued)
