Khudi ka sirr e nihaN la ilaha il Allah (The hidden secret of Khudi is la ilaha il Allah)
So wrote Allama Iqbal, the poet, philosopher, thinker, mujaddid, mujtahid and one of the most influential personages of Asia in the twentieth century. In spite of the volumes written about him, the Allama remains a mystery within an enigma within a riddle. He is quoted and misquoted, understood and misunderstood. Like Shakespeare in an earlier era, his very greatness has stood in the way of how he is understood. Let me offer some instances from my own experience.
Some thirty years ago, a certain shaikh asked me to give the juma’ khutba at a Masjid in New Jersey. In my youthful enthusiasm I chose the subject of khudi. The khutba was well attended and the audience listened in silence. After the prayers, the shaikh called me aside. “What you said in the khutba is not correct. There is no such thing as khudi in Islam.”
Five years ago I had lunch with a well-known Professor in Berkeley. The conversation was free-wheeling and it turned to Iqbal’s poetry. “Iqbal was confused about khudi”, said the professor, “I realize that is a dangerous thing to say to someone from the subcontinent”.
Muslim saints and Muslim scholars have been roasted for their views which were at variance with the common understanding of those around them. Mansur al-Hallaj was tortured and killed (922 CE) for saying, “Ana al Haq” (I am the Truth). Five hundred years later, in post-Timurid India circa 1450 CE, there was a certain Wali near Gulbarga in the Deccan who went into retreat in a hut. When he emerged from the hut after 40 days, he cried out, “Ana al Haq”. People thought the wali had gone crazy. They caught him and put him back in the hut and told him to remain in seclusion for 40 more days. By nightfall, the wali made a hole in the back of the hut and ran away into the forest. Iqbal was more fortunate when he pierced the glass ceiling of orthodoxy. When he wrote Shikwa, some mullas called him a kafir, only to turn around and call him a mujtahid when he published Jawab e Shikwa.
Hazrath Ali said: Speak to people at their level of understanding, or else they could lose their faith. The concept of khudi requires a deep understanding of the Self. The Prophet said: One who knows his Self knows his Rabb (Man ‘Arafa nafsahu faqad ‘arafa Rabbahu). This is not a quest for the faint hearted or the uninitiated. It requires a deep knowledge of science, history, philosophy and tasawwuf and the assumptions underlying each. Most important of all, it requires a deep understanding of the Qur’an because while Iqbal often speaks the language of the philosophers of the West, his ideas are firmly rooted in his own spiritual inheritance from the Qur’an and the tasawwuf of the Awliyah.
Iqbal lived in an age when his homeland was under the heel of foreigners. Pax Brittania held the vast subcontinent of Hindustan in its juggernaut. As such Iqbal had to come to terms with the ideas of the imperial West. He received his early training in Sialkot and Lahore and went on to study philosophy, first in England and then in Germany. Western thought was always a distraction for Iqbal; he had to constantly look over his shoulder to unhinge his ideas from those of the West. The ghosts of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer haunted his legacy so much so that many writers not just in the West but also in the Urdu-speaking East consider his idea of khudi to be an echo of the Ego advanced by Nietzsche. Iqbal himself did not help his case when he devoted a major part of his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam to examining and repudiating the philosophers of the West. The effort was perhaps unnecessary except for didactic purposes. Iqbal comes through in the fullness of his thinking when he expresses himself in his own languages, Urdu and Farsi.
This essay was written at the request of my good friend Dr Agha Saeed, who had done so much to establish and keep alive the tradition of Urdu literature in North America. When I sat down to write a brief note after delivering a talk on Iqbal, the pen took over. The result has been a deep study not only of Iqbal and of the secrets of khudi as articulated by him, but a study of the interdependence of science, history, philosophy and faith from the Qur’anic perspective. It evolved into a study of the Unity of Knowledge. One must necessarily sift though these disciplines and their processes to fathom the mysteries of khudi which I have translated in the past not as Ego but as Essence. It manifests itself through its attributes. Its secret, paradoxically, lies in its self-effacement. When it is effaced, it becomes the mirror into which is reflected its magnificent sirr (secret) from the Spirit. The Ego is a ghost from the West and it must be sent packing to where it came from. Essence is a child of the East and it needs to be nourished and cultivated.
Secular man abandoned the soul and embarked on a search for the Truth in atoms, protons and chemical reactions. How does one discuss the idea of khudi with one whose world is bereft of the Grace of the spirit or the joy and vibrancy of the soul? This was the dilemma faced by Iqbal too. He waged a valiant battle, borrowing the terminology of philosophy, engaging in a dialectic with secular man, incurring in the process the risk of being misunderstood. The attempt was consistent with Iqbal’s character. He was not only a great poet but a risk taker, injecting himself into the process of history, in politics, sociology, science and philosophy.
Iqbal enriched us with his thoughts and his actions. His vision was our horizon, his failures our teacher. He embellished the Urdu language with a new dimension of social and political activism, taking it to heights never seen before. Generations who come after him would be the poorer were it not for this great mujtahid.
The Renewal of Civilizations
A great civilization renews itself from within. The vicissitudes of time test the mettle of a civilization with new ideas, alien challenges, internal dissension, invasion, conquest, subjugation, triumphs and tragedies. A great civilization reaches into the oceans of its spirituality and rises to the occasion, renewing itself after every test. This process is continuous, unceasing. This was the gist of a Theory of Renewal that I advanced in my book Islam in Global History. It stands in contrast with the Theory of Asabiya advanced by Ibn Khaldun, the father of history, or the plethora of theories advanced by Western historians.
If you scan the history of Islam on the global stage you discern at least seven major turns when Islamic civilization demonstrated its resilience and renewed itself, each time diving into its spiritual reservoir and showing the world a new dimension of its timeless endurance and its universal appeal: The Hijra of the Prophet (622 CE); the triumph of the principle of Shura at the death of the Prophet (632 CE); the Mutazalite Revolution (765-746 CE); the triumph of the Awliyah following the Mongol Devastations (1219-1301 CE); the consolidation of Ottoman, Safavid and Mogul empires (1453-1600 CE); the appearance of great mujtahids with the onset of the colonial age (1750-1850 CE); and the reformers of the twentieth century. Iqbal belonged to this last category of thinkers and doers. The effort is still ongoing and the last page of this chapter is yet to be written. Islam has yet to throw off its intellectual complex vis a vis the West, overcome its inertia, amalgamate new ideas that have emerged with the technological age, absorb the blows that hammer at it from the East and the West, and renew itself to find its rightful place in the comity of civilizations.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
