Khudi


is a philosophical concept developed by Muhammad Iqbal. His philosophical writings and poetical works had a notable impression on the religio-cultural and social revival of the East particularly subcontinent Muslim. The central theme of his philosophical thought throughout his works, prose and poetry, especially in The Secrets of the Self, ''The Secrets of Selflessness and Message from the East'' is the doctrine of Khudi. As a Muslim sage he realised 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. His knowledge convinced him that the decadent condition of Muslims was due to those philosophical systems which regard the world as a mere illusion not worth striving for, and to certain classes of Sufis who regarded self-annihilation as the highest goal of human life. His use of term Khudi is synonymous with the world of Ruh as mentioned in the Quran. To him the main purpose of the Quran is to awaken in man "the higher consciousness of his manifold relations with Allah and the universe". 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.
Iqbal's ideal for individual as well as social life is Self-affirmation not Self-negation which was the common teaching of Hindu and Sufi pantheism. Hence Iqbal tried to establish a firm theoretical foundation for his viewpoints, and to discover a proper philosophical terminology for conveying his message to all the humanity. To Iqbal Khudi is a universal and comprehensive reality with different degrees in expression, which moves perfection. 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. Iqbal, therefore, condemned the doctrine of dissolution of the human self into the featureless Absolute as an Ideal of inaction and poverty of life, and developed his own doctrine based on self-affirmation under the unique name of Khudi. According to him:
  1. Khudi is a reality neither an abstract thought nor an idea that reveals itself as a unity of what we call mental states. Mental states does not exist in mutual isolation. They mean and involve one another. They exist as phases of a complex whole, called mind. To Iqbal, inner experience is the ego or Khudi at work. In deed our appreciation of the ego itself in the act of perceiving, judging and willing depends ultimately on the conviction that Khudi is real and is not merely an illusion of the mind.
  2. Khudi is a universal and multi-degree reality. There is a gradually rising note of egohood in the whole universe which differs in degree among the creatures. We are conscious of this in our own self, in nature before us and in the ultimate principle, of all life, the Ultimate Ego.
  3. Khudi is the gauge of the degree of reality of any living organism. In the scale of life the status of every object is fixed according to extent it develops its Khudi and gains mastery over the environment. Khudi attains highest development in man and here it becomes Personality.
  4. Khudi is not an independent reality. God the Infinite Khudi, is the Source of life for the finite Khudi which can maintain its existence only as long as it is in contact with this All-embracing Divine Khudi. This Khudi, born in the heart of the Infinite Khudi developing in Him, and yet distinct from Him, unable to exist without Him, but also unable to be non-existent in His presence.
  5. Khudi in human beings is individual and uniqueness. Iqbal says that our pleasures, pains, desires and experiences related to different things and persons which are exclusively ours, forming a part and parcel of our private Khudi alone. It is this unique interrelation of our mutual states that we express by the word ‘I’.
  6. Khudi is not a datum; it is an achievement. Khudi has the quality of growth as well as the quality of corruption. To Iqbal if Khudi does not take the initiative, if he does not evolve the inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inward push of advancing life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter. The greater man's distance from God, the less his individuality.
  7. The highest stage of development of Khudi is not self-negation-Fana but self-affirmation-Baqa. The fully developed Khudi does not dissolve even when the Reality is seen face to face as in mystic experience. He who comes nearest to God is the completes person. Nor that he is finally absorbed in God. Fand to Iqbal is not in the meaning of annihilation of Khudi but according to the Prophetical tradition, Takhallaqu bi-Akhlaq-i-Allah, it is essentially the annihilation of human attributes and their substitution by Divine ones.Thus man becomes unique by becoming more and more like the most unique Individuality.
  8. The basis of Iqbal's doctrine of khudi is a strong faith in the evolution of man. To Iqbal this evolution is to be attained by fortifying Khudi. The most important factors which strengthen Khudi are: Love, desire, Action, Faqr, Courage, Suffering, Tolerance and Forbearance. Khudi in this evolutionary process towards uniqueness has to pass through three stages; Obedience to Law, Self-Control and Divine-Vicegerency.
  9. By the side of factors and rules which strengthen Khudi, the fully grown Khudi will not be attained unless it associates with other Khudis in the community to which it belongs. So the kind of society in which the greatest scope for the free development of Khudi is provided is of the great importance. According to Iqbal's philosophy of Khudi, a nation is, just as the individual, a Khudi, and has to follow the same lines of conduct as the individual does. Hence the same rules and elements required to flourish the individual Khudi are applied to the community as the national Khudi as well.

    Background

Iqbal was born on 9 November 1877 at Sialkot in the Punjab, and died at 21 April 1938 in Lahore. He, as is well known, came from a Kashmiri Brahmin stock. The Brahmins, as devotees to Brahma were given to learning, knowledge and contemplation, and thus produced generations of talented persons. His ancestors around the two hundred and fifty years before Iqbal's birth had converted to Islam. As an enlightened family, they not only observed the practices of Islam but also were imbued with its spirit. Iqbal, therefore, from his very infancy was made conversant with Islam and inherited its best traditions. On the other hand, Iqbal's teachers had a vital role in the progress and maturity of his personality. 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. This tasted received an additional impetus at the hands of Thomas Walker Arnold, an orientalist. Arnold not only initiated Iqbal into modern scholarship but also created in him a devotion to scientific knowledge and western thought, in the pursuit of which Iqbal went to Europe. His visit to the west can be considered as second phase of Iqbal's life. There, contemplating on modern sciences and philosophy, he did not separate from the stream of oriental consciousness and wrote his dissertation on The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. He took advantage of his stay in Germany and England and searched thoroughly the libraries of Europe for rare manuscripts on Muslim learning and literature. At the same time, Iqbal, assimilated to the full the intellectual bias, voluntaristic tendencies, the scientific method and the dynamism of European thought. Eventually he was awarded Ph.D. in philosophy and returned to India in 1908.
On the other hand, Iqbal was fully conscious of depressing and pitiable conditions of the East towards the close of the nineteenth century. The consolidation of British role and the deliberate policy of the British to weaken the Muslim politically, economically and culturally had gradually broken the Muslim spirit. The last attempts of religious reformists and revivalists to reestablish Muslim supremacy and revival the moral and spiritual merits of the followers of Islam had failed. Iqbal was deeply pained at the sad plight of the Muslims. He was also conscious of his mission to regenerate his people from whom the foreign rulers had snatched away power and supremacy. From long before he had reflected deeply over the problems of his co-religionists. 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 oneness or wahdat-al-wujud in Sufism and Hellenic and neo- Platonic ideas which regarded the world as a mere illusion not worth striving for. These system of thoughts encouraged men to run away from the difficulties of life instead grappling with them, and emphasised the annihilation of the self as means of attaining union with the Ultimate Reality. This absorption and negation of the self led Muslims to adopt an otherworldly outlook and an attitude of renunciation of socio-political life. Iqbal was very much dissatisfied with this state of affairs. So he arrived at the solution of the political problems of the East, but a consistent philosophical basis of his message was as yet lacking. He wanted a comprehensive philosophy which should co-ordinate all the elements of his message and should serve as a vantage ground from which all problems about life could be solved. His acquaintance with the thoughts of great western philosophers as well as Muslim mystics works and teachings particularly the famous Persian mystic poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, helped him in developing such a philosophy and discovering a philosophical terminology for conveying his message for the political and spiritual emancipation of all the East, nay, of all the humanity. As a Muslim sage, Iqbal realised 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 criticised 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. This is the third stage of Iqbal's development which "may be described as the stage of firm beliefs and well grounded conviction marked by a philosophical depth. In this phase of life, he achieved the maturity of thoughts; his philosophical quest reached its goal."