‘A Stranger in the City’: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines Muhammad Iqbal’s self-portraiture as a stranger and shows how he frees the notion of strangerhood from its association with exile, migration, alienation or withdrawal from a community, foregrounding the originary sense of the word ‘stranger’ or gharīb as a means by which newness breaks into a closed system. It shows how the Iqbalian stranger, or Iqbal the stranger, exemplifies the self-differentiating, heterogeneous, intractable, indocile, individuating forces that resist assimilation to any larger whole and remain irreducible to representations and significations given to them, and in doing so asks and addresses important questions about selfhood and community, freedom and belonging, ethics and politics. The paper also demonstrates how Iqbal’s self-portraitures function as the principal means of access to the ways in which Iqbal poses and pursues his key philosophical, ethical, and political questions, and outlines how they refuse to be assimilated to a vaster discursive ensemble of autobiography or reduced to a quest for identity.