Reconstructing the Muslim Self: Muhammad Iqbal, Khudi, and the Modern Self

Abstract

Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), one of the 20th century's most influential Muslim thinkers, theorized a radically new understanding of Islamic selfhood. For Iqbal, the self (khudi) was marked by an individuality that made it distinct and inherently equipped to overcome colonial incursions. Iqbal put this down to Ibn ‘Arabi's (1165–1240) “Neo-Platonist doctrine of sheep” of wahdat-al-wujud. This article examines the ways in which Iqbal's ideas of the self derive from a specifically modern, Western notion of the self that has its history in Rene Descartes' cogito ergo sum — a modern selfhood entailing independence and uniqueness, and which became the standard in Europe after the 18th century. It is a self whose worth is measured by what it produces, and by its relationship to the world as a creator. When Iqbal writes that “man becomes unique by becoming more and more like the most unique individual [God],”1 this paper investigates how Iqbal's approach to the Muslim self is thought through Western categories — beginning with the self, but extending to the pan-Islamic nation (the ummah), and nationalism — and how such an imagining delimits his very (re)construction of Islam, thereby further imbricating “Islam” within Eurocentric power-knowledge. The article reflects on the importance of examining perhaps the foundational theoretical assumption of the modern Muslim experience — Muslim selfhood — and how such an examination is essential for the process of decolonial thinking to begin.