Khudi

Khudi, a Persian and Urdu word meaning “selfhood”, often with overtones of pride, is the central idea of Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophy. In his Persian poem The Secrets of the Self (1915) he gave the word a positive sense: the self is the centre of human life, the source of creativity and moral action, and the purpose of life is to strengthen and realize it through love, striving and discipline.

Iqbal set this against what he saw as a tendency in Persian Sufism, and in some readings of Plato and Vedānta, to treat the self as an illusion to be dissolved. The goal, for him, is not to lose oneself in God like a drop in the ocean, but to become a fuller self in relation to God, who is the ultimate self; even in the presence of God the perfect person keeps their selfhood. He found support for this in Rūmī, whom he called his master, and in modern philosophers such as Bergson and Nietzsche, reshaped in a religious key.

The idea had a wide influence on modern Muslim thought and on the politics of South Asia, where Iqbal saw the strengthening of the self as the key to the renewal of whole communities.