To talk of Iqbal’s affirmation of the self, his khud , under the long shadow of colonialism, is to speak of a metaphysics of resistance, an ethics of freedom and a politics of awakening. It is to enter, not merely a field of poetry, but a battlefield of being, a struggle between submission and sovereignty, imitation and creativity, servitude and freedom.

Iqbal’s khud is not decorative mysticism, nor a pious withdrawal from the world. It is, as Javed Majeed so persuasively argues, a critique of the colonially constituted subject, a rebellion against the psychic and epistemic domestication that empire performed upon the colonised self. Against this deformation of will, Iqbal raises what might be called a theo-poetic anthropology — a vision of the human as the locus of divine energy, capable of creation, transcendence and transformation. His call is not to an atomised ego but to a disciplined and dynamic interiority, one that situates freedom as the ontological ground of self-realisation. The self, for Iqbal, is not a psychological accident but the very axis of existence, where metaphysical freedom and ethical responsibility converge.

He tells us, in his immortal lines:

“Khud ko kar buland itn keh hartaqd r say pehay / Khud banday say khud p chhay, bat ter raz ky hai.”

(Raise thyself to such heights that before each decree of fate, God Himself asks thee — what do thou desire?)

This is not mere poetry; it is an ontological reversal. Here, divine determinism yields to dialogue; the Absolute no longer dictates but converses. The human being stands before God not as slave but as co-creator. In this vision, destiny becomes participatory; a moral negotiation between divine possibility and human aspiration.

Iqbal, in this, echoes and transforms a lineage of thought that stretches from Kant’s moral autonomy to Hegel’s dialectic of freedom, from Nietzsche’s will to power to Bergson’s duréecréatrice. He infuses each with the fire of prophecy. Kant gave us the categorical imperative, the self-legislating will that binds itself to moral law. Iqbal transfigures that imperative into a sacred command of becoming: freedom is not merely to act according to reason, but to create according to love. Hegel envisioned Spirit realising itself through history’s dialectic but Iqbal’s Spirit (r h) is not bound to historical necessity; it is, like Rumi’s flame, perpetually in motion, burning toward God.

Read again: “Khud vo h behr hai jis k ko kin ra nah ” (The self is an ocean without a shore).

This is Iqbal’s rejoinder to Nietzsche: yes, “God is dead” in the modern imagination but the divine pulse still throbs in the human self. The Übermensch becomes the Mard-i-Momin, the believer whose creative will is not nihilistic but sacred.

Iqbal’s Bergsonian inheritance is clear: being, for him, is élan vital, creative movement, the ceaseless surge of divine life. But where Bergson stops at intuition, Iqbal goes further: intuition must become love (‘ishq) not mere affect, but a metaphysical energy that propels being into creation.

His sources are not exclusively European. His imagination is also rooted in the Persian mystic tradition — in Rumi’s dance of becoming, in Hafez’s intoxicated love, in the luminous defiance of Mansur al-Hall j. From Rumi he inherits the doctrine that the soul must burn its veils to unveil God; from Hafez, the audacity to seek union through joy. Rumi’s verse, “Az khud b khud raw, t beh khud ras ,” — (From the self, travel through the self, until you reach God) anticipates the whole structure of Iqbal’s khud .

Thus, Iqbal’s philosophy is neither Eastern nor Western, but a metaphysical confluence. It is Dante’s journey through the inferno of self-ignorance toward the beatific vision; it is Goethe’s Faust, seeking redemption through strife; it is Wordsworth’s sense that the human mind “half creates and half perceives;” it is Shelley’s conviction that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal.” In the Romantic imagination, Iqbal finds his kin: for he, too, believes that imagination is a mode of revelation, that poetry itself is prophecy.

When he says, “Khud kay zor say duniy peh chh ja,” (With the power of the self, conquer the world) he is not urging imperial conquest, but the conquest of inner inertia; the rebellion against imitation and despair. His conquest is ethical, not political; it is the sovereignty of the self over the forces that diminish it.

Annemarie Schimmel interprets this as Iqbal’s “co-worker with God” thesis — humanity as collaborator in divine creativity. Here, freedom itself becomes a liturgy: to act freely is to pray through creation. Thus, Isl m is submission and not resignation, but affirmation; obedience is not the negation of freedom, but its transfiguration into love.

In Asr r-i-Khud (The Secrets of the Self), as translated by RA Nicholson, Iqbal makes this pedagogy explicit: khud is cultivated through ‘ishq (love), muj hada (struggle) and ‘amal-i-fikr (creative labour). Khalifa Abdul Hakim calls this a moral technology, a method for forging the will into unity and strength. Within the fractured world of colonial subjection, khud becomes both cure and weapon — an inner jihad that precedes every outer revolution.

Iqbal Singh Sevea reads this as a programme for polity, not mere mysticism. The freedom of the nation begins, Iqbal knew, in the freedom of the soul. Without morally awakened selves, there can be no collective emancipation. Thus khud becomes both spiritual and political: the spiritual infrastructure of sovereignty.

In The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal translates this poetic metaphysic into philosophy. Freedom, he declares, is the principle of ijtih d: renewal, reinterpretation, movement. He writes that the essence of Islam is “freedom of thought and movement.” Here he unites Hegel’s dynamism of Spirit with the Quranic command “Afal tatafakkar n,” (Will you not reflect?) Revelation itself becomes an invitation to create, not a closure of inquiry. Nazir Niazi recalls that Iqbal’s conversations embodied this ethic: freedom was not a doctrine but a daily discipline — a mode of being.

Theoretically, khud is a synthesis of existential phenomenology and Quranic anthropology. To exist, for Iqbal, is to act; to act is to create meaning; and to create meaning is to share in divine creativity. Thus, freedom is not an option but the very essence of humanity. Iqbal’s self, like Heidegger’s Dasein, discloses the world, yet it does so through love, not anxiety. Colonialism, by contrast, negates this freedom, externalising destiny and internalising servitude. Hence, Iqbal’s project becomes both ontological liberation and political insurgency, the reclamation of the right to will, to imagine, to act.

And so, when we return to his verses

“Khud ko kar buland itn …”

“Khud kay zor say duniy peh chh ja…”

“Khud vo h behr hai jis k ko kin ra nah …”

we must not recite them as poetry, but as incantations of being. Each is a metaphysical act, a call to reclaim the divine within the human.

Freedom, then, is not a distant political goal; it is the very texture of life. To be free is to be real. To be free is to will, to create, to transform. The enslaved mind cannot know truth, for truth demands participation. Freedom is not the luxury of the powerful; it is the duty of the living.

Thus, to recite Iqbal is to re-enact a revolution of consciousness. His khud is not an abstraction nor a slogan, but a hermeneutic of liberation, a method for reconstituting the human in the aftermath of dispossession. In affirming the self, we affirm life; in affirming freedom, we affirm God’s trust in creation.

In that affirmation lies Iqbal’s most enduring gift: the vision of the human being not as a shadow of empire, not as a mere echo of others but as a partner in the divine act of becoming, a being who, through freedom, struggle and love, transforms existence itself into an act of praise.

Yet, to speak of khud in the present moment in the Pakistan that bears Iqbal’s name as its intellectual parent is to confront both a promise and a failure. For Iqbal’s vision was never meant to be embalmed in statues or quoted on commemorative days; it was to be lived. In the disquiet of our current national soul amid moral exhaustion, political dependency and the slow corrosion of imagination the doctrine of khud stands before us as both mirror and indictment. Pakistan, born of Iqbal’s dream, was to be the concrete expression of his metaphysics of freedom: a polity animated by the moral autonomy of its citizens, where faith would quicken actionand action would be the sacrament of freedom. Yet, as Iqbal Singh Sevea and Javed Majeed remind us, the tragedy of post-coloniality is that the coloniser often leaves behind his shadow in the mind of the colonised. Bureaucratic fatalism, borrowed intellectual forms and the cult of imitation are the new idols that Iqbal’s hammer of khud must still shatter. His call, “Khud ko kar buland itn ,” was not for princes or politicians but for every person, to raise the self until it could converse with destiny.

In today’s Pakistan, this means reclaiming the moral courage to think anew — to perform ijtih d not only in theology but in culture, governance and knowledge. It means rediscovering what Kant would call the sapere aude, the courage to think for oneself and what Iqbal would translate as the audacity to believe that the self, properly awakened, can remake the world. The relevance of khud today lies in this: it is the grammar of freedom in a society tempted by conformity; it is the metaphysics of responsibility in an age of evasion. To awaken khud in our time is not merely to recite Iqbal’s verses, but to live them to turn poetry into praxis, to make of one’s life the very taqd r that God Himself must pause to ask about. Only then can the republic of Iqbal’s dream transcend its inertia and rise, once more, from self-knowledge to sovereignty, from lamentation to creation.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.