Khudi according to Muhammad Iqbal
Muhammad Iqbal (1877 – 1938) was a prolific writer who authored many works covering various fields and genres such as poetry, philosophy and mysticism. 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 realized 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. He 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 intellectualism 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:
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 (a Hindu deity) 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 unitism 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 emphasized 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 realized 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 criticized 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."
Concept of Khudi.
Iqbal’s poetry appeared in the twentieth century, a crucial time for the people of the sub-continent in the wake of British colonization and World War I. He was deeply concerned with the revival of the lost identity and status of the Muslims. Iqbal was despaired with the Muslim religious-philosophic tradition of his time which he termed in "The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam" as "worn out and practically dead metaphysics" with its peculiar thought form and phraseology producing "a deadening effect on the modern mind". His vibrant poetry stirred the dead into life and infused a renewing and rejuvenating sense of identity and self-manifestation in his readers. "The Secrets of the Self" (first published in 1915) marks the underpinning of a new stage in Iqbal’s creative work. It is linked with the turning point of Iqbal’s stance which took place after the poet’s homecoming from Europe. The poem contains Iqbal’s inventive doctrine of the self; and all the subsequent works of Iqbal supplemented and further refined this central concept. While dictating his views to Syed Nazeer Niazi in 1937, Iqbal explicitly stated that the poem is based on two principles: (a) that the personality is the central fact of the universe; (b) that personality "I am" is the central fact in the constitution of man.
The first principle is described in the Old Testament "as the great I am". The second principle of the smaller or dependent I-am is various described in Quran as weak or ignorant yet it is also described as the bearer of the Divine trust, it has the quality of growth as well as corruption, it has the power to expand by absorbing the elements of the universe of which it appears to be an insignificant part, it has also the power of absorbing the attributes of God (Wahid Thoughts and Reflection of Iqbal). This personal observation of Iqbal serves as a gateway to the landscapes of meaning. The dominant idea that Iqbal emphasizes is that knowing oneself is in fact an immediate perception of God. He focuses his attention on the individual "I", thus shifting the emphasis from divine to human. The path of recognition of the self is the path that takes one to a contact with the Absolute. As he writes in introduction to The Secrets of the Self translated by Nicholson: Physically and spiritually man is self-contained centre, but he is yet a complete individual. The greater his distance from God, the less is his individuality. He who comes nearest to God is the complete person. Nor that he is finally absorbed in God. On the contrary he absorbs God in himself. Subverting the traditional concept of mystical experience, Iqbal transfigured it as the fully developed self that does not dissolve even when the reality is seen face to face in mystical experience. And what he actually means by the idea of "absorbing God in himself" is to cultivate and create the attributes of God and by doing this "the man becomes unique by becoming more and more like the most unique individual". It is only after self-realization that the real meaning and purpose of human existence becomes more clear. In psychology, the Humanistic school with its most prominent figure Maslow recognizes this human potential for self actualization. Maslow defines self-actualization as: Ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities and talents, as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, destiny or vocation), as fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person’s own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend towards unity, integration or synergy within the person. Maslow postulated a hierarchical theory that is often represented as a pyramid, with the lower levels representing lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-actualization. Susan Cloninger explains in Theories of Personality: understanding Persons: "This hierarchy consists of five levels: four levels of deficiency motivation and a final, highly developed level called being motivation or self-actualization". Maslow divides these needs into two main classes: D-Needs and B-Needs: D-Needs mean that whenever there is deficiency in the fulfillment of these needs there is a motivation to eliminate them. B-Needs are the self actualizing needs concerned with the need to know Truth. Maslow saw human needs arranged like a ladder. The highest one is the need for self-actualization but that cannot be reached without stepping the other needs of this ladder. The most basic needs, at the bottom, are physical air, water, food, sex. Then there are the safety and psychological needs for belonging, love and acceptance. At the top are the need for self-actualization the need to fulfill oneself and the experience at this stage gained can be called as "peak experience". According to it, "peak experiences" are profound mystical moments of love, understanding, happiness or rapture, when a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world, more aware of truth, justice, harmony, goodness and so on. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is based on the universal fact about human nature. Man’s spiritual needs are undeniable and without moral and ethical concepts life is empty. There is a lot of truth in the maxim that "man does not live by bread alone"; though the converse is much true and as much applicable that man cannot live