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Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?

Hamza Qureshi Fellow
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Personal identityIslamicModern EuropeanFriedrich NietzscheMuhammad Iqbal#khudi#selfhood
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Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined and creatively asserted, not dissolved in mystical annihilation.

Western readers quickly compared him to Nietzsche. The parallels are obvious: an ethic of self-overcoming, contempt for passivity, the ideal of a higher human type. But Iqbal disagreed with Nietzsche on the central question: for Iqbal the self grows towards God, while Nietzsche's higher man stands after God's death. In Javid Nama he gives Nietzsche a place as a figure of tragic, unfulfilled spiritual striving.

So which is it: influence, or a polemic against Nietzsche that uses his language?

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4 replies

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    From the German side, Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century was so broad that almost every writer who used the language of will and self-overcoming was called Nietzschean. That might say more about readers than about influence.

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  2. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    The more important influence is Rumi, who is Iqbal's guide through the heavens in Javid Nama. Rumi's insistence on growth and striving, of the reed seeking its source, is closer to khudi than anything in Nietzsche.

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    1. Hamza Qureshi

      Fellow

      Reza, that's right about Rumi. I think the Nietzsche comparison stuck in the West partly because European readers knew Nietzsche and not Rumi, so they saw the one they recognised.

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  3. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Perhaps it's both: Iqbal uses Nietzsche's vocabulary to make a point against him. Writers do that all the time. You take the most powerful words available and turn them against their owner.