Muhammad Iqbal

Poet and philosopher from Sialkot who studied at Cambridge and earned a doctorate in Munich before practising law in Lahore. Writing poetry in Persian and Urdu and philosophy in English, he called for a dynamic reconstruction of Muslim thought centred on the development of the self.

Key ideas

• Khudi: the self as something to be strengthened and realised
• Religious experience as a source of knowledge alongside sense and reason
• Ijtihad as the principle of movement in Islam
• Reality as creative, temporal and open rather than fixed

Major works

• The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (1908)
• Asrar-i-Khudi (The Secrets of the Self, 1915)
• Javid Nama (1932)
• The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930; expanded 1934)

In the conversation

• Question What is ijtihad, and why did Iqbal call it the principle of movement in Islam? Hamza Qureshi · 3 replies
• Discussion Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic? Hamza Qureshi · 4 replies
• Reading group Reading group: Iqbal’s Reconstruction, Lecture I (“Knowledge and Religious Experience”) Hamza Qureshi · 5 replies