Iqbal’s Ego — Khudi and Quran

Mind-Body duality and its opposing idea that the mind is merely a hallucination created on top of increasingly complex combinations of matter have been debated for long.

The philosophical journey from Aristotle’s all-present Active Intellect that manifests in accidents we call matter and its events to Ibn Rushd’s idea of an all-present ruh manifesting in innumerous accidents we call nafs points to the urge of identifying the reality of the individual with that of the vast fabric of the cosmos; and that of the individual soul with some kind of a super-soul. But because the individual does not find a super-soul embodied in material ensemble like itself, it finds a parallel urge to deny any such existence.

For Iqbal, there is no question of denying the existence of the ‘self’, as for him it is the essence of reality. In the pursuit of finding undeniable evidence for the ‘self’, Iqbal in the 4^th lecture of the Reconstruction follows the line of identifying from among the innumerous accidents on the fabric of known reality, one particular ‘accident’, the ‘self’ that humans ‘know’ of, and then finding its trail back to the larger, seemingly all-present creative self. Iqbal tries to prove the unity of human ‘self’, the ‘ego’, the ‘khudi’, that persists unaltered in the flux of accidents experienced by it as states of the nafs, as in there is a self and there is its experience .

Iqbal needed to establish the ‘unity of ego’ in order to escape from the narrow mind-body debate, that offered a soul that was either a passive spectator experiencing events it had no control on or a soul that was a mere illusion. Rather what Iqbal wants is a mind that is nothing without the body and a body that is nothing without the mind, and an admittance that the self being an indivisible, undeniable entity, ‘knows’ and self-realises as it experiences the physical world around it.

In this, Iqbal disregards the Greek line of thought followed by the mutakallimun, wherein Ibn Rushd took ‘the soul as a finer kind of matter or a mere accident which dies with the body and is re-created on the Day of Judgement’. This idea was rooted in the Aristotelian two minds: one that makes; and one that becomes. The maker is the ultimate creative power and possessor of the Active Intellect, whereas the ‘become’ is merely a passive intellect that appears as accidents (events) on the fabric of a finer matter, which is one, universal and eternal. Ibn Rushd equated the first mind with the Quranic ruh and the second with its nafs, making the self’s appearance to itself as an independent actor, a mere illusion. This led to a pantheism, wherein the only possible truth would be of God Himself, and rest everything would be manifestation of His ongoing acts.

Iqbal argues instead for a ‘unity of ego’, and unique individuality of every human that is apparent in the unity of his conscience and the unity of his inner experience — but this is not done by negating the material world. For Iqbal the ‘secular’ is just as sacred as the ‘spiritual’, as it too has its origin in the creative power of the Ultimate Ego.

So, in struggling with the duality of the body and the soul, Iqbal tries to reach the conclusion that like khalq and amr are properties of the same Creative Power. Whatever is created in physical form also has activity, and the laws governing that activity, which is the amr from Allah, is part and parcel of that body — creation and its mode of action cannot be separated. In the same line, there is the body, Allah’s khalq — the body is constituted of innumerable constituents, each working in accordance with the directives, amr, that the Divine has assigned it, but along with this mechanistic ‘directive’, there is a conscience, a knowing, manifesting in every constituent. This knowing is the ego, the ‘I’.

This ‘I’ could be equated with the Quranic nafs, which can be generalised as a life-bearing, self-conscious being, conscious of its environment and connected to it. Therefore, every entity, even as small as an atom has an ‘I’, an ego, and every complex whole has an ‘I’ of itself. All things possess self-awareness, the Quran talks of the nafs of the planet in Surah Takwir, ‘and the night, when it slows down’, ‘and the morning, when it enlivens (tanaffus)’, as if the whole earth is awakened and all things become self-aware with the light and energy of the day. At another place, God says of Himself, ‘…He has decreed upon Himself (nafsahu) mercy…’ (6:12) — hinting that Allah Himself has a self, a consciousness, an ‘I’ that knows.

Therefore, this ‘self’, because of its self-aware conscience, possesses a mental space as well as a physical space. After establishing the fact that the mind and body are vitally necessary for each other and compliment and complete each other, Iqbal goes further in establishing that the mental space, at least of the human self, is much larger in scope and capacity compared to the physical space of the same. Iqbal explains that the space and time of the thought are different from those of the body. ‘My thought of space is in fact not spatially related to space’; the body being at one space-time at any particular instance, the thought can act in different space-orders in that same instance. Therefore, the self is not space-bound in the same way as the body is, it dwells in many worlds of its liking, and it is free to move about them. Nor is the self bounded in time: first, because the self remains intact in the flux of the experiences of the nafs; and second, because it boosts to remain intact even if the body dies down and along with it so do the experiences of the nafs. So much so, that for Iqbal, ‘true time-duration belongs to the ego alone’.

The Quran affirms of this same unity of the ego in space and time, they will say, “Our Lord, You made us lifeless twice and gave us life twice, and we have confessed our sins. So, is there any way of exit?” The ego survives death, it survives extra-physical life, it survives life on the planet and it will survive an ongoing eternal life — the unity of the ego, the khudi, is in the unity of its self-aware free soul, its ruh, that manifests as one kind of nafs on this planet, and may manifest in other kinds of nafs in other lives and other physical settings!

Published in The Express Tribune, March 17^th, 2023.

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