Iqbal and Quran: "the new method"

"Your creation and resurrection
are like the creation and resurrection of a single soul."
Iqbal's "method" for discovering the Unseen in one's soul
is based on this verse (28 in Surah Luqman)

Many online services allow us to create multiple identities. Hence, if you are William James, you can be William1910@gmail.com as well as James000@gmail.com, and so on. You would be the real person while these profiles or avatars would be your virtual selves, and you may have as many as you like.

According to Iqbal, we are like these virtual profiles. We are not real. "The existence of individuals is virtual; the existence of the nation is real," he wrote in a ghazal in 1906 (وجود افراد کا مجازی ہے، ہستیء قوم ہے حقیقی). Five years later he elaborated the point in a paper:

"...the individual as such is a mere abstraction, a convenient expression for facility of social reference, passing moment in the life of the group to which he happens to belong." 

A year later he wrote in Urdu, "The individual exists only with reference to the nation, and is nothing on his own; the wave is in the river, and nothing outside it."

فرد قائم ربطِ ملت سے ہے تنہا کچھ نہیں

موج ہے دریا میں اور بیرونِ دریا کچھ نہیں

He kept repeating this idea until his very last breath: his last poem, 'The Human Being' (حضرتِ انساں) was an ode to humanity as a collective ego.

Our reluctance to accept that this is what Iqbal believed is perhaps the main reason why we fail to understand him. Not only our education but even the social, political and religious institutions in the post-colonial world seem to be conditioning us in the opposite direction.

Is that why we have become so unreal? Iqbal believed that we become real only when we annihilate our individual self, ego or soul, in the collective ego. He called it "bekhudi" (بیخودی) - translated by A. J. Arberry as "selflessness".

This selflessness, or the diminishing of the individual self in the collective ego, has an educational purpose. It is the method suggested by Iqbal for discovering the "Unseen" in our souls.

The "Unseen" thus discovered is not a magic lantern of spirits. It is a living experience of the kind of biological unity implied in the famous verse of Quran, "Your creation and resurrection are like the creation and resurrection of a single soul." (31:28). It gives us personal, moral and political power - power which can be verified and used in the real world.

It goes without saying that there need not be any quarrel with those who understand or practice these matters differently. What Iqbal has offered is just a new method, which may be tried out to see whether it gives what it promises: secrets, mysteries and moral power.

Any questions? I would try to address them in the next post if you post them as comments or email me at khurramsoffice@yahoo.com