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Majeed is particularly good on the dialectic of khudi and bekhudi—selfhood and selflessness—in Iqbal's poetry
The poetry of Iqbal, sensitively analysed by Javed Majeed, is a deeply influential creative response to this moment of abject helplessness in the face of a dominant Western civilisation. The process of enforced cultural accommodation had profound consequences. In the first generation of post-1857 Urdu intellectuals, it translated into elegiac melancholy, a futile nostalgia inseparable from the sour taste of defeat. With Azad and Hali and their servile admiration of things English, it tips over into a kind of self-loathing. However, instead of the familiar chronicle of colonial monstrosity, Majeed redefines the postcolonial "problem" as one of inventing the aesthetic forms through which one may appropriate and accommodate one’s own experience, rather than remaining trapped in borrowed Western valuations. The post-colonial seeks to tell a story in which one is not merely an "extra", a victim, but is, instead, a protagonist, a doer, a maker of history.
Iqbal’s achievement cannot be addressed in a review—or even in a narrowly focused work such as this book. But Majeed is particularly good on the dialectic of khudi and bekhudi—selfhood and selflessness—in Iqbal’s poetry. One khudi couplet is well-known:
Khudi ko kar buland itna ki har taqdeer se pahle
Khuda bande se hi poochhe, bataa teri razaa kya hai
What is fascinating is the way in which this self-assertion and even arrogance is facilitated by the crystallisation of a myth of "Islam" that is sufficiently powerful to enable khudi to escape the confines of mere individuality. This is enabled through merging into the larger, attractive, global, enlightened, progressive narrative of an "Islam" that once was and, so the narrative runs, may be again. Therefore bekhudi.
Sentimentalists should be warned, however—Iqbal’s "Islam" is a problematic entity. The Islamic civilisation that emerged in Spain’s Andalusia over nearly eight centuries is undeniably a noble achievement. However, Iqbal seeks to unite "multicultural" Andalusia with the stern Bedouin purity of the desert triangle known as the Hijaz, in one resonant myth of Islam. There is little sympathy here for the soft accommodations of Sufism. What takes their place is a warrior ethic articulated in hypnotic words. Majeed is limited by the fact that his book is in English and so cannot attend adequately to Iqbal’s sound. But this resonant, macho idiom, at once poet and samurai is, alas, dangerously seductive. It might also be his most lasting poetic achievement. Not only poetic, either.