The return, and the turn to Khudi

Iqbal settled back in Lahore in 1908 and built a working life around the law. He practised as an advocate, kept his hours deliberately light, and refused to let the profession swallow him. The law was a means; poetry and philosophy were the end. He once said he never wanted to be a wealthy lawyer, only a free one.

These were years of inward change. The young poet of a shared India did not vanish, but his attention turned from describing the world to diagnosing it. He looked at the Muslims of the subcontinent — and at the wider East — and saw, as he believed, a civilisation grown passive, fatalistic, and asleep, mistaking the surrender of the self for spiritual depth.

Out of that diagnosis came the idea that would organise the rest of his work: Khudi, the self. Against centuries of poetry and piety that counselled the dissolving of the ego, Iqbal insisted on the opposite — the disciplined fortification of the self, the building of an inner being strong enough to shape destiny rather than merely submit to it.

This was not selfishness, and Iqbal was careful to say so. The strong self he called for was strengthened through love, through faith, and through action in the world; its purpose was creation and service, not domination. Khudi was an ethic of responsibility, not of ego.

He chose Persian to give the idea its fullest voice. In 1915 he published Asrar-e-Khudi — 'The Secrets of the Self' — a Persian masnavi that set out his philosophy of selfhood in verse. It startled readers used to the older poetry of self-negation, and it announced, unmistakably, a new and combative voice.

By 1915 the shape of Iqbal's mature life was set. He had a profession that left him free, a philosophy that was entirely his own, and a literary mission. The decades of his great works were about to begin.