Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, 'The Mysteries of Selflessness', is the second of Iqbal's long Persian masnavis. He published it in 1918, three years after his first, Asrar-e-Khudi ('The Secrets of the Self'), and the two were always meant to be read as one work. The first poem had argued that a human being must build a strong, distinct, self-aware self, the quality Iqbal called Khudi. This second poem turns the picture round and asks the question the first one leaves open: once you have built such a self, what is it for?
Iqbal's answer is the heart of the book. A self built in isolation is unfinished. It reaches its full strength and its full meaning only inside a community, in the give and take of life lived alongside other people. The title is deliberately a paradox. 'Selflessness' here does not mean the erasing of the self that the first poem worked so hard to build. It means the self freely spending itself, finding that it grows larger, not smaller, when it belongs. A.J. Arberry, who translated the poem into English in 1953, opens his version with Iqbal's own image: the bond that ties a person to their society is a mercy, and the self 'in the Community alone achieves fulfilment'.
The poem was written for the Muslim world of Iqbal's day, and its examples and its law are drawn honestly from Islam. But the question underneath it is one that belongs to everybody. How does a single human life relate to the group it is part of? What holds a community together once it exists, and what dissolves it? Read at that level, Rumuz-e-Bekhudi is a study of the self and the group, and it speaks to any reader who has ever wondered where the line between the two should fall.
On the translation. Translated into English by A.J. Arberry as The Mysteries of Selflessness (1953). The passages quoted on this page are taken from published English translations, and the translator is named with each one. No Persian text is reproduced here.
Why a companion volume was needed
Asrar-e-Khudi had been a startling book. Its message, that the individual self is sacred and must be hardened, sharpened and affirmed rather than dissolved away, cut against a long current of mysticism that prized self-effacement. Some readers heard only half of it. They took Iqbal to be preaching a lonely, almost aggressive individualism, the strong self standing apart and above.
Rumuz-e-Bekhudi exists to correct that misreading and to finish the thought. Iqbal had never meant the self to be an end in itself. A self with no one to serve, no community to enrich, no shared task to spend its strength on, is a self with nowhere to go. The first poem builds the instrument. The second poem shows what the instrument is to play.
This is why the two works are best thought of as a single argument in two movements. Iqbal himself encouraged that reading, and in Persian editions the two are often bound together. To meet only one of them is to meet half of Iqbal's picture of a human life.
How the self and the community relate
Iqbal's central idea is that the individual and the community are not rivals. They are reflections of each other. The community is made of selves, and has no existence apart from them. The self, in turn, draws its language, its memory, its sense of purpose and its very ripening from the community it grows up inside. Arberry renders Iqbal's figure plainly: the individual 'a Mirror holds to the Community, and they to him'.
From this follows a claim that sounds like a paradox and is meant to. The self does not lose its freedom by belonging. It gains it. Alone, Iqbal writes, the individual is 'heedless of high purposes' and his strength tends to scatter and waste itself. It is the community that gives that strength shape, discipline and direction. The poem's boldest line on this is an image of a tree: the community sets the self in the earth 'like a well-rooted oak', and binds it close in order 'to make him truly free'.
So the self is not swallowed by the group, and the group is not merely the sum of its members. Each needs the other to become complete. A strong community can only be built from strong, self-affirming individuals, and a strong individual can only be fully realised inside a living community. Neither half of that sentence works without the other.
What holds a community together
If a community is more than a crowd, something must bind it. Iqbal's answer, in the Islamic terms of the poem, is shared belief, above all the belief in the unity of God, Tawhid, and the example of the Prophet. A people, he writes, 'must have one thought', and it is when 'several hearts put on a single hue' that a true community comes into being rather than a mere gathering.
Two further things hold it. One is law, a common pattern of life that members hold in common, which for the poem is the law of the Quran. The other is memory and continuity, the sense of a shared past carried into a shared future. Lifted out of its particular setting, the principle is one any group can recognise. A community endures when its members share a conviction, a way of living, and a story that joins their past to what is to come.
Iqbal also gives an unexpected place to mothers in this. The continuance of a people, he argues, runs through motherhood, because 'mothers shape the way that men shall go'. Whatever a reader makes of the surrounding argument, the underlying observation is sound: a community is renewed in its homes, in the hands that raise the next generation, not only in its public life.
The dangers Iqbal warns against
Much of the poem is a warning. Iqbal names the forces that he believes hollow out a self and dissolve a community, and he names them sharply. The three he returns to are despair, grief and fear. He calls them, in Arberry's heading, 'the Mother of Abominations, destroying Life'.
His case against them is psychological before it is religious. Despair, he writes, 'lulls life asleep'; it presses on the heart 'a tombstone', and even a person 'as high as Alvand's mount' is cast down by it. Fear, in his account, 'robs the foot of strength to rove abroad' and 'filches from the brain the power of thought'. These are not abstract sins. They are the inner conditions that make a person, and a people, passive, timid and easy to defeat.
Against all three Iqbal sets a single medicine, which in the poem is faith in the one God: the conviction that the universe is meaningful, that effort is not futile, that one need not be afraid. A reader of another creed, or none, can still take the structure of the warning. The enemy of a living self is not weakness of body but the inner collapse that despair, grief and fear bring on, and the cure is some grounded reason for hope.
How the two poems form one argument
Set the two Persian masnavis side by side and the design is clear. Asrar-e-Khudi answers the question, who am I, and what should I become? Its reply is the strong, distinct, awakened self. Rumuz-e-Bekhudi answers the next question, what is that self for? Its reply is the community: the self fulfilled by belonging, by service, by being spent on a shared life.
Neither poem is complete alone. A philosophy of pure selfhood, with no community to serve, curdles into mere self-assertion, the very thing Iqbal disliked in some Western thought. A philosophy of pure community, with no strong selves inside it, has no real members, only a crowd. Iqbal needed both poems because he believed the truth lived in the relation between them.
This is also what keeps the work from being a period piece. The balance Iqbal is reaching for, a self that is fully itself and fully bound to others, is a balance every age has to strike again. The two poems together are his attempt to hold it steady.
A few passages
Quoted from published translations — the translator is named with each passage.
The link that bindeth the Individual
To the Society a Mercy is;
His truest Self in the Community
Alone achieves fulfilment.
The opening lines of the poem, stating its whole thesis: the self is completed, not erased, by belonging.
The Individual a Mirror holds
To the Community, and they to him;
He is a jewel threaded on their cord,
A star that in their constellation shines.
Iqbal's central image: the self and the community reflect and depend on each other.
The Individual,
Alone, is heedless of high purposes:
His strength is apt to dissipate itself;
The People only make him intimate
With discipline ... Set him in earth like a well-rooted oak,
Close-fetter him, to make him truly free.
The paradox at the heart of the poem: the self gains its freedom by being rooted in a community.
When several hearts put on a single hue
That is Community ... Peoples must have one thought.
Iqbal on what turns a crowd into a community: a shared conviction.
Despair lulls life asleep ... Fear robs the foot of strength to rove abroad,
And filches from the brain the power of thought.
Iqbal names despair and fear as the inner forces that hollow out a self and a people.
Rumuz-e-Bekhudi was written for one community at one moment in history, and it does not hide that. Its law is the Quran, its examples are drawn from Islam, and its first readers were the Muslims of the early twentieth-century subcontinent. An honest guide says so plainly rather than dressing the poem up as something it is not.
And yet the question it works on outlasts its setting. Every reader belongs to something larger than themselves, a family, a people, a faith, a country, and every reader has felt the pull between being fully an individual and being fully a member. Iqbal's claim, that these are not opposites, that a self grows stronger by belonging and a community grows stronger by being made of real selves, is an idea anyone can test against their own life. That is why this poem, the companion to his hymn of the self, still speaks past the single creed it was written in.