In 1841 the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson published 'Self-Reliance', the founding text of New England Transcendentalism. Its argument is bracing and simple: trust yourself; the same divine current that runs through the universe runs through you; conformity is a kind of death. Emerson called the larger spiritual reality the Over-Soul.
Read Emerson and then read Iqbal's philosophy of Khudi — the fortified, self-aware self — and the family resemblance is striking. Both men despised herd-thinking. Both insisted that the individual carries something sacred and is obliged to develop it. Both wrote to wake their readers out of passivity and imitation.
Yet scholars who set the two side by side stress that Iqbal did not derive Khudi from Emerson, and the philosophies diverge at their foundation. Emerson's self dissolves, finally, into the Over-Soul — the individual is a wave returning to an ocean. Iqbal's self does the opposite: it hardens, sharpens, and grows more distinct as it matures, even in its nearness to God. For Iqbal the goal of selfhood is not absorption but a deathless, fully individual self.
The comparison is useful precisely because it is imperfect. Emerson and Iqbal arrive, from different continents and different faiths, at the same urgent message — become who you are, do not borrow your life — and then disagree, illuminatingly, about where that road ends. To read them together is to see one of humanity's recurring ideas worked out twice, in two keys.