For Iqbal, the life of a Mard-e-Momin is the embodiment of his struggle to become the perfect man; in essence a stage that which can only be described as the completeness of man. No less than a comprehensive development of man as a whole, taking into consideration both his aspects, is the explicit as well as the implicit aim of Quranic teachings, when terms like nafs, ruh, insan are – used in Quran to refer to the human individual, they signify his entire personality.

The word “human ego” or khudi used by Iqbal likewise is taken by him to mean the unity and totality of the human person. He rejects the dualist theory of mind and body because parallelism and interactionism both lead to various sorts of oddities and contradiction. The former “reduces the soul to a merely passive spectator of the happenings of the body”; as to the latter, “we cannot find any observable facts to show how and where exactly their interaction takes place and which exploits it for physiological purpose, or the body which exploits it for physiological purposes, or the body is an instrument of the soul, are equally true proposition on the theory of interactionism”. Mind and body, in fact, belong to the same system, says Iqbal. Matter is “spirit in space-time references”. It is a colony of egos of a law order out of which emerges the ego of a higher order. The physical organism reacting to environments gradually builds up a systematic unity of experience which we call the human ego”.

The ego or self that man is has two aspects, according to Iqbal – the ‘ appreciative self’ and the ‘efficient self’. The former for which he also uses various alternative phrases like the ‘deeper self’, the inner centre of experience’, the ‘root of being’ etc. lives in pure duration while the latter deals with serial time. In our day-to-day life we are so much absorbed with the world of space and time that we entirely lose sight of the fundamental or the appreciative ‘I’ within. It is, for Iqbal, incumbent upon a person to realize it not only in order to qualify himself for and encounter with the ‘great’ I am’ and prepare himself for authentic relations with other human beings but also because this achievement would make him a human person in the full sense of term “ to exist in pure duration”, says Iqbal, “ is to be a self and to be a self and to be a self is to be able to say ‘ I am’. It is the degree of intuition of I – am ness that determines the place of a thing in the scale being”.

How do I discover and recognize my self? Iqbal’s answer is that being most simple, fundamental and profound. I – am ness is neither an object of perception nor simply an idea to be logically interred and rationally conceived. It can, in the final analysis, only be known through a flash of intuitive insight. David Mume, the British empiricist, for instance, is well-known for his attempt to reach the self through channels which are purely sensory, empirical nature. In his ‘A Treatise of human Nature’, he wrote: “…when I enter most intimately into what I call ‘myself’ I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at anytime without a percept and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as my sound sleep, so long I am insensible of ‘myself’ and may truly be said not to exist. And where all my perceptions removed by death… I Should be entirely annihilated “. He thus concluded that there is no such thing as ‘I’ or ‘self’ and that a person’s mind is nothing but a medley of different perceptions. Hume’s supposition here is that all knowledge is to be furnished by sense experience. Descartes, on the other hand, represents those who followed the course of reason. Being himself a brilliant mathematician and discoverer of analytical Geometry, he was firmly of the opinion that for philosophy a method could be discovered on the analogy of the one used in mathematical sciences, where with start with certain simple, self-evident principles, rising by degrees to the complex ones – thus building up an entire system of thought. So he set out in search of the indubitable and the self-evident. This he did by a grand process of elimination. He doubted away everything he could possibly doubt : testimony of his sense, his memory, and the existence of the physical world, his own body and even the truths of mathematics. One thing, however, he found, he could not possibly doubt and that was the fact of his own existence, his own self, his I – am ness. It is he after all who had been performing the activity of doubting all the time. Doubting is the form of thinking. ‘I think’, he concluded, ‘therefore I am’, meaning to say, ‘I exist’ this argument, the critics have pointed out, is fallacious on many grounds. For one thing, the conclusion to which in fact is the subject of all prepositions that are made, can be asserted. From this to skip over the factual existence of an ‘I’. As Descartes really does, is a leap which cannot at all be justified.

Iqbal thus appears to be right when he holds that both sense-experience as well as reason, forms of perception as well as categories of understanding, is only meant to equip us for our dealings with the spatio-temporal world : they are not capable of reaching the core of one’s being. In fact “ in our constant pursuit after external things we weave a kind of veil round the appreciative self which thus becomes alien to us. It is only in the moments of profound meditation”, he goes on to observe, “when the efficient self is in abeyance, that we sink into our deeper self and reach the inner center of experience”. On these premises, neither the mutakallimun nor the philosophers but the devotional Sufis alone have truly been able to understand the nature of the human soul. The meditation , referred to here, is either pure meditation through which ideationally I remove from myself all that is not essentially ‘ me’ i.e. all that possess due to specific ‘ historical’ and ‘geographical’ situation, on the broadest sense of these terms. Or it may be the meditation charged with activity in which case I practically eradicate from my nature exclusive love for, and involvement with, the world which is the cause of much alienation from the source and ground of my existence. The second meaning particularly is accepted by the mystics of Islam. The Sufis tic path formally begins with the inculcation of virtue of tuaba (repentance) which signifies purification of soul and deliverance it form all extraneous material so that the divine within it stands realized. “The palled to empty their psychical life…in order to achieve by personality-denying techniques an emptiness that will prepare the way for the incoming of the Divine”.

It is to be hurriedly pointed out here that neither according to genuine Sufism nor in the thought-system of Iqbal himself does this ‘personality-denying’ phenomenon stand for self- mortification or asceticism. The world is not being disparaged it as such. It could be as a sacred as the spiritual realm. Iqbal’s emphasis on the revilement of the inner being of man is simply aimed, as shown above, at the realization of one’s own Devine nature. There is a tradition of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) which says : verily God created man must therefore shed off limitations that make up his efficient personality and away the web that he has woven—warily or unwarily—around his original self. It is to this original self that the Quran refers when it says : He is indeed fails who buries it. This discovery necessarily gives to man a simple, fresh, uncontaminated point of view with which to look at everything, a sure ground from which to take off and start a truly authentic existence.

Realization of the appreciative self is thus not an end in itself. It only amounts to revolutionizing the behavior of the man-in-the-world. This fact is well-evidenced by the way of the Prophets as conceived by Iqbal. He defines a prophet “as a type of mystic consciousness in which unitary experience tends to overflow its boundaries and seek opportunities of redirecting or refashioning the forces of collective life. In his personality the finite centre of life sinks into his own infinite depth only to spring up again, with fresh vigor to destroy the old and to disclose the new directions of life. Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) has, in fact, been accepted by Iqbal as the ideal of perfect manhood in Islam.

Iqbal is a process of philosopher. In the preface to his reconstruction of religious thought in Islam, he significantly points out the Quran emphasize deed rather than idea. The Quran sys : (God) created death and life that He might try you—which of you is best in deeds”. Not fatalism and inactivity but ever-continuing formation of fresh goals and their perpetual realization is the desirable style of life for the soldier of the moral ideal. The essence of perfect manhood lies in a constant state of tension. The ego, throughout its career continues invading the environments and the environments invading the ego. The appreciative self, being a pure receptacle of Divine illumination as shown above, plays the role of a directive agent in this mutual invasion in order to shape the person’s own destiny as well as that of the universe. Thus, gradually and surely, his personality continues to be integrated more and more so that ultimately it is ensured against all possibilities of dissolution or extinction. “That which tends to maintain the state of tension tends to make the immortal, “says Iqbal. Further, the “idea of personality gives us a standard of value: it settles the problem of good and evil. That which fortifies personality is good, that which weakens it is bad. Art, religion and ethics must be judged from the standpoint of personality. On this standard, passionate desire for the realization of goals, supreme indifference to evanescent material benefits, sterling self-confidence and courage to overcome obstacles, tolerance for the views and acts of others etc. are good, whereas ill-founded fears, undeserved possessions, disrespect for humanity, a false sense of dignity, malicious attitudes towards others are all bad. There being degrees of individuality, God is the most integrated individual. One who is nearest to him in this respect is thus the complete man. This nearness does not at all imply that man is finally absorbed is God ; rather he absorbs God into himself. Even such a voluminous upheaval as the judgment will not affect the individuality, uniqueness and calm of the well-integrated ego. The Quran says:

The trumpet will (just) be sound, when all that are in the heavens on the earth will swoon, except such as it will please God (to exempt).