Iqbal's central claim about the self is one sentence, and almost everything in his work follows from it.
You are not born with a self. You build one.
Khudi gets translated as selfhood or ego, and both translations mislead, because the English words point at something you already possess. Iqbal means the opposite. Khudi is not equipment issued at birth. It is constructed, deliberately, by effort, and most people never get far with the construction.
The self is built through engagement. Through acting on the world, transforming something, making a thing that was not there. His line is that the aim of the ego is not to see something but to be something, which reads as aphorism and is actually a method: you find out what you are by what you manage to do, and there is no other instrument.
Then the sentence that reframes the entire political argument.
Colonisation is a spiritual condition before it is a political one.
A people with khudi intact cannot be colonised. Defeated, yes, occupied, taxed, garrisoned. But not colonised in the sense that matters, which is the condition of accepting the role of imitator and spectator in your own history.
This sits alongside Bennabi's colonisability and is not the same thought.
Put them together and the sequence runs: individuals lose khudi, which produces a society that stops generating its own ideas, which produces colonisability, which produces colonisation. The soldiers arrive at step four. Everything decisive happened earlier.
Before the Ummah can build an Islamic economy, it has to believe that it can. Before it can challenge the existing order, it has to know it holds an alternative.
A community that does not believe it can produce anything original will not produce anything original, and will experience that as confirmation, and will conclude that the borrowed frameworks were correct after all. The belief is not a nice addition to the capacity. It is upstream of it.
Iqbal's Allahabad Address of 1930 supplied the intellectual foundation for a separate Muslim state. He died in 1938, nine years before it existed. He never saw it.
What he had in mind was a laboratory: a place where the principles could be tested, refined and demonstrated. What emerged was a nation-state like the others, with an army, a flag, a national interest, and a border with another Muslim country that it has fought four wars over.
You can say that is Pakistan's failure and not Iqbal's, and there is something to it. You can also say a philosophy whose one attempted implementation produced the exact structure the philosophy diagnosed as the disease has a question to answer about its own operability. Both are true and I am not going to pretend the second one away.
His prescription is slower and much less satisfying than founding an institution. Build the self first. Which cannot be legislated, cannot be funded into existence, and produces nothing anyone can announce.
It is also the only step nobody has seriously tried.