A question about authenticity
A situation.
A young woman wants to be a writer. Her family expects her to become a doctor. She enrols in medical school, performs adequately, and tells herself she chose this freely — that she wants to honour her parents, that medicine is a more practical path, that writing can wait. She is not unhappy. She is not happy either.
Is this a real choice?
The core
Existentialism begins with a single, unsettling claim: existence precedes essence. You are not born with a fixed nature that determines who you are and what you should do. You exist first — thrown into the world without your consent — and then you create yourself through your choices. There is no human essence, no pre-written script, no cosmic purpose that tells you what your life should look like. You are, as Sartre put it, “condemned to be free.”
Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the first existentialist, rebelled against Hegel’s system— a philosophy that explained everything except what it meant to be a particular person making a particular choice at a particular moment. Philosophy, Kierkegaard insisted, must start not with abstract categories but with the existing individual: anxious, mortal, confronted with choices that no system can make for them. The leap of faith — Kierkegaard’s most famous concept — is the choice to commit to something (God, a relationship, a vocation) without the guarantee that reason demands. You leap, or you remain on the edge forever.
Sartre (1905–1980) pushed existentialism to its most radical conclusions. If there is no God, there is no pre-given human nature, no objective moral law, no external authority to tell you how to live. You are absolutely free — and absolutely responsible. Every choice you make defines not just who you are but what you think a human being should be. The anguish of this responsibility — the vertigo of total freedom — is the authentic human condition. Those who flee from it into roles, conventions, or excuses are living in bad faith.
Heidegger’s existentialism (though he resisted the label) focused on being-toward-death: the awareness that you will die, that your time is finite, and that this finitude gives your choices their weight. Most people evade this awareness by losing themselves in the anonymous “they” — doing what one does, thinking what one thinks. Authentic existence means confronting your mortality and choosing in full awareness that this life is the only one you have.
In the Islamic tradition
Existentialism has no direct Islamic antecedent, but the questions it raises — about authenticity, responsibility, and the meaning of individual existence — resonate deeply with Islamic thought.
The Qur’anic concept of the amānah(trust) — the trust offered to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains, which they refused but humanity accepted (33:72) — is remarkably existentialist in structure. Human beings are defined not by a fixed nature but by a responsibility they have taken on. The trust is not a comfortable inheritance; it is a burden that requires continuous choice, continuous effort, continuous risk of failure. To be human, in the Qur’anic vision, is to have accepted something the rest of creation had the wisdom to refuse.
The Sufi tradition’s emphasis on fanā’ (annihilation of the ego) might seem anti-existentialist — the self is dissolved rather than asserted. But the dissolution is a stage, not an endpoint; what follows is baqā’ (subsistence in God), in which the self returns — transformed, purified, more itself than it was before. This is not the destruction of selfhood but its deepening.
Iqbal’s engagement with existentialist themes is profound but carefully bounded. He shared the existentialist contempt for inauthenticity — for the herd mentality, the flight from responsibility, the substitution of convention for genuine choice. But he rejected Sartre’s atheistic premises entirely. For Iqbal, the self is not “condemned to be free” in a meaningless universe; the self is created to be free in a purposive universe. Freedom is not a burden imposed by the absence of God; it is a gift bestowed by the presence of God. Authentic selfhood, for Iqbal, is not the lonely assertion of an isolated ego — it is the flowering of khudi in creative partnership with the Ultimate Ego.
Why this matters
Pakistan is a society saturated with bad faith — in Sartre’s precise sense of the term. People who claim they had “no choice” when they did. Students who study subjects they have no interest in because “that’s what everyone does.” Professionals who hate their work but cannot imagine alternatives. Religious practitioners who follow rituals they do not understand because questioning is not permitted. In each case, the person has freedom — real, frightening freedom — and has hidden it from themselves.
The existentialist insight that matters most for Pakistan is not Sartre’s atheism but his diagnosis of bad faith: the recognition that the most common form of unfreedom is not external oppression but self-deception. The chains that bind most Pakistanis are not physical but psychological — the conviction that they cannot choose, that alternatives do not exist, that the path laid out by family and society is the only path available. This is a lie — and it is a lie they tell themselves.
What Tadreej calls the cultivation of khudi is, among other things, an existentialist project: the development of a self that can face its own freedom honestly, make genuine choices, and accept responsibility for the consequences. But it is an existentialism transformed by faith — one that says: you are free, and your freedom has a purpose. Use it.
Connections
Appears in
Lecture IV (throughout)
Further reading
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (free online)
- Steven Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, Chapters 1–3
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lecture IV