He left India for England in 1905, studying philosophy at Cambridge, qualifying as a barrister in London, and then traveling to Munich, where in 1907 he earned a doctorate for a dissertation on the history of Persian metaphysics.

In his 1915 Persian poem Asrar-e-Khudi, he argued against a mystical tradition that prized dissolving the self into the divine. His word for the alternative was khudi — selfhood — strengthened through striving, discipline, and love, not surrendered.

Addressing the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad in December 1930, he proposed a consolidated Muslim-majority state in India's northwest. Historians regard it as one of the earliest articulations of what became, seventeen years later, the idea of Pakistan.

He died in Lahore on 21 April 1938, nine years before the country his address had argued for came into being. He never saw it founded.