Person · poet & philosopher · India
Allama Muhammad Iqbal (poet-philosopher)
Also known as Allama Iqbal, Muhammad Iqbal, Allama Muhammad Iqbal, Iqbal
Sialkot-born poet and philosopher (1877–1938) educated at Government College Lahore, Cambridge, Munich and Lincoln's Inn, who wrote Persian and Urdu poetry that remade the twentieth-century idea of the Muslim self and the 1930 Allahabad Address that proposed a separate Muslim state in northwest India — the earliest substantive articulation of what became Pakistan. His Asrar-i-Khudi (The Secrets of the Self, 1915) and Bal-i-Jibril (Gabriel's Wing, 1935) are canonical in the Persian poetic tradition, and his Sare Jahan Se Achcha (1904) is the subcontinent's unofficial second national anthem.
- Date
- 1877–1938
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
His 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad named northwest India — Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, the Frontier — as the territorial core of a Muslim state; the term Pakistan was coined by Choudhry Rahmat Ali three years later. He was buried in a simple sandstone chamber at the Hazuri Bagh between the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort, where his tomb is now a Pakistani national monument.
About the place
This expands the existing PE0240 entry; see also PE0240 (Muhammad Iqbal).
Connections (2)
- Buried atTomb of Allāma Iqbāl, Lahore
Allama Muhammad Iqbal's tomb stands in the Hazuri Bagh at Lahore in the gap between the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort — a deliberate placement that frames his memorial as part of the Mughal-and-Sikh architectural ensemble rather than as a modernist monument. The sandstone chamber was built by the Pakistani government in 1951 and declared a national monument. Iqbal's two Allahabad Address (1930) and Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam lectures were given during the years when the tomb's site was still an open garden.
- Influenced byChoudhry Rahmat Ali
Choudhry Rahmat Ali's 1933 Now or Never pamphlet proposing the name Pakistan built explicitly on Allama Iqbal's 1930 Allahabad address that had argued for a separate Muslim state in northwest India. Where Iqbal had named the territory (Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, the Frontier), Rahmat Ali gave it a name — the P-A-K-I-S-T-A-N acronym that encoded the five provinces including Kashmir, which Iqbal had not. The Muslim League leadership adopted the territorial claim without acknowledging either source until the state was fait accompli.