Person · poet & philosopher
Muhammad Iqbāl
Born at Sialkot in 1877, educated at Lahore, Cambridge, Munich and Lincoln's Inn, and dead in 1938. He wrote in Persian and Urdu — Asrār-e-Khudī, Bāng-e-Darā, Bāl-e-Jibrīl — and in English in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, arguing for an Islam reasoned out again from the self rather than inherited. His 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad proposed a consolidated Muslim state in the north-west, and is read as the intellectual origin of Pakistan.
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The same poet wrote “Sāre Jahān Se Achhā”, which is still played at Indian state occasions and by the Indian armed forces, and the Allahabad address that Pakistan dates its idea from — so both countries quote him, for opposite purposes.
Connections (3)
- Samadhi atTomb of Allāma Iqbāl, Lahore
Iqbāl died in Lahore in April 1938 and was buried in the Hazuri Bagh, in the gap between the Badshahi Mosque and the fort — a placement chosen to put the national poet between the two buildings that stand for Mughal sovereignty in the Punjab. The mausoleum went up between 1946 and 1951 to a design by the Hyderabadi architect Zain Yar Jang, in red sandstone from Jaipur with Afghan marble and lapis lazuli given by the Afghan government for the inscriptions.
- BirthplaceSagala / Sialkot
Iqbāl was born at Sialkot in 1877 into a family of Kashmiri converts, and took his first education there before Lahore, Cambridge, Munich and Lincoln's Inn. The town is the same Sāgala that was Menander's capital seventeen centuries earlier and the Sangala Alexander stormed before that, and Iqbāl's Persian work is steeped in exactly the Central Asian and Iranian world those layers came from. He wrote about Kashmir, which his family had left, as a homeland he had never lived in.
- Contemporary capital withMuhammad Ali Jinnah
Iqbāl's 1930 presidential address at Allahabad proposed a consolidated Muslim state in the north-west of India; Jinnah, then in political retreat in London, was persuaded back partly by Iqbāl's letters of 1936 and 1937 urging him to take up the question of Muslim political future in economic as well as communal terms. Iqbāl died in 1938, nine years before the state was made, and the division of credit between the poet who framed the idea and the barrister who obtained it has been argued over in Pakistan ever since.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Muhammad Iqbal”. Iqbal Academy Pakistan editions of the Kulliyat; Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930); Presidential Address, All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 1930.
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