Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938) Story:
Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938), a descendant of a Kashmiri
Brahmin family that had embraced Islam in the seventeenth
century, was born and settled in Sialkot. After a traditional
education in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, he was exposed to a
liberal education that defined the contours of his thought and his
poetry during the entire period of his life. Beginning his
educational career at the Scottish Mission School, he went on to
acquire his M. A. in Philosophy, before joining Trinity College, and
later earning the degree of Bar-at-Law. He furthered his education
by getting the degree of doctorate from Germany on The
Development of Metaphysics in Persia. He worked in different
capacities at different points of time; he taught philosophy,
practised law, got involved in politics, and also attended the
second Round Table Conference. Even while he favoured the idea
of the creation of Pakistan and is venerated there as the national
poet, he wrote the famous patriotic song that celebrates the
greatness of India. King George V decorated him with knighthood
and he was called Sir Mohammad Iqbal thereafter.
Iqbal wrote both in Persian and Urdu, and is often regarded as the
poet-philosopher of the East who addressed the Muslim ummah,
believed in the philosophy of wahdatul wujood, and propounded
the philosohy of khudi, or selfhood, which called for self-
realisation and the discovery of the hidden talent with love and
perseverance. Beyond that lay the stages of complete submission
and forgetfulness which, he thought, was the ultimate stage of
khudi. Iqbal dreamt of the ‘complete man’ and also entered into a
metaphoric dialogue with the divine. His poetry emerged as a
remarkable site where message and art coalesced, as he re-
configured major poetic devices like metaphor, myth, and symbol
to re-visit history, philosophy and the Islamic faith to develop his
individual vision. He has left behind his collections of poems,
Asraar-e Khudi, Rumooz-e Bekhudi, Baang-e Daraa, Baal-e Jibreel,
Payaam-e Mashriq, Zaboor-e ‘Ajm, Javed Naama, Zarb-e Kaleem,
and Armaghaan-e Hijaz, apart from his lectures collected in
English as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, and
other works on the Eastern worldview.
(Aayan Sadiq) 1/24/2024
