Today marks the 145th Birth Anniversary of the renowned Muslim thinker, philosopher, politician and poet, Muhammad Iqbal. Although his birthday is celebrated in Pakistan, his birth and resting place, as “Iqbal Day”, he is also honored and remembered across the world for his contributions to the field of Urdu poetry and philosophy.
Given the title of Poet of the East, and often referred to as Shakespeare of the East by his readers, Muhammad Iqbal was born on 9 November 1877 in Sialkot, Punjab which was then part of the British Rule and following partition, merged with modern-day Pakistan.
He belonged to a Kashmiri Muslim family whose descendants were traced to be Kashmiri Brahmins. His family had fled to Punjab after the revolt of 1857 which was unsuccessful during that time.
Iqbal did his B.A and M.A from Government College Lahore and subsequently began teaching at Oriental College. After this, he studied at Cambridge where he obtained a Bachelors degree once again in Philosophy and completed his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Munich.
Because of his long-lasting affiliations with the world of academia, Iqbal had an intellectual temperament from the very beginning.
Muhammad Iqbal, who is today honoured with the title of “Allama” Iqbal or the most learned, was taught by Sayyid Mir Hassan during the beginning. Mir Hassan was also the teacher of another significant Urdu poet and thinker of the twentieth century, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
Though remembered and praised, Allama Iqbal’s poetry also gained criticism for its distinctive style, often called out as blasphemous for his unconventional mode of writing. After his stay in London for quite some time, Iqbal returned to Lahore, and it was here that he composed one of his initial and most controversial works, “Shikwa,” which was considered to be a complaint to God from a believer due to the misery and harm he is seeing his community suffer from. He received the title of “infidel” by orthodox religious clerics during that time.
However, he released a continuation in the form of “Jawab-e-Shikwa” or a Response to the Complaint in 1913. Upon the publication, Iqbal was ironically praised for his contributions to Islamic literature as the poem or nazm highlighted the contributions of humans in influencing the world.
Iqbal was greatly influenced by “Rumi” and accepted him as his guide. The poetry and philosophical work of Rumi also received contempt during his lifetime. Rumi, a well-known Sufi of the Khorasan or Iran region, also believed in a different concept of love of God where he tried to gain acceptance for idolaters, egoists, polytheists, and other categories of people who found the way of Islam but were not welcomed into the community.
Allama Iqbal was known to never indulge in disagreements that arose from his own works and portrayed his ever-evolving thinking process through poetry. Another example of the existential questions that he raised and tried to discover the answers for is “Jibreel-o-Iblees” where he poetically expressed a conversation between Angel Gabriel and Iblees (Satan).
During his journey to Spain in 1932/33 CE, Iqbal can be seen in this photo at the Great Mosque of Córdoba (Masjid e Qurtuba). In 1236 CE, the Great Mosque of Córdoba was converted into a Catholic Church. However, Iqbal was fortunate that he was allowed to offer his prayers in the mosque (as you can see in the photo).
In 1936 CE, after visiting the Great Mosque, Iqbal penned a poem titled “Masjid e Qurtuba,” which was included in his collection Baal-e-Jibril (The Wing of Gabriel).
The concept of “khudi” or selfhood presented by Iqbal also earned worldwide acclaim, defined as one of his finest poetic works, and the earliest philosophical work. Iqbal was a firm believer of the Individuality of a being, where he defined Khudi in the same way as Rooh or Divine Spark is defined in the Holy Quran.
He tried to contradict the idea of this great divine spark with the stages a person is required to go through to reach this spark.
“People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.”
_IQBAL
As we commemorate the 145th Birth Anniversary of Iqbal, it becomes crucial to read, whether to praise or criticise, the many works of Allama Iqbal which re-defined Urdu Literature and enhanced the Islamic Literature.
