By Amb. Salahuddin Choudhry
llama Iqbal was a great poet of the East, philosopher and visionary. During his lifetime, he produced great literary works in Urdu and Persian, delving into the spiritual being of man and his surroundings.
Sir Dr. Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), also known as Allama Iqbal (‘The Great Scholar’), is often described as the unique ‘intellectual father of Pakistan’.
He is an individual who propagated a revolutionary transformation for South Asia through his poetic Masnavi’s and political thinking.
He was a man who could look beyond the confines of hardship or barriers of community and culture and see beyond into evergreen fields of prosperity.
We don’t call him just a poet of Pakistan, but he is a universal poet, and his thought is really universal, in fact, cosmic. He is revered as a poet-philosopher, because his poems were not just lyricism, singing the songs of beauty and love, but also the aims and ideals and destiny of nations.
While Iqbal largely accepted the models of Western thought, he felt it lacked a dimension that only Eastern heritage and philosophy could bridge.
Science had thrust the West into a new age, but this was at the expense of faith and a spiritual understanding of man’s place in the world. This idea of spiritual well-being is something that Iqbal felt was prominent in Eastern philosophy, but was in danger of being lost as the British Empire conquered all.
For Iqbal, his surroundings had seen a radical shift that abandoned traditional Indian thinking and philosophy and instead paid homage to Western ideologies of living and standard.
Through his poetic and literary works, Iqbal explores understandings of man and his place on Earth. In particular, he digs deep into the realms of spiritual thought drawing great inspiration from Jalal-uddin Rumi, a Persian metaphysical poet from the 13th century.
Iqbal wrote a series of poetic Persian anthologies, or Masnavi’s, including the Asrar-i-Khudi, or The Secrets of the Self (1915), and Rumuz-i-Bekhudi, or Mysteries of Selflessness (1917). In them, Iqbal explores notions of Self-hood and the Self through the eyes of a poet. Explaining the poem, Iqbal says:
“All life is individual; there is no such thing as universal life. God Himself is an individual; He is the most unique individual.”
The difference, therefore, between man and a higher being is that the man suffers from ‘ego’ or khudi. It is only through strenuous spiritual application that man can utilize khudi to achieve bekhudi, or ‘selflessness’.
In order to acquire such a state, the Self must first escape from the daily trappings of materialism and earthly desire. Doing so, man can go on to attain divine spirituality, which will bring him closer to God. What could be truer in our modern times when the world is once again faced with ill-placed concepts of “haves & have-nots”, and the man groping for existence or survival?
Rather than for man to assimilate Sufiistic notions of rejecting the world in order to become closer to God, Iqbal offers a different quest for man to strive for.
This quest, Iqbal notes, is one that offers a careful balance of spiritual harmony alongside modernity, helping them to create a well-rounded individual, who is worldly rather than closed-off.
Like Pakistan’s founder Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Allama Iqbal too was opposed to religious bigotry and extremism. Many of his verses describe clerics as those for whom religion is a tool to create dissensions in the body politics of Muslims. He was a stout exponent of Sufi Islam, religion with a universal message of peace, love and harmony for all.
The attention he had received from numerous academic writers, translators, and critics from Western as well as Islamic countries testifies to his stature as a world literary figure. The great intellectual late Anne Marie Schimmel devoted her life to the study of Dr. Allama Iqbal.
Indeed, Sir
Allama Muhammad Iqbal was a poet, philosopher, scholar, knight, politician and an authority on Islam all rolled into one single mortal being. Most importantly, he is acclaimed to be the ‘Dreamer’ of Pakistan nation-State. To this day, Iqbal’s poetry and his extensive work remains popular among the Muslims around the world. His message of Muslim brotherhood, self-confidence, knowledge and continuous progress reverberates unabatedly in the present-day context.
The Two National Heroes of Pakistan – ie. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam / Founding Father of our beloved country, and the Dreamer of Pakistan & the declared National Poet – are given due and appropriate recognition by his people for their timely & righteous role played in leading the struggle and Movement for Independence of the Muslims of the then Sub-Continent.
The making of Pakistan as a free Muslim-majority nation-state in the north-west and north-east of the defunct British-Indian Empire was largely through political means. Nobody could have believed that it would take merely a period of seven years since 1940 for India’s largest yet most deprived minority to finally secure a country for themselves they called their own.
The Day of 23rd March dawned in 1940 heralding the end of a 150-years of colonial rule in the South Asian Sub-Continent as it marked the course of the Muslim political thought of “two-nation theory”, conceived & initiated by Jinnah & Iqbal, culminating into two major groups of people seeking and attaining Separate States for Hindus and Muslims.
Surely & conclusively, Iqbal is a poet-philosopher whose poetry and philosophy do not exist in isolation from each other; they are integrally related.
Today, therefore, it can be inferred, where one can construe existentialism is facing a possible threat, Dr. Allama Iqbal’s delineation of life through lyrics consummates its existence and gives meaning to life by looking inward for self-development in consonance with pragmatic practices in a man’s world !!
The author is a former senior Foreign Service of Pakistan Officer and senior Member of Nazriya Pakistan Council Islamabad
He can be reached on
