The All Parties Hurriyat Conference Azad Jammu and Kashmir (APHC-AJK) chapter senior leader, Muhammad Farooq Rehmani, has paid rich tributes to Poet of the East, Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal, on the eve of his 146th birth anniversary.
Muhammad Farooq Rehmani in a statement issued in Islamabad said that Allama Muhammad Iqbal, was a great poet, philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century who changed the poetry theme affecting overall political narrative to suit freedom movement of his times, particularly the life and struggle of the Indian Muslims of the British colonial period.
He said in his poetry, Allama Iqbal stressed upon the dignity of mankind and was moved by the economic plight of the Indian Muslims drawing focus of Muhammad Ali Jinnah to ways of changing economic and social fortunes of the fellow Muslim countrymen by writing significant letters to a politician, who in his latter life became founder of Pakistan and named Quad-e-Azam.
Muhammad Farooq Rehmani said that equally Dr Iqbal’s heart was burning with the slavery of the Kashmiri Muslims, who were treated as a wretched creature by their rulers for centuries. He said that Dr Iqbal for some time as President of the Kashmir Committee Lahore made vital political contribution to the freedom movement of Kashmir in addition to his revolutionary and heart-rending poems on Kashmir.
The APHC-AJK leader stated that the slavery of Palestine under the British mandate and rise of British-backed Zionist movement for a Jew homeland in Palestine was another sad development in Iqbal’s times and indeed the poet philosopher and political thinker like Iqbal could not remain indifferent to the issue of Palestine-Al-Qudus (wall of Buraq), and killings and displacement of the Palestinians. He not only wrote verses on Palestine but at the same time expressed his views in different seminars on Palestine and both Quaid-e-Azam and Allama Iqbal had serious views on dangers of Zionism in the Islamic world. Today, we are facing both these issues in their most terrible shape and unless and until we keep before us thoughts of Allama Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim leadership of the Arab and non Arab Muslim world became cognizant of the genocide in Palestine and demographic changes in Kashmir, repercussion for callously indifferent Muslim rulers and their supporters would be unimaginable, he added.—KMS
