Iqbal’s Persian verse remade a political imagination
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) wrote Urdu poems ranked among the twentieth century's finest—yet chose Persian to think aloud. His 1930 Allahabad Address sketched a northwest Muslim polity; nine years after his death, Pakistan named him national poet.
Born 9 November 1877 in Sialkot, Punjab, to Kashmiri-Pandit Sapru converts and tailor father Sheikh Noor Muhammad, Iqbal spoke Punjabi and Urdu daily. Mosque Qur'an lessons and Syed Mir Hassan's Arabic and Persian led through Scotch Mission College and Government College Lahore: B.A. with an Arabic medal (1897), M.A. first in philosophy (1899). Early children's verses included "Parinde Ki Faryad" on animal rights and patriotic "Tarana-e-Hindi."
Teacher Thomas Arnold pushed him west. In 1905–08 he took a second B.A. at Trinity College, Cambridge, was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and earned a Munich Ph.D. (4 November 1907) on The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. Heidelberg's Emma Wegenast taught him Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche; he mastered German in three months. Back in Lahore he taught, practised law (over 100 reported judgments), then devoted himself to poetry—Asrar-e-Khudi, Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, Bang-e-Dara—winning a knighthood after Asrar-i-Khudi.
Rumi became "his guide" for a spiritual-political revival of the ummah. Lectures collected as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) paired with League work and the Allahabad Address's two-nation framework. Throat illness from 1933, a Bhopal pension after quitting law in 1934, and visits to Ali Hujwiri's dargah filled his last years; he died in Lahore on 21 April 1938, tomb between Badshahi Mosque and the Fort. Pakistan still marks 9 November as his birthday holiday.
Source: Muhammad Iqbal
