Allama Muhammad Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of the East

Iqbal was born in Sialkot on 9 November 1877 and studied in Sialkot and at Government College, Lahore. In 1905 he went to Europe, studied philosophy at Cambridge, took a doctorate in Munich in 1907 and qualified as a barrister in London. Back in Lahore he practised law, wrote and lectured. He was knighted in 1922. In his presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad in 1930 he proposed a Muslim state in the north-west of India, an idea later taken up in the movement for Pakistan. He died in Lahore on 21 April 1938.

Iqbal's early Urdu poems include the patriotic Tarana-e-Hind (1904), Saare jahaañ se achchhaa Hindostaañ hamaaraa ("Better than all the world is our Hindustan"), still sung in India, and the daring pair Shikwa (Complaint) and Jawab-e-Shikwa (God's Reply). His central idea is khudi, the self: each person must strengthen and realise the self through action, love and faith, rather than dissolve it.

Urdu: Bang-e-Dara (1924), Bal-e-Jibril (1935), Zarb-e-Kalim (1936), Armaghan-e-Hijaz (1938). Persian: Asrar-e-Khudi (1915), Rumuz-e-Bekhudi (1918), Payam-e-Mashriq (1923) and Javid Nama (1932), his journey through the heavens. His early book on economics, Ilm-ul-Iqtisad, is discussed in Asateeri Mabahis.