Barely half an hour before his death on April 21, 1938, Allama Iqbal recited a quatrain which reads like an epitaph (translated): The melodies bygone may come again; or nevermore/ The zephyr from Hijaz may come again; or nevermore/ The days of this Faqir are ended now; forevermore/ And yet another seer may come or not; forevermore!

This quatrain sums up Iqbal’s supreme significance for Muslims, for then and for centuries beyond. After all, men like Iqbal are born but in centuries. To quote Amir Shakib Arsalan, the world of Islam had not thrown up a thinker of his calibre during the last few centuries.

Iqbal had ample opportunities to assimilate eastern and western thought. His education included study of Arabic, English literature and philosophy, besides social sciences. His quest for knowledge took him to Europe where he also became familiar with the groundwork of western civilisation and contemporary western thought.

Iqbal made his debut as a rising poet in 1899, when he recited the Nala-i-Yatim (The Cry of the Orphan) at the annual session of the Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam in Lahore. For the next six years, Iqbal, for the most part wrote, under a patriotic impulse, and became an advocate of the emergent Indian nationalism. To this period belongs the Tarana-i-Hindi, which according to Iqbal Singh, “remains to this day [1947] the best patriotic poem in modern times”. Hence, he came to be hailed as the ‘National Poet of India’.

His studies and a three-year (1905-08) sojourn in Europe opened for him new vistas, inducing him to disorient himself from his erstwhile orientation. First, his study of the development of metaphysics in Persia, the topic of his doctorial dissertation at Munich, disoriented him from mysticism, as it had no place in Islam. Deeply influenced by European thought, Iqbal was, for now, all for endeavour, initiative, and action — attributes antithetical to Sufism.

Second, he joyously admired Europe’s soaring vitality, creativity, initiative, inquisitiveness, and confident restlessness, for a better tomorrow, and readily realised the tremendous possibilities before man, opened up by science but undreamt of in India. But he also found that undiluted capitalism, aggressive nationalism and blind racism had undermined western civilisation. The triad concepts had divided mankind, entailed endless competition and bred bitter rivalries between nations and races. What, then, was the answer?

To Iqbal, Islam was the only answer — because Islam envisages a world brotherhood which transcends racial, national and class affiliations. Thus, Iqbal’s European sojourn brought him to the threshold of a paradigmatic shift: from an Indian nationalist he turned into a pan-Islamist. In a conceptual sense, he was for now treating the seldom trodden path, delineated by Albert Schiller, when he proclaimed, “I write as a citizen of the world who serves no prince. I lost my fatherland to exchange it for the great world. What is the greatest of nations but a fragment?”

The Prophet (PBUH) had once said, “The whole of this earth is a mosque (unto me)”. Iqbal would, for now, say, “Every country is ours because it is the country of our God”. The fatherland to which he belonged was the sprawling Muslim world — the vast belt from Morocco to Indonesia, and far beyond. To quote Dr Nafisy, the learned Iranian intellectual, Iqbal took upon himself the immense task of a poet-prophet. His poems, for now, shifted ground: he sang of the glory of Islam and Muslims.

Over the years, Iqbal’s poems increasingly reflected the travails of the Muslim world; they also mirrored the agitated mood of Indian Muslims. To quote Professor Hamilton A R Gibb, the famed Orientalist, “… Iqbal … reflected and put into vivid words the diverse currents of ideas that were agitating the minds of Indian Muslims. His sensitive poetic temperament mirrored all that impinged upon it… Every Indian Muslim, dissatisfied with the state of things — religious, social or political — could and did find in Iqbal a sympathiser with his troubles and his aspirations and an adviser who bade him seek the way out by self-expression.”

Iqbal’s claim to be the foremost Muslim philosopher of the present age rests chiefly on his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930). Therein he tried “to re-think the whole system of Islam without completely breaking away with the past”. Actually, he tried to do what St Augustine had done for Catholicism several centuries ago.

His significance as a poet and thinker apart, Iqbal was also the ideologue of Pakistan. To this day, his presidential address to the Allahabad (1930) League session stands out as the intellectual justification for Muslim nationhood in India.

— An HEC distinguished National Professor, the writer is the co-editor of Unesco’s History of Humanity, vol. VI, The Jinnah Anthology (2010) and In Quest of Jinnah (2007).

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