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........

© Pakistan Observer