Muhammad Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal wrote poetry in Persian and Urdu that is still recited by people who disagree about what it meant, and proposed a Muslim state in north-west India nine years before anyone drew it. He came from Sialkot, studied philosophy at Cambridge and took a doctorate at Munich on Persian metaphysics, and practised law without much interest in it. The poetry is the work: Asrar-i-Khudi argues for the development of the self against a quietist reading of Sufism, Bal-i-Jibril and the Javid Nama are the major Urdu and Persian collections, and Tarana-e-Hindi, written in 1904, is still sung as a patriotic song for the whole subcontinent. In the 1930 address to the Muslim League at Allahabad he called for Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan to be amalgamated into a single state within or without the British empire. He is the national poet of Pakistan, which did not exist in his lifetime, and is read as much in India and Iran. He was knighted in 1922. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, six lectures delivered in Madras and Hyderabad, is his main prose work and argues that ijtihad, the right of independent reasoning, must be reopened. Sare Jahan se Accha, the popular name of Tarana-e-Hindi, is played by Indian military bands and was hummed by Rakesh Sharma from orbit when asked how India looked. His tomb stands beside the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore and is guarded by the Pakistan Rangers. Iqbal Day is a public holiday in Pakistan.

• Lived: 1877 CE – 1938 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: writer