Blackwell Reference Online

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Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, reverentially known as Allama (Sage), is unquestionably one of the most important twentieth-century Urdu poets. While Pakistan claims Iqbal to be its national poet, responsible for conceiving the idea of Pakistan, India takes pride in Iqbal's masterpiece “Tarana-e-Hindi” (The Song of India); in fact, Iqbal died nearly ten years before the creation of Pakistan and the division of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Iqbal was highly critical of capitalism, and paid glowing tributes to Karl Marx and Lenin . He was, however, a devout Muslim, and never associated with atheistic Bolshevism. While declaring the Qur'an a panacea for all ills and capitalism a curse to this world, Iqbal rejected the destruction of capitalism. The Progressive Writers' movement in Pakistan was divided over Iqbal's legacy. While a large majority of progressives disowned Iqbal, stalwarts like Faiz Ahmed Faiz defended him as a Muslim intellectual who sought to cleanse the House of God of all false idols; others viewed him as an obscurantist mullah , a withdrawn mystic, and a demagogue. Muhammad Iqbal was born in Sialkot, a town in northern Pakistan, in 1877. After his matriculation and intermediate examinations at the Scotch Mission School, he moved to Lahore. He graduated from Government College, Lahore in 1897 and later earned a master of arts in philosophy (1899). After graduation ... log in or subscribe to read full text