References
وہ نظر پاک بیں کیوں زینت برگسوتواں دیکھے
Hussain Ahmed Madani, Muttahida Qaumiyyat aur Islam, ed. Amjad Ali Shakir (Jamiat Publications, 2006), 107–68, 111.
Muhammad Umar Faruque, “The Crisis of Modern Subjectivity: Rethinking Muhammad Iqbal and the Islamic Tradition,” Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 6, no. 2 (2021): 43–81, 71.
Like Faruque, Muhammad Qasim Zaman also relies mostly on Iqbal’s English writings and his Persian poetry in his magisterial 2018 monograph, Islam in Pakistan: A History. Even public-facing scholarship in English that seeks to emphasize the importance of Iqbal’s thought for Muslims today, such as Saloni Jaiswal’s 2025 article in Traversing Tradition, relies on a similar source base.
This brief essay does not address the legacy of Iqbal’s Persian poetry, which is a complex and important topic in its own right.
دلیل صبح روشن ہے ستاروں کی تنک تابی
عُروُقِ مُردۂ مشرق میں خُونِ زندگی دوڑا
Michael Cook, for instance, wonders how the Arabs could “conquer for themselves one of the largest empires in history, with enduring religious and cultural consequences, even though they had never done such a thing before and would never do it again.” Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2024), 55. Borrowing a term from Nicholas Taleb, Cook describes the rise of Islam as a “Black Swan” event: an entirely unpredictable event that changed the course of human history.
The passage is from Ibn al-Athīr’s al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh, quoted and translated in Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge University Press, 1902), vol. II, p. 427. Here is Browne’s own description of the Mongol invasions: “In its suddenness, its devastating destruction, its appalling ferocity, its passionless and purposeless cruelty, its irresistible though short-lived violence, this outburst of savage nomads, hitherto hardly known by name even to their neighbours, resembles rather some brute cataclysm of the blind forces of nature than a phenomenon of human history.”
ہے عیاں فتنہ تاتار کے افسانے سے
سبق پھر پڑھ صداقت کا، عدالت کا، شجاعت کا
ہُوا خیمہ زن کاروانِ بہار
جہاں چھُپ گیا پردۂ رنگ میں
ذرا دیکھ اے ساقی لالہ فام
پِلا دے مجھے وہ میء پردہ سوز
The scholarship is too vast to cite. An accessible entry point is Saloni Jaiswal, “Understanding the Self Through Muhammad Iqbal’s Philosophical and Political Thought,” Traversing Tradition, January 20, 2025, traversingtradition.com. For a range of scholarly views, see the collection of essays in Muḥammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought, ed. H. C. Hillier and Basit Bilal Koshul (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
Muhammad Iqbal, The Secrets of the Self, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (Macmillan, 1920).
خودی کیا ہے، تلوار کی دھار ہے
اَزل سے ہے یہ کشمکش میں اسِیر
خودی کی یہ ہے منزل اولین
تری آگ اس خاداں سے نہیں
خودی کے نِگہباں کو ہے زہرِ ناب
مرا طریق امیری نہیں فقیری ہے
موت کو سمجھے ہیں غافل اختتامِ زندگی
In a Persian couplet, Iqbal captures the serene bodily response of one who truly understands the reality of death:
The example is adapted from comments made by Dr. Asif Salman Siddiqui in his four-part lecture series (in Urdu) on the poem. A recording is available on Youtube (youtube.com).
خدائے لم یزل کا دستِ قُدرت تُو، زباں تُو ہے
کرتے نہیں محکوم کو تیغوں سے کبھی زیر
تعلیم کے تیزاب میں ڈال اس کی خودی کو
وہ فریب خوردہ شاہیں جو پلا ہو کرگسوں میں
لب پہ آتی ہے دُعا بن کے تمنّا میری
As one example of how Iqbal continues to inspire readers, see Saaleh Baseer’s riveting and deeply personal account of Urdu and Islamic history stretching across South Asia and America. He concludes: “my final duah, my weeping prayer, to Allah is that my children shatter reading Iqbal’s Urdu.” Mullā Saaleh Baseer, “Language Is a Grandmother: The Long and Torturous Death of Urdu in America,” Traversing Tradition, November 9, 2022, traversingtradition.com.