Muhammad Iqbal

Sir Muhammad Iqbal (9 November 1877 – 21 April 1938) was a poet and Islamic philosopher. His Urdu poetry ranks among the finest of the 20th century, and his ideas about a cultural and political future for the Muslims of British India are often seen as a driving force behind the Pakistan Movement. Commonly addressed as Allamah (meaning "learned"), he is regarded as a major Muslim thinker and religious philosopher of the 1900s.

Iqbal was born and raised in Sialkot, in the Punjab region of British India (now Pakistan). He attended Scotch Mission College in Sialkot and Government College University in Lahore. From 1899 to 1903, he taught Arabic at Oriental College, Lahore, and wrote extensively during this time. Early Urdu poems include "Parinde Ki Faryad" ("A Bird's Prayer"), a reflection on animal rights, and "Tarana-e-Hindi" ("Anthem of the Indians"), a patriotic piece—both written for children. In 1905, he left India to study in Europe, first in England and then Germany. In England, he earned a second BA at Trinity College, Cambridge, and qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn. In Germany, he earned a PhD in philosophy from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, with a thesis on "The Development of Metaphysics in Persia" in 1908. Returning to Lahore in 1908, he set up a law practice but focused mainly on scholarly work in politics, economics, history, philosophy, and religion. He is best known for his poetry, including "Asrar-e-Khudi", "Rumuz-e-Bekhudi", and "Bang-e-Dara". His Persian writings earned him recognition in Iran.

A strong advocate for the political and spiritual revival of the Muslim world, especially Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, Iqbal delivered a series of lectures later published as *The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam* in 1930. He was elected to the Punjab Legislative Council in 1927 and held various roles in the All-India Muslim League. In his Allahabad Address at the League's 1930 annual assembly, he outlined a political framework for Muslim-majority regions in northwestern India, pushing the League toward the two-nation theory.

Nine years after his death, in August 1947, the partition of India created Pakistan, an independent Islamic state where Iqbal is honored as the national poet. He is also known in Pakistan as Hakim ul-Ummat ("The Wise Man of the Ummah") and Mufakkir-e-Pakistan ("The Thinker of Pakistan"). His birthday, 9 November, is a public holiday in Pakistan.

Iqbal was born in Sialkot to a Punjabi family of Kashmiri ancestry. His lineage traces back to the Sapru clan of Kashmiri Pandits from a village in south Kulgam, who converted to Islam in the 15th century. His mother tongue was Punjabi, and he mostly spoke Punjabi and Urdu daily. During the Sikh Empire's conquest of Kashmir, his grandfather's family moved to Punjab. Iqbal's grandfather was an eighth cousin of Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, a lawyer and freedom fighter who later admired Iqbal. Iqbal often wrote about his Kashmiri roots. Scholar Annemarie Schimmel noted that Iqbal described himself as "a son of Kashmiri-Brahmans but (being) acquainted with the wisdom of Rumi and Tabrizi."

His father, Sheikh Noor Muhammad (died 1930), was a tailor with no formal education but a religious man. His mother, Imam Bibi, a Kashmiri from Sambrial, was known as polite and humble, helping the poor and neighbors. She died on 9 November 1914 in Sialkot. Iqbal loved her deeply and expressed his grief in an elegy.

At age four, Iqbal was sent to a mosque to learn the Qur'an. He studied Arabic and Persian under Syed Mir Hassan, head of the madrasa and Arabic professor at Scotch Mission College, where he matriculated in 1893. He ranked first in grade one and began writing poetry under the pen name Iqbal while in class nine, with his work published in literary journals as a teenager. He earned an intermediate Faculty of Arts diploma in 1895. That year, he enrolled at Government College, Lahore, earning a BA in philosophy, English literature, and Arabic in 1897, winning the Khan Bahadurddin F.S. Jalaluddin medal for Arabic. In 1899, he received an MA from the same college, placing first in philosophy at the University of the Punjab.

Iqbal married four times. His first marriage was in 1895 at age 18 to Karim Bibi, daughter of Khan Bahadur Ata Muhammad Khan, a civil surgeon and fellow Punjabi-Kashmiri from Gujrat. Her sister was the mother of director and composer Khwaja Khurshid Anwar. The couple had two children: a daughter, Miraj Begum (1895–1915), and a son, Aftab Iqbal (1899–1979), who became a barrister. Aftab's son Azad Iqbal is also a barrister, writer, and musician, performing jazz and ghazal. Another son is said to have died shortly after birth in 1901. Iqbal and Karim Bibi separated between 1910 and 1913, though he continued to support her financially.