Death of Muhammad Iqbal

# Muhammad Iqbal: The Poet-Philosopher Who Dreamed of Pakistan

The Last Journey

On April 21, 1938 CE (21 Safar 1357 AH), Muhammad Iqbal — poet, philosopher, barrister, and the most influential Muslim intellectual of the 20th century — died at his home in Lahore. He was approximately 61 years old. He had been suffering from a throat disease for several years; his voice, once powerful enough to fill large lecture halls, had gradually weakened. His last major work had been completed; the dream he had articulated — a separate homeland for the Muslims of South Asia — would be realized nine years later, without him, in August 1947.

The response to his death across the Muslim world was extraordinary. He was mourned not only in India but in Persia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Arab countries where his Persian poetry had been read for decades. The great Egyptian scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida wrote a tribute; the Ottoman scholar Mehmed Akif Ersoy, who had himself written the Turkish national anthem, had been Iqbal's friend. Iqbal was buried in Lahore beside the Badshahi Mosque — a burial site that has since become one of the most visited in Pakistan.

Origins and Formation

Muhammad Iqbal was born on November 9, 1877 CE (3 Dhul Qa'da 1294 AH) in Sialkot, in the Punjab region of British India — the same city that had produced Mawlana Shibli Nu'mani, the great Islamic historian. His family was of Kashmiri Brahmin origin, converts to Islam three or four generations earlier. His father, Nur Muhammad, was a pious and largely self-educated man with a love of Sufi poetry and Islamic spirituality — an environment that shaped his son's earliest religious formation.

Iqbal received his initial education at Sialkot Mission School (a Christian school, the best available) and then at Government College Lahore, where he came under the influence of the Scottish philosopher and professor Thomas Arnold. Arnold recognized Iqbal's extraordinary abilities and encouraged him to pursue advanced studies in Europe. He also deepened Iqbal's engagement with Western philosophy in a way that, rather than diminishing his Islamic identity, ultimately sharpened his critique of Western civilization's limitations.

In 1905, at the age of 28, Iqbal left for England to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied philosophy under James Ward and J.E. McTaggart. He then moved to Munich, where he completed a PhD on "The Development of Metaphysics in Persia" in 1907 — tracing the evolution of Persian philosophical and mystical thought, a subject that gave him deep knowledge of the Sufi intellectual tradition while also equipping him with critical tools.

He was also called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in London, making him a qualified barrister — a credential that would serve him in his later legal practice in Lahore.

The Poetry: Urdu and Persian

Iqbal's reputation rests above all on his poetry — in both Urdu and Persian — which stands among the finest produced in either language in the 20th century. His early Urdu poetry (collected in Bang-e-Dara, "The Call of the Caravan Bell," 1924) includes nationalist and patriotic poems written before and shortly after his European studies, including the famous "Tarana-e-Hind" (Anthem of India), celebrating India as a unified homeland regardless of religion.

After his return from Europe in 1908, Iqbal's thought shifted significantly. He became convinced that the Indian nationalist framework — which subsumed Muslim identity into a composite Indian identity — would ultimately undermine Islamic civilization. His subsequent poetry reflects this shift: the focus moved from Indian nationalism to Islamic universalism.

Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self, 1915) was his first major Persian work and the one that established his international reputation. It was translated into English by R.A. Nicholson of Cambridge University, and the translation caused a sensation in European scholarly circles. The book argued — in verse — that the Muslim's primary spiritual obligation was to develop the self (khudi) rather than to seek its annihilation in God. This was a deliberate philosophical critique of the dominant strand of Sufi thought (the Fanaa tradition associated with al-Hallaj and the metaphysics of Ibn Arabi) which emphasized self-dissolution. Iqbal argued that the Quranic vision was of a strengthened, empowered self that actively engages with and transforms the world — not a self that dissolves into mystical union.

Rumuz-i-Bekhudi (Hints of Selflessness, 1918) was the companion volume, exploring the individual's relationship with the community — arguing that the self's development was ultimately in service of the ummah's collective empowerment.

Payam-i-Mashriq (A Message from the East, 1923) was written as a response to Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) — a poetic conversation across civilizations about the spiritual poverty of materialist Western civilization and the resources of Eastern spiritual tradition.

Javid Nama (Book of Eternity, 1932) is widely considered his masterpiece — a Persian poem in the tradition of Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Iqbal is guided through the celestial spheres by the spirit of Rumi. Along the way he encounters historical figures — Nadir Shah, Sarmad the mystic, Nietzsche — and engages them in debate about the human condition, the nature of God, and the destiny of the Muslim world. It is simultaneously a philosophical treatise and a deeply personal spiritual journey.

His Urdu poems (Bal-e-Jibril, "Gabriel's Wing"; Zarb-e-Kalim, "The Rod of Moses"; the posthumous Armughan-e-Hijaz, "Gift of the Hejaz") continued to the end of his life, exploring themes of spiritual awakening, the critique of Western materialism, and the calling of the Muslim ummah.

The Intellectual Framework: Self, Community, Ijtihad

Three ideas define the core of Iqbal's intellectual contribution.

The first is khudi — the self. Against the Sufi tradition of self-negation, Iqbal insisted on the Quranic dignity of the human person. The purpose of spiritual development was not dissolution but empowerment — the creation of a human being capable of being Allah's vicegerent (khalifa) on earth as described in Surah al-Baqara (2:30). The Muslim world's weakness, in Iqbal's diagnosis, was precisely a failure of self-confidence — a tendency toward fatalism, imitation, and withdrawal rather than creative engagement.

The second is the ummah — the community. The individual self develops only in relation to community. The Muslim ummah is not merely a political or demographic category but a spiritual community with a shared mission: to establish the principles of divine justice in human civilization. The loss of the Caliphate (1924) was for Iqbal a symptom of the ummah's spiritual weakness, not merely a political event.

The third is ijtihad — independent reasoning in Islamic law and thought. Iqbal's Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930, based on lectures delivered in 1928-1929) argued that the "closing of the door of ijtihad" — the medieval Muslim scholars' assertion that all necessary legal questions had been resolved and that later scholars should only follow earlier authorities — was a historical mistake that had frozen Islamic thought. He called for a renewal of ijtihad appropriate to modern circumstances.

This last point generated controversy among traditional scholars, some of whom felt that Iqbal was insufficiently qualified in the traditional Islamic sciences to make pronouncements about ijtihad. The critique has some validity: Iqbal was a philosopher and poet, not a classically trained faqih. His Reconstruction is a work of Islamic philosophy and theology rather than Islamic jurisprudence, and his specific proposals for legal reform were not always well-grounded in the technical tradition.

The Allahabad Address and Pakistan

On December 29, 1930 CE (8 Rajab 1349 AH), Iqbal delivered his presidential address to the All-India Muslim League in Allahabad — a speech that has become the foundational text of Pakistani nationalism. In it, he proposed, for the first time, the creation of a Muslim state in northwestern India comprising the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan.

Iqbal's argument was not that Muslims and Hindus could not live together — he had written earlier poetry celebrating Hindu-Muslim unity. His argument was that the Muslim community had specific spiritual and civilizational needs that could only be fully expressed in a polity organized around Islamic principles. Within a Hindu-majority India, however democratically governed, Muslim institutions and values would inevitably be subordinated to the majority's preferences.

The speech was careful and philosophical rather than inflammatory. Iqbal envisioned a Muslim state that would serve as a living example of Islamic principles applied to modern governance — a "laboratory" for Islamic civilization's encounter with modernity. He was not calling for hostile separation but for the recognition of Muslim distinctiveness within or alongside a broader Indian confederation.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the lawyer who would become the founder of Pakistan, read Iqbal's speech carefully and corresponded with him in the 1930s. Iqbal's philosophical framework gave Jinnah's political project an intellectual and spiritual depth it might otherwise have lacked.

Iqbal did not live to see Pakistan. He died in 1938, nine years before the partition of the subcontinent. But he is honored as the "Mufakkir-e-Pakistan" (the thinker of Pakistan) and "Shair-e-Mashriq" (the Poet of the East) — a legacy formally recognized when Pakistan's highest civilian honor, the Nishan-e-Pakistan, was posthumously awarded to him.

The Ahl us-Sunnah Assessment

Iqbal presents a complex figure for Islamic evaluation. His deep love for the Prophet ﷺ — expressed throughout his poetry in terms of extraordinary beauty and emotion — his commitment to the Quran as the dynamic word of God, and his insistence that Islamic civilization had unique spiritual resources that the world needed, are unambiguous contributions to the Muslim community's self-understanding.

His philosophical positions — particularly his critique of certain Sufi schools' self-negation theology and his call for renewed ijtihad — have been disputed by some traditional scholars who felt he overstepped the boundaries of his expertise. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in particular requires reading with awareness that it is the work of a philosopher engaging with Islamic theology, not a work of classical Islamic scholarship.

What remains undeniable is his service to Islamic consciousness at a time when the Muslim world was in deep crisis. His insistence that Muslims must recover spiritual self-confidence, that Islamic civilization had a positive contribution to make to humanity, and that the path forward required both returning to Islamic foundations and creative intellectual engagement with the challenges of modernity — this was precisely what a demoralized Muslim community needed to hear.

Sources:

• Iqbal, Muhammad. Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self). Trans. R.A. Nicholson. Macmillan, 1920.
• Iqbal, Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Oxford University Press, 1934.
• Iqbal, Muhammad. Kulliyat-i-Iqbal (Complete Works in Urdu). Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. Gabriel's Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Brill, 1963.
• Malik, Hafeez. Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan. Columbia University Press, 1971.
• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. "Islam and the Encounter of Traditions," in Islamic Life and Thought. SUNY Press, 1981.
• Allahabad Address (December 29, 1930). Full text: Iqbal Academy Pakistan.