poetry: Allama Iqbal Poetry

Allama Iqbal :

Allama Iqbal is our national hero. He was great poet , philosopher, and politician, as well as an academic, barrister and scholar.Iqbal was born in Sialkot, in the present-day province of the Punjab in Pakistan, in 1877. He received his early education in that city, where one of his teachers was Mir Hasan, an accomplished scholar who commanded a knowledge of several Islamic languages. Mir Hasan gave Iqbal a thorough training in the rich Islamic literary tradition. His influence on Iqbal was formative. Many years later (1922), when the English governor of the Punjab proposed to the British Crown that Iqbal be knighted in acknowledgment of his literary accomplishments, Iqbal asked that Mir Hasan also be awarded a title. To the governor’s remark that Mir Hasan had not authored any books, Iqbal responded that he, Iqbal, was the book Mir Hasan had produced. Mir Hasan received the title of Shams al-’Ulama’ (“Sun of Scholars”).

For higher education Iqbal went to Lahore (1895), where he enrolled in Government College, getting, in 1899, an MA in philosophy; he had already obtained a degree in law (1898). In Lahore, a major center of academic and literary activity, Iqbal soon made a name for himself as a poet. One of the teachers of Government College Iqbal admired most was Sir Thomas Arnold. Arnold, too, had great affection for Iqbal, he helped Iqbal in his career as a teacher and also encouraged him to undertake several research projects. When Arnold returned to England in 1904, Iqbal wrote a touching poem in which he expressed his resolve to follow Arnold to England. The very next year, in fact, Iqbal left for study at Cambridge. His choice of Cambridge was probably dictated by the fact that Cambridge was reputed for the study not only of European philosophy but also of Arabic and Persian. In his three years of stay abroad, Iqbal obtained a BA from Cambridge (1906), qualified as a barrister at London’s Middle Temple (1906), and earned a PhD from Munich University (1908).