Dr. Mohammad Iqbal, the Islamic poet-philosopher who played such a vital role in the birth of Pakistan, was the first to advocate the formation of independent Muslim state for the subcontinent. In 1930, in his capacity as President of the Muslim League, Iqbal was the first to use a political platform to launch the concept of a separate homeland for Muslims. I have researched, selected, and annotated a few thoughts for you to learn more about our profound thinker.
As a poet Iqbal represented in perhaps the most sensitive manner, the collective consciousness of his people during a certain period of their history.
Born in November 1877 in Sialkot, Iqbal achieved high proficiency in Arabic and Persian languages at an early age. After completing graduate studies in philosophy, he became a college lecturer in Lahore at the age of 24. Later he moved to Cambridge, England for higher studies and earned Ph.D. from Munich University, Germany at the age of 30.
If we agree with Iqbal’s thesis, we must believe that revelation as a source of knowledge discontinued after 632 C.E. and the only source of knowledge now available to us is sense perception and reasoning by which we can both understand God’s will as enunciated in the Qur’an and Sunnah and create new knowledge to predict and control the natural and social phenomena for purposes of better survival of the humankind. Unfortunately, many Muslims, presumably out of anger towards their recent colonial past, want to discard all modern knowledge, labeling it as ‘western’, and strive to dig out a certain prescription for all our social ills through religious intuition or extra-sensory perception – an obsurantist and obviously futile effort.
If Muslims had heeded for the last 70 years Iqbal’s advice and considered scientific advancement as an act of prayer, the road map of world power today would have been very different. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist of