At a glance
Era 11- Dates
- 1877-1938 CE
- Who
- Poet and philosopher who called Muslims to spiritual renewal
- Era
- Colonialism & Renewal
ProfileMuhammad Iqbal
Muhammad Iqbal was born in Sialkot, in the Punjab, in 1877. He studied philosophy and law at Cambridge and in Germany and practised as a lawyer in Lahore, but he is remembered above all as a poet in Urdu and Persian.
His poems called Muslims to wake from despair and imitation, to recover their dignity and to act. He wrote of khudi, the self, which grows strong through faith and effort. In his lectures, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he argued that ijtihad is the principle of movement in Islam and must be used to meet a changing world.
In 1930, at Allahabad, he proposed that the Muslim-majority regions of north-west India form a state of their own. He died in Lahore in 1938, nine years before Pakistan was founded, and is honoured there as its national poet.
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SourcesSources for this profile
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