Biography of Iqbal Lahuri

Born in November 1877 in Sialkot, Punjab (now Pakistan), 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. He became barrister-at-law in 1908 and returned to Lahore to practice law. He was actively involved in the Muslims cultural and political strivings and was elected in 1920 a member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly. He was an outstanding and highly popular poet of Urdu and Persian languages and also delivered scholarly addresses at various occasions. A collection of his six (later seven) addresses was first published in 1930 titled Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. The same year, he delivered a historic address proposing creation of a Muslim homeland by partitioning British India when it achieves independence. He said in this country Islam would have an opportunity to mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to being them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.(Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p 11) Nine years after he passed away in April 1938, Pakistan came into being in August 1947.

Although many compilations of Iqbals poetry also deliver his message very eloquently, his foremost book Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam was intended to secure a vision of the spirit of Islam as emancipated from its Magian overlayings. (p.114) He says, far from reintegrating the forces of the average mans inner life and thus preparing him for participation in the march of history, this Muslim mysticism has taught man a false renunciation and made him perfectly contented with his ignorance and spiritual thralldom (or servitude). (pp.148-49) One cornerstone of Iqbals thought is his keen understanding of the profound significance of the supreme idea of finality of prophethood looked at from the view point of religious and cultural growth of man in history and also looked at from the viewpoint of mans achieving full self-consciousness as bearer of the Divine promise of a complete subjugation of all this immensity of space and time. Iqbal assumes this idea of the finality of prophethood to be a psychological cure for the Magian attitude of constant expectation. He says with the revelation of this idea of finality, one of the greatest that dawned upon the prophetic consciousness, all personal authority claiming a supernatural origin came to an end in this history of man.(p.101) He tells us that the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Quran and the emphasis that it lays on nature and history as sources of human knowledges are different aspects of the same idea of finality. Iqbal asserts that the birth of Islam is the birth of inductive intellect. (p. 101)