FW: OBITUARY OF ALLAMA IQBAL ...THE LONDON TIMES APRIL 22, 1938

 

 

 

 

OBITUARY OF ALLAMA IQBAL ...THE LONDON TIMES APRIL 22, 1938

 

SIR MUHAMMAD IQBAL

THE POET OF ISLAM

The Times, London, Friday 22 April 1938

Sir Muhammad Iqbal, of Lahore, whose death at the age of 62 is
 announced by a Reuter message from Lahore, was the greatest Urdu and
 Persian poet of his day, and his reputation in the West might have
 been comparable to that of his great Indian contemporary Tagore had
 translations of his work into English been more frequent. He exercised
 an enormous influence on Islamic thought, and was an eloquent
 supporter of the rights and interests of his fellow Indian Muslims.

Iqbal was greatly influenced as a student at Lahore University by that
 ripe Islamic scholar Sir Thomas Arnold, and for seven years he was
 Professor of Philosophy at the Government College Lahore.

He went to Cambridge in 1905 and read Western philosophy at Trinity
 College, under the direction of the late Dr. McTaggart, for the
 Philosophical Tripos, in which he obtained his degree by research
 work. In J908 he was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn and did some
 practice in Lahore. The Munich University conferred on him the Ph.D.
for a dissertation on the development of metaphysics in Persia. He
 developed a philosophy of his own, which owed much to Nietzsche and
 Bergson, while his poetry often reminded the reader of Shelley. The
 Asrar-i-Khudi ("Secrets of the Self"), published in Lahore in 1915,
 while giving no systematic account of his philosophy, put his ideas in
 a popular and attractive form. Professor R. A. Nicholson, of
 Cambridge, was so impressed by it that he obtained the leave of the poet to translate it into English, and the rendering was published in 1920.

Western readers found him to be an apostle. if not to his own age,
 then to posterity, and after the Persian fashion he invoked the Saki
 to fill his cup with wine and pour moonbeams into the dark night of
 his thought. He was an Islamic enthusiast, inspired by the vision of a
New Mecca, a world-wide, theocratic, Utopian State in which all
 Muslims, no longer divided by the barriers of race and country, should
 he one. His ideal was a free and independent Moslem fraternity, having
 the Ka’aba as its centre and knit together by love of Allah and
 devotion to the Prophet. In his Rumuz-e-Bekhudi ("The Mysteries of
 Selflessness ") (1916) he dealt with the Iife of the Islamic community
 on those lines, and he allied the cry "Back to the Koran" with the
revolutionary force of Western philosophy, which he hoped and believed
would vitalize the movement and ensure its triumph. He, felt that
 Hindu intellectualism and Islamic pantheism had destroyed the capacity
for action based on scientific observation and interpretation of
 phenomena which distinguished the Western peoples and "especially the
 English". But he was severely critical of Western life and thought on
the ground of its materialism. Holding that the full development of
 the individual presupposes a society, he found the ideal society in
 what he considered to be the Prophet's conception of Islam. In 1923 he
 published Piyam-i-Mashriq ("The Message of the East") and addressed
 the modern world at large in reply to Goethe's homage to the genius of
 the East. Two years later came Bang-i-Dira ("The Call to March"), a
 collection of his Urdu poems written during the first 20 years of the century. This was followed by a new Persian volume of which the title stood for "Songs of a Modern David."

A poet with his gifts and his theme could not fail to influence
 thought in an India so politically minded as that of our day. He took
 some part in provincial politics being a member of the Punjab
 Legislature in 1925-28. He was on the British Indian delegation to the
 second session of the Round Table Conference in London in 1931. His
 authority was cited, not without some justification, for a theory of
 Islamic political solidarity in Northern India which might conceivably
 be extended to adjacent Moslem States. In 1930 he publicly advocated
 the formation of a North-West Indian Moslem State by the merging of
 the Moslem Provinces within the proposed All-India Federation. But his
 real interests were religious rather than political. A notable work
 published in 1934 reproduced a series of lectures by the poet on
 â€œThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam." Therein he
 sought to reconcile the carrying out of modern reforms, as in Turkey,
 with the claims of the Shari’at. The lectures went to show "that
 soundness and exactitude of historical judgment were not his special
 endowment. The fact was that in maturity as in youth he sought to
 reconcile the most recent of Western philosophical systems, into which
 he gathered the latest scientific conclusions, with the teaching of
 the Koran. Like his earlier work the book was marked by penetrating and noble thought, though the connexion of his argument was somewhat obscure.

He was knighted in 1923, and the Punjab University made him an
 honorary D.Litt. in 1933. He was elected Rhodes Memorial Lecturer at
Oxford University for 1935. For a long time he had been in indifferent
 health, and he became increasingly dreamy and mystical.