IQBAL: A PROFILE by MERVYN M. KEIZER & NASEEM SAHIBZADA

On November 9, 1877- the year in which Disraeli as prime minister carried through an act in the British

Parliament proclaiming Victoria Queen Empress of IndiaMuhammad Iqbal was born at Sialkot, a border

town of the Punjab, a few miles from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was no whim that had prompted

Iqbals grandfather, Shaikh Rafiq, to migrate to Sialkot from his ancestral village of Looehar in Kashmir about

twenty years earlier. His was one of several Kashmiri families that had uprooted themselves in the period

following the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, an arrangement which placed Kashmir in the hands of the Hindu Dogras,

whose oppressively policy forced a Muslim exodus. We may be certain that when Iqbal, at a later date,

contemplated the vast panorama of Indian history, the circumstances attending this transplantation would

have made the deepest of impressions.

By the standards of his environment, Iqbal had a comfortable childhood. The familys social

and economic status had been somewhat enhanced since their arrival from Looehar. While Iqbals grandfather

had been a peddler of Kashmiri shawls, his father Shaikh Nur Muhammad, became moderately successful as a

tailor, and embroiderer, and later, as the owner of a small millinery, an enterprise which folded in Nur

Muhammads old age. This modest, albeit temporary business success may, however, have produced a more

enduring result: it may have facilitated the marriage of Iqbals oldest brother, Shaikh Ata Muhammad, to the

daughter of a retired soldier of the British Indian Army, a circumstance which, in the words of two Iqbal

scholars, raised the social status of the family from a working-class to a middle-class position.1

Although Queen Victoria, in her 1858 Royal Proclamation, had pledged, inter alia, that Britain

would not impose Western convictions upon the Indian people, by 1885 an educational system was established

whose overt aim was the extension of European knowledge among all classes in India. In 1893, the year

following his graduation from secondary school, Iqbal entered the Scotch Mission College, a recently established

institution for the spread of Western culture, which, to its credit, also offered some courses in Arabic and

Persian.

He spent two years at the Scotch Mission College, taking courses in the liberal arts, and more

importantly, attending the discourse of Sayyid Mir Hasan, a professor of Oriental literature at the college. Thus

he was both steeping himself in Islamic studies and theology, and refining his taste and feeling for Persian and

Arabic poetry. His classical Urdu poetry was facilitated by contact with, and won the approval of Nawab Mirza

Khan Dagh, a master of that genre.

In 1895, Iqbal entered the Government College in Lahore, from which he graduated with honours in

1897. These two years were spent in the further study of Arabic and in intensive work I the disciplines of English

literature and philosophy. These two approaches to life, the imaginative and the abstract, exercised a powerful

hold on his acute and imaginative and the abstract, exercised a powerful hold on his acute and sensitive mind,

and foreshadowed the unique contribution he was to make to the theoretical and practical affairs of the Indian

subcontinent.

To Iqbal, in retrospect, the years 1899 to 1905 must have seemed the most trying and taxing and

frustrating of his entire career. Iqbals biographers, however, must surely see these years as most seminal, and

formative, and rich in portents of the near and distant future.

First, these years saw the burgeoning of his poetic genius. His contributions to the poetical symposia of

Bhati Gate were widely applauded, as were his recitations at the annual sessions of Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam

of Lahore. Of greater significance was his enunciation in the poetry of these years of the themes of Indian unity

and self-determination, his affirmation of the legitimacy of Muslim aspirations, and his excoriation of those who

frustrated, in whatever way, the fulfillment of those aspirations.

The years 1899 to 1905 also represented a period of marked intellectual growth for Iqbal, influenced as

he was by Sir Thomas Arnold, professor of philosophy at the Government College in Lahore. Arnold contributed

significantly to Iqbals knowledge of modern philosophy, and also encouraged his young disciple to sojourn in

Europe in order to deepen his knowledge and understanding of Western Culture.

In these years also, Iqbal pondered the prospects of several careers. In 1899, his intellectual brilliance

and Arnolds influence won for him the position of Macleod-Punjab reader of Arabic at the University Oriental

College of Lahore. Intermittently between 1901 and 1904, he also taught English in Islamia College and at his

alma mater. He, however, was not one to undervalue his talents, and he must have felt keenly the limitations

imposed both by the nature of the academic career itself and by the social realities of the colonial India. Instead

of merely chafing against these arbitrary restrictions, Iqbal moved resolutely to deal with them. He had, as early

as 1897, begun the study of law, but his need to concentrate on his graduate work in philosophy resulted in his

failure at the preliminary examination in law. In 1899, his petition to retake the law examination without

repeating the schedule of lectures was denied, and this forced him to explore the feasibility of the civil service

position as an alternative to an academic or legal career. In pursuit of this objective, he applied to take

examination for the competitive position of extra assistant commissioner, but was excluded, at the eleventh

hour, for minor medical reasons.

These disappointments are important for a variety of reasons. First, they must have rendered

irreversible Iqbals decision to study in Europe. Secondly, as Hafeez and Lynda Malik have pointed out, Iqbal

must have felt that the built-in mechanism of the socio-political order of colonial India provided no outlet for

the fulfillment of his talents:2Thirdly, they must have added to and made virtually intolerable the burdens of

family life which Iqbal had had to shoulder as early as 1892, the years his parents married him to Karim Bibi. His

marriage in his fifteenth year, the birth of his first child in his eighteenth year, of his second in this twenty-

second year, and the birth and death of his third child in his twenty-fourth year, these happenings must have

age the young Iqbal prematurely, and the stresses which they engendered must have left a scar of sadness on his

soul. In 1903, the unfounded implication of his elder brother, Shaikh Ata Muhammad, in a criminal conspiracy

provoked from Iqbal two responses, one practical, the other poetic. His practical response was a memorandum

to Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, detailing the facts of his brothers case. The memorandum resulted in

prompt and favourable action. His poetic response was the ode Berg-i-Gul, in which he asked the saint,

Khawaja Nizam-ud Din Awliya, to intercede with Allah.

Buoyed by his rising reputation as a poet, frustrated by the social realities of his colonial society,

burdened with the weight of family problems, and seized with a passionate desire for knowledge, Iqbal left India

in 1905, bound for England and the European continent, his journey financed, to a considerable extent, by the

same older brother for whom he had pleaded with Curzon and with Allah.

The years 1905 to 1908 were characterized by a virtual explosion of intellectual activity of Iqbals part.

He studied at Lincolns Inn and qualified in 1908 as a barrister-at-law. He read philosophy and Persian literature

at Cambridge University and graduated in 1907 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.He submitted to Munich

University a doctoral dissertation, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, was awarded the doctorate in

1907, and published the work in London in 1908. In addition, he studied Philosophy and German at Heidelberg.

Every scrap of new knowledge was, of course, grist for Iqbals poetic and philosophic mill. What is of concern

also was the direction of his political thought. The Maliks argue cogently that Iqbal returned from Europe as

Muslim Nationalist, although, up to that time, he could be accurately described as a Nationalist Muslim.

Riffat Hassan, approaching the matter from the standpoint of the development of Iqbals poetical philosophy,

explains the change as the glimpse of a wider concept.3She puts the matter this way:

Earlier Iqbal had visualized a particular fulfillment of his universal vision of love and goodwill in a

unified India. It seems that now he had begun to realize that unity, in order to be real and lasting,

must spring from within; that is, it must be organic. . .In search for a group with an inner cohesion,

Iqbal began to concentrate more and more on the Muslims.4

While it is true that Iqbal was and remains for all time pre-eminently a poet and a philosopher, it is

necessary, in the interests of biographical clarity, to focus upon the practical uses to which he put his poetry and

philosophy. The years 1908 to 1938, looked at from this perspective, witness the emergence of Iqbal the political

theorist. This emergence represents no conscious decision on his part; it is rather the natural and direct result of

centrality of political questions in the period before, during, and after World War I, and in the two decades

which precede World War II. It is not that man, in India, has become, in the Aristotelian sense, a political

animal, for that is a liberating conception; it is rather than foreign occupation and alien domination always

make political questions and human questions virtually interchangeable.

As might be expected, Iqbal, on his return to India in 1908, pursued the three careers for which he had

trained himself so well on his European sojourn. He resumed, for the briefest periods, his assistant professorship

at the Government College in Lahore. Henceforth he earned his living as practicing lawyer and practicing poet,

scrupulously rationing the time and energy devoted to the law, and in this way buying the leisure needed for

poetic composition. However much the law suffered, poetry benefited, and it is to this period that belong Iqbals

poetical masterworks5 and his lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.This

husbanding of his energy and channeling of his intellectual resources did him good service. Without it, he would

never have been able to form that habit of reflection and that feeling for the tradition of Islam and its vital

destiny which undergirded his poetical and philosophical and political thinking. He formed a calm and

considered idea of the conditions imposed on Islam by its history and in particular by its continuity. He grasped

the fact that Islamic history was a series of accumulations in which the later stages did not obliterate the earlier

but completed them. He came to see the Islamic past as a complex of institutions, customs, and memories,

worthy to be preserved or restored because and in so far as they served the needs of the day. Thus, in 1926, when

he became a member of the Punjab Legislative Council, he as well on the way, intellectually and intuitively,

towards the crafting of those ideological formulations of Muslim nationalism that led inexorably, temporary

aberrations and deviations, notwithstanding to the emergence of Pakistan.

The turmoil of his personal life would have hindered destinys course in the case of a lesser man. His

marriage to Mukhtar Begum in 1909 and her death in 1924; his marrriage6to Sardar Begum in 1913 and her death

in 1935, the death of his eldest child in 1914 and of his mother the following year, his separation from his first wife

in 1916, the birth of a son in 1924, and of a daughter in 1930, these historical anchors of existencebirth,

marriage, deathwere dropped into the most turbulent political waters.

The fundamental political question of Indian self-determination was now complicated by the rising call

for the preservation of separate Hindu and Muslim national entities. Iqbal participated in 1928/29 All-Parties

Muslim Conference, and although he was not invited to the first Round Table Conference held in London in

1930, he was included in the Muslim delegation to the second Round Table Conference in 1931, and to the third in

1932. To evaluate Iqbals decisive contribution to the history of these critical years---1929 to 1934one fact must

be borne in mind: not until 1934 did the ideology of separation cease to be alien to Jinnahs thinking. As

Malik points out, . . . Iqbal provided the ideological leadership, spearheading the Muslims demand for a

separate Muslim state.7Iqbals 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad, and his 1932

address to the annual session of All-India Muslim Conference at Lahore are the definite statements of his

growing conviction, stated in his 1936/37 correspondence to Jinnah, that the enforcement and development of

the Shariat of Islam were impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states,8 and that a

separate federation of Muslim provinces. . . was the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and

save Muslims from the domination of non-Muslims.9

Although Iqbal died on April 21, 1938 at Lahore, nine years before the partition of India and the

independence of Pakistan, the conspicuous role he played in the altering of the political face of the Indian

subcontinent is affirmed by no less an authority than Jinnah.10 It was Iqbals great service that he forced his

people to see that the complete recover of their identities as Muslim was, paradoxically, the distinctive

contribution they were to bring to the comity of nations. For that he is just revered.

(In: Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Iqbal Centennial Issue) December 1977, pp. 5-11)

Notes and References

1. Hafeez Malik and Lynda P. Malik, The Life of the Poet-Philosopher, in Hafeez Malik, ed., Iqbal:

Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan, (New York and London, 1971), p. 5

2. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

3. Riffat Hassan, The Development of Political philosophy, in Hafeez Malik, ed., Iqbal, p. 144.

4. Ibid., p. 144

5. Hafeez Malik, Selected Bibliography, in Iqbal, pp. 416-420.

6. Hafeez Malik and Lynda P. Malik, The Life of the Poet-Philosopher, in Hafeez Malik, ed., Iqbal, pp.

24-25.

7. Hafeez Malik, The Man of Thought and the Man of Action, in Hafeez Malik, ed., Iqbal, p. 90.

8. See Letters of Iqbal to Jinnah, cited in the Appendix of Hafeez Maliks Iqbal, pp. 385-386.

9. Ibid., p. 388.

10. Ibid., p. 383-385.

About The Writers:

Keizer, Mervyn M.; was Professor of Classics, Brooklyn College, City University of New York (in 1977).

Naseem Sahibzada; was Assistant Professor of English, University of the District of Columbia, and a member

of the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Advisory Editorial Board (in 1977).

(Source: IQBAL NEW DIMENSIONS (A Collection of Unpublished and Rare Iqbalian Studies). Compiled,

Annotated and Translated by M. Ikram Chaghatai).

Digitized by: www.mbilal-azam.blogspot.com

The End