Muhammad Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal was born at Sialkot in the Punjab in 1877 and studied at Lahore and Cambridge, then took a doctorate at Munich with a thesis on the development of metaphysics in Persia. He practised law at Lahore, taught philosophy, and became the leading Muslim poet and thinker of India in his day; he is honoured in Pakistan as its national poet. He died at Lahore in 1938.

Although he wrote in Urdu as well, Iqbal chose Persian for his first long poem, Asrar-i Khudi (1915), so that it might reach Muslims well beyond India; Persian was the literary language of the wider Islamic world, and the poem follows the Persian masnavi tradition of the rhymed narrative poem. The work in this archive is Reynold A. Nicholson's English translation of 1920, so what is read here is English verse rendered from the Persian.