Biography of ‘Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal’
Allama Iqbal was the great poet-philosopher and active political leader born at Sialkot, Punjab, in 1877. He descended from a family of Kashmiri Brahmans, who had embraced Islam about 300 years earlier.
Allama Iqbal received his early education in the traditional Madarsa. Later he joined the Sialkot Mission School, from where he passed his matriculate examination. In 1897, he obtained his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Government College, Lahore. After two years, he secured his Master’s Degree and was appointed in the Oriental College, Lahore, as a lecturer of history, philosophy and English. He later proceeded to Europe for higher studies. Having obtained a degree from Cambridge, he secured his doctorate at Munich and finally qualified as a lawyer.
He returned to India in 1908. Besides teaching and practicing law, Iqbal continued to write poetry. He resigned from government service in 1911 and took up the task of propagating individual thinking among the Muslims through his poetry.
By 1928, his reputation as a great Muslim philosopher was firmly established and he was invited to deliver lectures at Hyderabad, Aligarh and Madras. These series of lectures were later published as a book “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”. In 1930, Iqbal was invited to preside over the open session of the Muslim League at Allahabad. In his historic Allahabad address, Iqbal visualised an independent and sovereign state for the Muslims of North-Western India. In 1932, Iqbal came to England as a Muslim delegate to the Third Round Table Conference. In later years, when the Quaid had left India and was residing in England, Allama Iqbal wrote to him conveying to him his personal views on political problems and state of affairs of the Indian Muslims, and also persuading him to come back. These letters are dated from June 1936 to November 1937. This series of correspondence is now a part of important historic documents concerning Pakistan’s struggle for freedom.
On April 21, 1938, the great Muslim poet-philosopher and champion of the Muslim cause, passed away. But he will always be present in readers’ heart due to his beautiful poetry. He lies buried next to the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore.
