Poets · a Light

A poet in Sialkot wrote in Persian to reach further

Muhammad Iqbal was born on 9 November 1877 in Sialkot, in what was then British India and is now Pakistan. He studied philosophy at Cambridge and took a doctorate at Munich on metaphysics in Persia, then practised law in Lahore while writing the poetry he is known for. He wrote much of it in Persian rather than Urdu, because Persian was still read from Istanbul to Delhi and he wanted the wider audience. His theme was self hood, khudi: that a person and a community come alive by taking responsibility rather than waiting. In 1930 he argued for a separate Muslim political unit in northwest India. He died in 1938, nine years before Pakistan existed.

Muhammad Iqbal · born 9 November 1877