Iqbal in Europe — Centenary International Conference

One hundred years after Iqbal was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn and returned from Europe to Lahore, the Academy marked the centenary of his European studies with an international conference held jointly with Iqbal Academy Pakistan and the Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia at SOAS.

The London day was hosted by the Chairman, Professor Saeed A. Durrani, and the Management Committee of Iqbal Academy (U.K.), with Mr Muhammad Suheyl Umar, Director of Iqbal Academy Pakistan. The theme was taken from the dissertation Iqbal submitted at Munich in 1907, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, and the papers followed him from Trinity College to Munich and to Lincoln's Inn — the three years that gave his later work its universalist character.

A second leg followed at Trinity College, Cambridge, Iqbal's own college, where the Academy had installed Gulgee's portrait of him in 1993. An exhibition of books and compact discs relating to Iqbal's poetry, philosophy and cognate fields ran alongside the London proceedings, and the Iqbal Medallion — struck at Lahore in 2007 with the calligraphy of Rasheed Butt, and funded by HE Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani in memory of his daughter — was awarded for the first time, by Dr Mai Yamani, on the London day.