The Poet-Philosopher, Iqbal

In 1905, at the age of twenty-seven, Iqbal travelled to Europe for what became three formative years of study. He undertook graduate study at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking a BA with Honours in 1907; he took a doctorate at Munich with a dissertation on The Development of Metaphysics in Persia; and he was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, London, in July 1908. He returned to Lahore that year to practise law, though his true calling remained poetry and philosophy.

These three years were the decisive turning point of his life, and they are the reason the Academy's work is rooted in Britain. Unlike many Westernised Muslims of his generation, exposure to European thought did not push Iqbal to reject his own tradition. It gave him the instruments with which to re-examine that tradition constructively — and to subject modern Western thought to precisely the same critical scrutiny.

In December 1930 he delivered his celebrated presidential address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad, articulating for the first time the idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of India. He represented India at the Round Table Conferences in London in 1931 and 1932, travelling widely across Europe and the Middle East, and died on 21 April 1938.

Iqbal remained in intellectual dialogue with his Cambridge supervisor, the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, long after he had left England, and drew freely on Bergson, Whitehead, William James and Dewey. He fused these with the Muslim tradition of Rumi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn 'Arabi and al-Shatibi, and the result was The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam — an attempt to think the inherited tradition through again, from the beginning, in the language of modern philosophy.

He admired Western science and technology, and condemned the imperialism, exploitation and moral emptiness he saw accompanying them. He admired the inner spiritual and intellectual heritage of the East, and criticised its complacency and its imitation of the West, urging it instead to look within. His resolution of the two was neither surrender nor retreat: the East, which has love, and the West, which has intellect, should combine to build a new world order — what he called an amalgam of love and intellect.

As early as the twelfth century Al Ghazali had written of the poetic and musical heritage that enriched the Islamic tradition. Kafi and qawwali represent that same Sufi mission of bringing different religions and cultures together through music. Amir Khusrau, at the court of Sultan Alauddin Khilji of Delhi (1296–1316), was the genius through whom this form of singing really developed and flowered: born to a Hindu mother and a Muslim Turkish father, he worked at the synthesis of Hindu and Muslim cultures, mixing Indian, Persian and Turkish musical modes into distinct mystical forms in which music is recognised as a means of attaining spirituality. It is in this tradition that Iqbal's own verse is still sung.