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DR. MUHAMMAD IQBAL
Dr. Iqbal's forefathers were originally Kashmiri Brahmins who later on became Muslims and settled permanently in Sialkot. He was born in Sialkot on the 22nd February, 1873. Though his father was not so educated, but he had a great desire to see his son properly educated.
He received his early education in Sialkot. After passing his M.A., he became a lecturer in philosophy in the Government College, Lahore. He then proceed to England for higher studies in 1905. He obtained the degree of Bar-at-Law from the Cambridge University. He also prepared a thesis on Persian Philosophy which earned him Doctorate from the Cambridge and the Munich Universities.
He returned to India and join the bar, but could not do well. This was because of the fact that at heart he was a man of letters and not of law. The poet in him who had been nourished and nurtured from his boyhood days took the better of the lawyer in him, and he turned his attention to poetry which had been, as it were, his life blood. He was a poet and philosopher combined and the ideas conveyed through his BANG-E-DARA, BALE-JIBREEL, ISRAR-E-KHUDI, PAYAM-E-MASHRIQUE and a host of others were new and very appealing. Through his thoughtful and philosophical writing imbued with the spirit of Islam, he brought a new life to the Muslims of India and opened their eyes to what they then were and what they could be. His poetic fervor inspired the Muslims from one end of India to the other with a new life, new feelings and new inspirations.
He was a poetic reformer and as such, he could not but take interest in the politics of the day to safeguard the interests of Muslims. He was the member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly and attended the Round Table Conference in London. He gave the idea of a separate Muslim state in South Asia. He is generally credited with initiating the idea of separation.But this is not wholly correct. There were people before him who advocated partition of India, but Dr. Iqbal was the first important public figure to pronounce it from the plat-form of all India Muslim League in 1930.
Dr. Iqbal breathed his last in Lahore on the 21st of April, 1938, at the age of sixty five. His dream of a separate homeland for the Muslims could not be fulfilled during his life-time, it materialized only nine years after his death.
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