Muji

He was dying when he wrote the letters. Throat infection. Kidney disease. Heart failure. He had lost his voice. He wrote to Jinnah anyway. Come back from London. Lead the Muslim League. There is no one else. Jinnah came back. Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Sialkot. Born November 9, 1877. Son of a tailor. Grandson of a Kashmiri shawl trader. Lower-middle class family in Kashmiri Mohalla, Sialkot. His father Sheikh Noor Muhammad could not read. But he told his young son one thing while he watched him read the Quran. Read it as if it is being revealed directly unto you. Iqbal never forgot it. Scotch Mission High School, Sialkot. Government College Lahore. First class. Top rank in Punjab University. Then Cambridge. Trinity College. Then Lincoln's Inn. Called to the Bar in 1908. Then Munich. Ludwig Maximilian University. PhD in Philosophy. Dissertation: The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. He came home a barrister, a philosopher, and a poet. He had left for Europe as an Indian nationalist. He returned as something else entirely. What he saw in Europe changed him. Western civilization was technically brilliant and morally hollow. Secular nationalism would swallow minorities whole. The Muslim could not survive inside it without his own ground to stand on. 1915. Asrar-i-Khudi. Secrets of the Self. In Persian. The most important philosophical poem written in South Asia in the 20th century. Khudi. Selfhood. Dynamic personal agency. The opposite of passive resignation. He told Muslims to rise. 1930. Allahabad. President of the All-India Muslim League session. He stood before the assembly and said what no one had said directly before. I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. That sentence. In that room. In 1930. Is where Pakistan was first spoken aloud. Jinnah was in London in semi-retirement when Iqbal began writing to him in 1936. Letter after letter. Urgent. Clear. A separate federation of Muslim provinces is the only course. Why should not the Muslims of North-West India be considered as nations entitled to self-determination. He was on his sickbed writing these letters. Voice gone. Body failing. Jinnah came home in 1934. The Muslim League was reorganised. The Lahore Resolution was passed in 1940. Pakistan came in 1947. Iqbal died on April 21, 1938. Nine years before the country he had imagined existed. 70,000 people attended his funeral at the Badshahi Mosque. He is buried outside its entrance. In the city he never left. Jinnah said after his death: He was a friend, guide and philosopher, and during the darkest moments through which the Muslim League had to go, he stood like a rock. A tailor's son from Sialkot. Knighted by King George V in 1923. Buried at the gate of the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore. Poet of the East. Thinker of Pakistan. Physician of the Ummah. He did not live to see what he had built. Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Pakistan Zindabad. 🇵🇰