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Thinkers

Muhammad Iqbal

Islamic · South Asia · 1877 to 1938

South Asian poet and thinker who held that the self grows stronger through creative action, and who urged a renewal of faith.

What it is

Muhammad Iqbal (1877 to 1938) was a poet and philosopher of British India. He was born in Sialkot, studied in Lahore, Cambridge and Munich, qualified as a barrister, and wrote poetry in Persian and Urdu. His Urdu verse is counted among the greatest of the twentieth century.

The self is a central theme of his thought, and he stressed self-affirmation and self-realisation. He was knighted and died in Lahore.

The main ideas

  • The self. In his Persian poem the Secrets of the Self he set out a theory of the self. Self-realisation and self-knowledge are the aim of life in his thought.
  • A vice-regent. The self passes through stages, and at the end of them a person can become a vice-regent of God.
  • Selflessness. The next long Persian poem, the Mysteries of Selflessness (1918), takes up the theme named in its title.
  • A shared life. He stressed service to the community and wrote to guide his fellow Muslims in British India. His vision for the Muslims of British India came to be linked with the idea of a separate state, which later became Pakistan.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone who has long waited for a push from outside to begin something important. A reader of Iqbal would ask what that person is doing to build up their own self, and would say that strength grows through effort and aim, and not through waiting. This is an illustration of his theme, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Secrets of the Self (Asrar-e Khudi) is a long Persian poem, published in 1915.
  • The Mysteries of Selflessness is a Persian poem of 1918.
  • Message of the East and Persian Psalms are further Persian volumes of the 1920s.
  • The Javid Nama is a Persian work of 1932.
  • Bang-e Dara is a collection of Urdu poetry, published in 1924.
  • His doctoral thesis, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, for his doctorate at Munich.

Questions and criticism

  • A borrowed idea? He knew the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is fair to ask how much his call for self-affirmation owes to him. The question of how much he owed to Europe is open.
  • Self and selflessness. It is fair to ask how a call to strengthen the self sits beside a call to give it up, and whether his two poems answer each other or pull apart.
  • Politics and poetry. His name is tied to a political outcome that people judge in very different ways. It is fair to ask how far a poet should be held to the later history made in his name.

Close neighbours

The page on Rumi sits closest, since Rumi appears in Iqbal's writing. The page on Nietzsche covers a German philosopher whose work Iqbal knew.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Friedrich Nietzsche · He engaged with Nietzsche's idea of the strong self, though he rejected his rejection of faith. (scholars disagree about this link)
  • Henri Bergson · He took up Bergson's view of time and creative change in his lectures on reconstruction of religious thought.
  • Jalal al-Din Rumi · He called Rumi his guide, and wrote a poem in which Rumi leads him through the heavens.
  • Jamal al-Din al-Afghani · Iqbal admired his call to renew Muslim thought and unite Muslim peoples. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Islamic thinkers

Sources we used

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