The enigma of Muhammad Iqbal

Pakistani daily the Dawn reviews Zafar Anjum’s Iqbal

In Pakistan, much of the national energies are spent to eulogize the great poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who is credited with being not only the poet of the East, but also the thinker who imagined, perhaps insufficiently, the birth of a new Muslim country from within undivided India.

Meanwhile in India, where Iqbal was born, lived and died while it was still a British colony without witnessing for himself the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the poet is now little-known save for one of the nationalistic poems he bequeathed to his love for Mother India, in his ‘nationalist’ phase, Saare Jahan say Achcha Hindustan Hamara.