Early Life of Allama Iqbal

divengrabber — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:15:32 +0000

Pakistan’s national poet Allama Iqbal, or Sir Muhammad Iqbal as he is often known, was born on November 9th 1897 in the town of Sialkot, which then resided in a province of British Indian which has subsequently become Pakistan. While the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan was in power over the country, Iqbal’s ancestors are said to have converted to Islam, which has been also been backed as an accurate estimation by scholars. However, biographer to Iqbal, Mustanir Mir, has suggested that the conversion may have taken place far earlier, up to 40 years before the Urdu poet was born. It was much later when the Kashmir region fell under the power of Sikh rule that Iqbal’s grandfather’s family emigrated to Punjab, according to another scholar, with Iqbal often writing about his status as the son of a Kashmiri-Brahman though being fully acquainted with the teachings of Tabriz and Rum.

His father, who was named Nur Muhammad, worked as a tailor and lacked any level of formal education, though was a tireless devotee to Islam and something of a mystical figure. His mother was known to be a generous and wise woman, often helping out the poor and needy while acting as mediator for neighbourhood disputes. One of the more famous works of Urdu poetry written by Iqbal is an elegy written for his mother following her death in 1914.

Iqbal attended the mosque from the age of four, which is where he learned to read the Qu’ran entirely in Arabic. He then became a long term student of Syed Mir Hass, who at the time was head of the Madrassa, later attaining fame as a noted Muslim scholar.

UrduArt is author of this article on Allama Iqbal. Find more information about Urdu.

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Early Life of Allama Iqbal