‘Poetic genius’: Allama Iqbal Lahori in the words of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei

By Humaira Ahad

While visiting any city across Iran, including the capital Tehran, one can frequently see streets, schools, or institutions named after the legendary Pakistani poet, Allama Dr. Muhammad Iqbal.

It testifies to his stupendous popularity in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Starting his literary journey in Urdu, Iqbal later turned to Persian, surprisingly publishing his magnum opus in the national language of the Islamic Republic, which is a Persian masterpiece.

Muhammad Iqbal, popularly known as Iqbal Lahori in Iran, is remembered as one of the greatest intellectuals of Islamic culture and civilization. 

Known as the “Poet of the East”, he is widely admired by literary aficionados in Iran. As a non-native Persian poet, he is especially revered by the intellectual class of the country.

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has described Iqbal as a “poetic genius”.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s association with Iqbal

Ayatollah Khamenei has often expressed his admiration for Iqbal in his speeches and writings. The Leader has also authored a book on the famous poet named “Iqbal: Manifestation of Islamic Spirit.”

“I have been a disciple of Iqbal for years now, Iqbal has inhabited my mind. I have lived emotionally in his company and am greatly indebted to him,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in one of his speeches on the South Asian poet and intellectual.

For Ayatollah Khamenei, Iqbal is far more than a poet or philosopher. Leader of the Islamic Revolution, who is a great admirer of arts and literature, considers him a reformer, revolutionary, and an unrelenting warrior.

“The other dimensions of his life are so bright that if we consider him to be just a philosopher and a scholar, I feel we have belittled him,” Leader said about the Pakistani poet-scholar.

At a conference in Tehran in the 1980s, Javed Iqbal, the son of Muhammad Iqbal expressed his amazement at Ayatollah Khamenei’s understanding of the renowned poet.

 “I was surprised when I found out that Ayatollah Khamenei had memorized about two thousand verses of Iqbal's poems. Even I, as the son of Iqbal, do not remember such a huge chunk of my father’s poetry,” the former judiciary chief of Pakistan was quoted as saying at an event to commemorate Iqbal.

Iqbal: The Eastern Wisdom

Allama Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal’s fascination with Iran

Iqbal admired Iran and Iranians for their refinement of manners, philosophical bent of mind, ancient civilization and pristine culture. In his collection of essays and articles, Maqaalaat-e-Iqbal, he observed that the most important event in the history of Islam was the conquest of Persia as it played a major role in the subsequent intellectual and cultural development of the religion.

“The conquest of Persia gave the Muslims what the conquest of Greece gave to the Romans; but for Persia, our culture would have been absolutely one-sided,” he wrote.

Iqbal longed to visit Iran but his wish never materialized. The then-Iranian monarch Reza Shah Pahlavi invited Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore to visit Iran but the famous Muslim Persian poet was ignored. Iqbal felt slighted. 

“The special situation of our country, especially the dominance of the evil policies of colonialism, caused Iqbal to never see Iran, and the same policies that Iqbal fought against, did not let the idea of ​​Iqbal, the way of Iqbal, and the teachings of Iqbal reach the people of Iran,” Ayatollah Khamenei writes in his book on Iqbal.

However, Iqbal’s love and a soft spot for Iran is reflected in his illuminating poetry. In one of his famous Persian poems dedicated to the youth of Iran, the poet writes:

I am burning like a tulip's lamp on your path,
O youth of Iran, I swear by my own life and yours.

The man is coming who shall break the chains of the slaves,
I have seen him through the cracks in the walls of your prison.

Zabur-e-Ajam (Persian Psalms)

“Iqbal belongs to this nation and this country. It was for this reason that he turned his attention to Iran so that the flame that was burning inside his heart could be converted into a bright blaze in Iran. He was waiting for a miracle to occur here,” Ayatollah Khamenei writes about Iqbal’s love for Iran.

Iqbal’s works also served as a source of inspiration for Iranian youth during the 1979 Islamic revolution, when they toppled the West-backed despotic regime.

Renowned Iranian sociologist and scholar, Dr. Ali Shariati played a key role in popularizing Iqbal in Iran.

“Shariati heavily quoted Iqbal in his lectures at Hosseniyeh-e-Ershad, a religious center that became the epicenter of revolutionary activity during the 1970s. Iqbal’s evocative and moving Persian elegy for Imam Hussein (AS) also adorned the walls and pillars of Hosseniyeh-e-Ershad,” Keywan Iranzadeh, a scholar of Iranian history and a student of the Urdu language, told the Press TV website.

According to Ayatollah Khamenei, the philosopher-poet emphasized that conviction to the “Quran and Islam are to be made the basis of all revolutions and movements and Iran was exactly following the path that was shown to us by Iqbal."

A noted expert on Iqbal’s works, Professor Sayed Habib Rezavi, who has written several books on the Pakistani poet spoke about the poet’s association with Iran in a conversation with the Press TV website.

Prof Rezavi, who is based in Indian-administered Kashmir, said, Iqbal wanted Hussain’s (AS) martyrdom to be the summum bonum of his spiritual poetry, and also of freedom from ecclesiastical bounds that had gripped Islam to kill its creative spirit due to greed and lust for worldly possessions and power.

“Driven by the libertine mystic passion he sought the falcon’s spirit flying over the never-ending heights of perfection. His source of perfection was the House of the Prophet (peace be upon him) which later took the symbolic form of Madina and Najaf in his poetic thought,” he stated about Iqbal.

Experts believe that Iran’s policy based on the principle of “Neither the East nor the West” conforms with what Iqbal advocated and wished to pursue. The country’s self-reliance doctrine is identical to Iqbal's political and spiritual views.

In one of his lectures, Leader of the Islamic Revolution mentioned that Iqbal would have found contentment in seeing the progress of Iran after the Islamic Revolution.

“Had he been alive today, he would have seen a nation standing on its feet, infused with the rich Islamic spirit and drawing upon the inexhaustible reservoirs of Islamic heritage, a nation that has become self-sufficient and has discarded all the glittering western ornaments and is marching ahead courageously, determining its targets and moving to attain them, advancing with the frenzy of a lover, and has not imprisoned itself within the walls of nationalism and racialism,” he said.

In one of his famous and often-quoted verses, Iqbal writes:

If Tehran could become the Geneva of the Orient

The fortunes of this world might change

(Jamiyat-e-Aqwam or League of Nations)

Iranzadeh says Iqbal was prophetic in seeing Tehran as the “Geneva of the Muslim world.”

“The only country that is fighting against imperialism in the world is Iran. We are using all our resources to fight hegemony and oppression. Iqbal saw the spirit of uprightness in Iran,” he told the Press TV website.

Iqbal’s Poetic Genius in Ayatollah Khamenei’s words

Although the language of Hind is sweet as sugar

Yet sweeter is the fashion of Persian speech

My mind was enchanted by its loveliness

My pen became a twig of the Burning Bush

Because of the loftiness of my thoughts

Persian alone is suitable for them

(Asraar e Khudi or Secrets of the Self)

Iqbal has been reckoned among the greatest poets of the Persian language in the subcontinent. His revolutionary poetry during the early decades of the twentieth century when the subcontinent was under the control of the British provided impetus and motivated Muslims to rise against foreign rule.

For Ayatollah Khamenei, Iqbal's Persian works remain one of the miracles of poetry. Leader regards Iqbal’s poetic themes and their renderings as sublime, requiring extraordinary genius to be composed in a language that is not the poet’s mother tongue.

“There are a large number of non‑Persian speaking poets in the history of our literature, but none of them reaches the excellence of Iqbal's Persian poetry,” he notes.

Born into a Punjabi-speaking family, Persian was a foreign language for the Pakistani poet.

Iqbal studies experts are of the opinion that choosing the Persian language as a medium for literary expression was a conscious decision taken by the great philosopher-poet.

He believed that Persian was the only language through which he could effectively express his ideas.

“Iqbal once chose to give up writing verse. But his teacher, Professor Arnold, feared this would deprive humankind of Iqbal’s unique universal poetry. He agreed to continue but with a different medium, Persian, as Urdu didn’t bear the burden of his mature thought,” Prof Rezavi told the Press TV website.

“Tremendous changes had occurred in his philosophical speculations and religious thought which he wanted to reconstruct. He knew that the Persian language has seen many great Persian poets, philosophers, religious thinkers and scholars of diverse disciplines. Thus, he desired to make his thought a meeting place of the East and the West as of classical traditions and modernity.”

In “Iqbal: Manifestation of Islamic Spirit,” Ayatollah Khamenei writes about the poet’s great mastery in casting the most delicate, the subtlest and radically new philosophical themes into the mold of Persian poetry, some of which are still unsurpassable.

“Reading the prefatory note to Iqbal’s Mathnawi, ‘Rumuz‑e Bikhudi' (The Secrets of the Selflessness) and ‘Asrar‑e Khudi’ (The Secrets of the Self), it can be found that even the Persian-speaking people are hardly able to understand it,” states Ayatollah Khamenei in the book.

Awareness of ‘Self’, a binding force for Muslims

The motif of Iqbal’s poetry is “self” (khudi) or “ego”. He urges his readers to discover their individuality through contemplation, introspection, self-cognition, and self-realization.

According to Ayatollah Khamenei, “self” was first conceived by Iqbal as a sociological and revolutionary notion.

“Iqbal considers love and passion essential for human society. Man has the capability of strengthening his ‘self’, which in turn strengthens the ‘social ego’. Iqbal believes that the ‘ego’ of an individual and the society cannot be strengthened without love,” Leader said at a conference on Iqbal in the late 1980s.

Through his poetry, Iqbal shows how love is the basic force that empowers man and lifts him from his frail position to a state where he becomes the center of the Universe.

His verses focus on the love of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) as the essence of true love, and this love guides weak undirected egos, and helps them to find clues that could connect them with the Ultimate Ego.

Iqbal expresses his intense love for Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He considers the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) as a non-duplicable exemplar of being the beholder of the deepest meaning of “self”.

“Remarkably, he determines the Prophet of Islam (PBUH)as an object of love, a point around which the Muslim Ummah has to rally. His desire to see Muslims united led him to believe that the love of the Prophet Muhammad al‑Mustafa (PBUH) was the only passion that could motivate and rally the Muslim Ummah around a new consciousness,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in one of his lectures on Iqbal.

We belong to the Hijaz and China and Persia

Yet we are the dew of one smiling dawn

We are all under the spell of the eye of the

cup-bearer from Makkah

We are united as wine and cup

(Asrar-e- Khudi, The Secrets of the Self)

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