By the mid-1930s, his health had deteriorated so much that he had to decline to give a series of Rhodes lectures at Oxford in 1935. He dissociated himself from the idea of Pakistan as a country carved out of Muslim majority states of the Indian sub-continent. That same year, he gave evidence before the Simon Commission and in 1931-2 he was a delegate to the Second and Third Round Table Conferences, visiting London again. It is on the basis of these that he is know as the poet-philosopher of Pakistan.įrom 1926 to 1930 he served on the Punjab Legislative Council and was President of the All-India Muslim League in 1930. He continued to develop these ideas in his poetry for the rest of his life. In them he combined his ideas of the ego striving to achieve freedom and to develop a fuller personality with the moral, spiritual and intellectual values of Islam. His Persian masnavi sequence Asrar-i Khudi (1915 Secrets of the Self (1920)) and Rumuz-i Bekhudi (1918 'The Mysteries of Selflessness') were the foundation of Iqbal's philosophical poetry. Besides law he found time to develop his poetry in the 1920s, but he was also drawn into politics by his friends, Jogendra Singh, Zulfikar Ali Khan and Khawaja Shahabuddin. After a while, he resigned from the College and focused on law. In August 1908 he returned to Lahore where he joined the Government College as a part-time professor of philosophy and English literature while also practising as a lawyer in Lahore Chief Court. While in Europe, Iqbal became influenced by Kant, Bergson and especially Nietzsche. In London, he delivered a series of lectures his lecture at Caxton Hall was widely reported in the papers. He obtained his degree at Cambridge and went on to Munich University where he obtained a doctorate his thesis was entitled The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. He would once again work with Thomas Arnold when he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a student of Philosophy in 1905.

In 1903, he published a treatise on economics entitled Ilmul-Iqtesad, and in 1904 he wrote the Indian patriotic song Sare Jahan se Achccha Hindostan Hamara. He was educated at the Scotch Mission College, where he also took up poetry, and later, in 1895, at Government College, Lahore, where he would come into contact with Sir Thomas Arnold. Mohammad Iqbal was born in 1877 in Sialkot, Punjab, to father Sheikh Nuruddin Mohammad, a tailor by profession and of Kashmiri background, and mother Imam Bibi.

Muhammad iqbal poems