Muhammad Iqbal

Sir Muhammad Iqbal lived from November 9, 1877 to April 21, 1938 and was an Islamic philosopher and poet born in Sialkot in British India, in what is now Pakistan, honored with the title Allamah, the learned one, and counted among the most important Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. His central philosophical work, the lecture series The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, published in 1930, examined Islam's role as both a religion and a political and legal philosophy suited to the modern era. He wrote roughly 12,000 verses of poetry, about 7,000 of them in Persian, including Asrar-i-Khudi, Secrets of the Self, in 1915 and Rumuz-i-Bekhudi, Hints of Selflessness, in 1917, alongside Urdu works such as Bang-e-Dara, The Call of the Marching Bell, in 1924 and Bal-e-Jibril, Wings of Gabriel, in 1935. His 1930 Allahabad Address set out the idea of separate Muslim majority states in northwestern India, shaping the two nation theory that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, and his intellectual vision significantly influenced the Pakistan Movement.