Sir Muhammad Iqbal

Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) was a poet, philosopher and political thinker of British India. Born in Sialkot in the Punjab, he studied in Lahore, at Cambridge and at Munich, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy, and he practiced law in Lahore. Writing in Urdu and Persian, he called Muslims to self-realization and action, above all in The Secrets of the Self and The Message of the East, and he set out his thought in prose in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. His 1930 proposal of a Muslim state in northwest India made him a founding figure for Pakistan.