Friendships, rivalries, and the wider world

No large mind grows in isolation, and Iqbal's was unusually crowded with company — some of it living, much of it drawn from across centuries and continents. To read him well is to know the minds he kept beside his own.

Above all stood Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet of love, dead more than six hundred years before Iqbal was born. Iqbal called him Pir-e-Rumi, Rumi the master, and treated him not as a historical figure but as a living teacher to be answered. In the Javid Nama it is Rumi who leads him through the heavens. From Rumi he took the primacy of ishq, love as the engine of the self.

Among the moderns, Goethe was a kindred spirit and Nietzsche a brilliant adversary. Iqbal admired Goethe's restlessness and answered him directly in Payam-e-Mashriq. Nietzsche he judged with a memorable, exact generosity — a man with the heart of a believer and the mind of an unbeliever, who saw that the modern world was sick but, having lost God, had no medicine. Iqbal took the diagnosis and refused the despair.

Closer to home stood Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1913. The two were the towering poet-thinkers of modern South Asia, and they answered the same age in opposite keys — Tagore universalist and contemplative, Iqbal dynamic and assertive. They are best read as a pair, each a foil that completes the other.

Iqbal also had real friendships and working relationships in the political world. He corresponded with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and, in his last years, urged the younger man to return to Indian politics and take up the leadership of the Muslim League — a quiet act of encouragement whose consequences would outlast them both. He kept friendships across community lines as well, the human echo of the composite-India poems of his youth.

The pattern across all of it is the same. Iqbal learned from everyone and was overawed by no one. He could call a 13th-century Persian his master and a celebrated European his adversary in the same book. That posture — open, critical, unintimidated — is itself one of the things a reader can take from him.