The great works

The two decades after Asrar-e-Khudi were Iqbal's great creative period, and the output was extraordinary in both volume and range. He wrote in Persian and Urdu, and his philosophy in English, moving between the languages as the thought required.

In 1918 he followed Asrar-e-Khudi with Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, 'The Mysteries of Selflessness,' which carried the argument from the individual to the community — the self completed not in isolation but within a living society. In 1923 came Payam-e-Mashriq, 'The Message of the East,' written explicitly as a reply to Goethe: the East now reaching back toward the West, poet to poet, a century after the West-Eastern Divan.

His Urdu masterworks belong to these years too. Bang-e-Dara, 'The Call of the Marching Bell,' appeared in 1924, gathering his Urdu poetry — including the early composite-India verse — into one volume. Bal-e-Jibril, 'Gabriel's Wing,' followed in 1935 and is often considered the summit of his Urdu poetry; Zarb-e-Kalim, 'The Blow of Moses,' came in 1936, sharper and more polemical, a declaration of war on the age.

Iqbal also turned to prose. Between 1928 and 1932 he delivered and published, in English, the lectures collected as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam — an attempt to rethink Islamic philosophy in dialogue with modern science and modern thinkers such as Henri Bergson. It remains his central prose statement and is still studied in universities.

The crown of the period was the Javid Nama (1932), a Persian poem of a journey through the heavens. Modelled in spirit on Dante, it sends Iqbal on an ascent through the planets and spheres — and the guide who leads him, as Virgil leads Dante, is the 13th-century poet Rumi, whom Iqbal called his master across six centuries. Named for his son Javid, it is widely regarded as his masterpiece.

Through every one of these books ran the same emblems and convictions: Khudi, the fortified self; ishq, love as the engine of life; the Shaheen, the falcon, soaring and self-reliant and refusing soft comfort; and motion always preferred to stillness. By 1936 Iqbal had built one of the most coherent bodies of work in modern letters.