Iqbal on Women

Iqbal wrote about women in terms of striking reverence. In one well-known verse he says it is the existence of woman that gives the picture of the universe its colour — that from her comes the very inner warmth of life.

Like much in Iqbal, his thought here belongs to its time and is best read honestly rather than either dismissed or oversold: his framing often centres the mother and the shaper of the next generation. A modern reader can take the deep respect and the recognition of woman as central to life's meaning, while reading the period-bound parts as exactly that.

What is worth keeping is unambiguous and large: Iqbal did not treat woman as marginal to the human story. He treated her as the source of its warmth and its continuity — the colour in the picture, without which the whole canvas goes grey.