Aaftab

The sun; sunshine, radiance.

Literally: Persian aftab: the sun.

The aaftab is the sun — the supreme source of light and heat, classically the dazzling face of the beloved and the centre that gives the moon and stars their borrowed glow, the lamp of the whole sky. Unlike the moon's reflected light, the sun shines with its own fire. Iqbal exalts the sun as an emblem of self-made radiance and of greatness that gives rather than borrows; the awakened self is summoned to be a sun, a source of its own light, not a moon dependent on another's.