The Sun

Aftab — 'The Sun' — is one of the most remarkable poems of Iqbal's early period, and one of the clearest signs of how wide his early imagination ranged. It is Iqbal's Urdu rendering of the Gayatri Mantra, the ancient Sanskrit verse of the Rigveda addressed to the light of the sun, and among the most sacred utterances in the Hindu tradition.

That fact alone makes the poem extraordinary. Here is a Muslim poet, early in the twentieth century, taking the most revered prayer of another faith and re-creating it, with evident reverence, in his own language. Iqbal does not translate it word for word; he re-imagines its spirit as a hymn in Urdu, an ode addressed directly to the sun.

The poem speaks to the sun as the life and soul of the world — the force that binds together the great book of creation, the order behind space and time. Iqbal keeps the original's posture of awe and dependence: the human being stands small before this radiance and asks it for something.

What the poem asks for is light of a particular kind — not merely warmth or daylight, but the light of understanding. Iqbal prays that the sun's brilliance illumine the inner eye, that its radiance give wisdom to the mind. The physical sun becomes an image of the source of all true knowledge.

Aftab belongs unmistakably to the young, pluralist Iqbal — the same poet who wrote that religion does not teach mutual enmity, and who imagined a temple with no walls. It is concrete evidence that, whatever his later thought became, he began as a poet at home across the subcontinent's many traditions.

Formally the poem is a flowing ode, rich in light-imagery, and it shows Iqbal already able to take an inherited sacred form and make it sing in a new language. It sits in Bang-e-Dara among his other early nature poems, and it is one of the quiet treasures of that collection.

Aftab endures partly for its beauty and partly for what it represents: a poet honouring the scripture of a faith not his own. In an age that often sets traditions against one another, a Muslim poet's loving rendering of the Gayatri Mantra remains a striking, hopeful fact.