Ishq aur Maut — 'Love and Death' — is one of Iqbal's earliest allegorical poems, written around the turn of the century and placed near the opening of Bang-e-Dara. It imagines a scene at the very beginning of the world, when creation was new and its great forces were still being assigned their roles.
The poem personifies two of those forces: Love and Death. They appear almost as characters in a myth — Love radiant and warm, Death cold and certain of its power. The setting is cosmic and timeless; Iqbal is writing not about a particular event but about the permanent shape of things.
Death speaks with the confidence of a ruler. It surveys the new creation and assumes that everything within it will, in time, fall under its authority — that all life is simply matter awaiting its return to dust. Death's claim is the claim of pure physical reality: whatever is born will die.
But the poem gives the last word to Love. Love does not deny that bodies perish; it concedes that openly. What it denies is that this perishing is the whole story. Love claims a different territory — the realm of meaning, devotion, and the soul — and over that realm Death has no jurisdiction. What love builds, Iqbal suggests, belongs to an order that decay cannot reach.
The poem is an early statement of a conviction Iqbal would hold all his life: that the human being is not reducible to the body, and that the deepest things — love, faith, the awakened self — partake of permanence. Here, in mythic dress, is the seed of his later philosophy of Khudi, the indestructible self.
Formally Ishq aur Maut is built as a dramatic contrast, two voices set against each other, in the ornate and somewhat formal style of Iqbal's apprentice years. It is more declamatory than his mature work, but the central idea is already clear and firmly held.
Ishq aur Maut endures because it gives memorable shape to a hope most people carry — that love is stronger than death. Iqbal does not argue the point so much as stage it, and lets Love's quiet confidence answer Death's certainty.