The Answer to the Complaint

Jawab-e-Shikwa — 'The Answer to the Complaint' — is Iqbal's reply to his own earlier poem. Where Shikwa was a believer's grievance addressed up to God, this poem is the voice of God answering back down. Together the two form a single conversation, and the answer is what gives the pair its lasting power.

Iqbal wrote it in 1912 and recited it in 1913, again to a large gathering, with proceeds going to a charitable cause. If Shikwa had unsettled people, Jawab-e-Shikwa reassured them — not by softening the complaint but by reframing it entirely. The reply does not deny the decline. It relocates the cause.

The argument of the answer is direct and unsparing. You complain, the divine voice says, but look honestly at yourselves. You kept the name of faith and let go of its substance. You inherited a great inheritance and stopped doing the things that earned it. The stars have not changed; you have. Heaven's grace was never withdrawn — it was simply no longer being claimed by anyone willing to act.

Structurally it mirrors Shikwa line for line and metre for metre, which is part of its art: the same music that carried the grievance now carries the rebuttal. The poem moves from rebuke toward something gentler — a promise. The door is not closed. Become again the kind of people the earlier glory required, and the glory is yours again.

The single most quoted idea of the pair lives here: that the divine itself is bound to the awakened, striving self. Build a true selfhood, the answer says, and even heaven will ask you what you wish — the same conviction that runs through all of Iqbal's later philosophy of Khudi, stated here in the voice of God.

Jawab-e-Shikwa endures because it converts grievance into responsibility without contempt. It takes a community's pain seriously and then hands that community its agency back. The message reaches past any one faith: stop blaming the heavens for a stillness that is yours to end.