Address to the Youth

Khitab Ba Jawanan-e-Islam — 'Address to the Youth' — is one of Iqbal's most direct poems of challenge. It belongs to the later section of Bang-e-Dara, and it does exactly what its title says: it speaks, face to face, to the young.

The poem opens with a question rather than a statement. Have you ever truly reflected, Iqbal asks the young listener — have you thought about what you are, and where you have fallen from? He compares the young person to a single broken star that has dropped out of a vast sky, and the image sets the poem's tone: a reminder of a greatness now diminished.

From there the poem becomes a contrast between ancestors and heirs. Iqbal recalls the achievements of earlier generations — their reach, their courage, the empires they unsettled, the learning they carried — and sets that record beside the passivity he sees in the young of his own day.

The sharpest line in the poem makes that contrast a moral one. There can be no real kinship between you and your forefathers, Iqbal tells the young, because they were action and you are only talk — they were fixed, deed-doing stars, and you are mere words. To inherit a name is not to inherit a worth; worth has to be re-earned.

But the poem is not contempt. Like much of Iqbal's work, its harshness is in the service of awakening. He is hard on the young precisely because he believes they are capable of more — the broken star can still become a sun. The address is a goad, not a verdict.

Formally the poem is built in firm, declarative couplets, each pressing the comparison home, and it shows Iqbal's gift for turning history into a personal summons. He does not lecture about the past; he hands it to the listener as an unmet standard.

Khitab Ba Jawanan-e-Islam endures because every generation hears it freshly. Its question — have you earned what you were given, or are you living on a borrowed name — is one that any young person, in any community, eventually has to answer for themselves.