The Complaint

Shikwa — 'The Complaint' — is one of the boldest poems ever written in Urdu. In it Iqbal does something almost unthinkable in devotional poetry: he turns to God and lodges a grievance. The speaker, a Muslim of the early twentieth century, looks at the ruin and decline of his community and demands an explanation. We kept faith with You, he says; why have You not kept faith with us?

Iqbal recited the poem in 1909 at a gathering in Lahore. The effect was electric, and to some, scandalous. A poem that argued with God struck conservative ears as something near blasphemy, and Iqbal was criticised for it. But the criticism mistook the poem's form for its meaning. Shikwa is not a rejection of faith; it is the cry of a wounded lover, and a lover only complains to someone he still believes in.

The structure is a sustained dramatic monologue, written in a flowing, musical metre meant to be sung as much as read. It moves through history — the speaker reminds God of all that believers once did: how they carried a message across deserts and centuries, how they stood when others knelt to idols, how they spread learning and built civilisations. Then it turns to the present and to the ache of watching all of that fade.

What makes the poem more than a lament is its underlying argument. Beneath the complaint sits a question about agency and decline: a people that once moved the world now sits still and blames heaven for the stillness. Iqbal lets the grievance run its full length precisely so that, later, it can be answered.

Because Shikwa ends without resolution, it cried out for a reply — and three years later Iqbal wrote one. Read alone, the poem is a thunderclap of grief and protest. Read as the first half of a pair, it becomes the setup for one of the most searching answers in modern poetry.

Shikwa endures because it gives dignified voice to a universal feeling — the moment when devotion meets disappointment and a believer dares to ask why. Iqbal's gift was to make that hard question speak in beautiful, singable verse, and then to insist that asking it honestly is itself an act of faith.