Tariq's Prayer

Tariq ki Dua imagines a prayer spoken on the field of war in Andalusia. The figure behind it is Tariq ibn Ziyad, the commander whose crossing into the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century gave Gibraltar its name. Iqbal does not narrate the battle; he gives us, instead, the words a soldier of conviction might lift to God before it.

The poem sits in Bal-e-Jibril, the 1935 collection, and it belongs to a thread that runs through much of Iqbal's later work: his deep attachment to the memory of Muslim Spain, a civilisation he saw as a high point of learning and beauty that was later lost. Tariq stands at the beginning of that story, and the prayer carries the weight of everything that came after.

The poem is shaped as a single rising address to God. It opens by naming the soldiers as God's own mysterious servants, men granted a taste of the divine. It moves through their strength, the way mountains seem to shrink before their resolve, and then it arrives at the prayer's true centre, which is a statement about what these men want.

That centre holds the poem's argument. What the man of faith seeks, the prayer says, is shahadat, the giving of the self in a worthy cause; not the loot of war, not the conquest of new lands. The plea is turned inward. The soldier asks God to keep alive in the heart of the believer the lightning that once flashed in the cry of fearlessness, and to make the gaze of such a person sharp and decisive as a sword.

The hardest part of the poem, read honestly, is its martial setting. A modern reader can be uneasy with a battlefield prayer. But Iqbal's interest is not in conquest, and the poem itself makes that explicit by refusing the soldier any wish for spoil or empire. What he is praising is a quality of inner readiness: the willingness to spend oneself entirely for something believed to be true. The sword in the last line is finally an image of clarity and resolve, not of bloodshed for its own sake.

Tariq ki Dua endures because that inner quality is not the property of any one army or age. The prayer to be free of self-interest, to want the worthy thing rather than the easy reward, to face a hard hour with a steady heart, is a prayer anyone of conviction can recognise. Iqbal gave it the dignity of great verse.