When Iqbal went to study in England around 1905, his teacher Sir Thomas Arnold steered him toward the neo-Hegelian philosophy then dominant at Cambridge. Iqbal took to it. In his private notebook, Stray Reflections (written 1910), he paid the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel a memorable compliment, calling his system 'an epic in prose' — a rare tribute from one maker of epics to another.
Hegel had given Europe a vast vision of reality as a single rational process unfolding through history, contradiction driving thought ever upward. For a young thinker hungry for a dynamic, developmental picture of the world rather than a static one, Hegel was intoxicating. Iqbal later said that Hegel and Goethe were the two who first led him 'into the inside of things'.
But the admiration did not last unchanged. As Iqbal's own philosophy matured, he drifted away from Hegel and finally turned critical — criticising him in two poems, 'Jalal-o-Hegel' and a poem addressed to a philosophy-struck young man. His objection was that Hegel's grand system was, in the end, a structure of pure thought: a logic, an abstraction, magnificent but bloodless. It had reason without love, motion without a living self.
This arc — drawn in, then arguing his way out — is the most honest portrait of how Iqbal used Western philosophy. He never simply rejected it and never simply absorbed it. He apprenticed himself to Europe's best minds, learned everything they could teach, and then measured them against his own conviction that reality is alive, personal, and moved by love. Hegel taught him to think in motion. Iqbal then went looking for the heartbeat the system left out.