The Russian Revolution of 1917 sent a charge through the colonised world, and Iqbal felt it. He watched the rise of a movement that named, loudly and without apology, the injustice of a system in which a few grew rich on the labour of the many. On that injustice, Iqbal and Karl Marx were in full agreement.
Iqbal's poetry of the 1920s and 1930s is full of fury at exploitation. He wrote with real tenderness about the peasant and the labourer and with real contempt for landlords and financiers who lived off them. In his poem 'Lenin Before God', he put a blistering critique of capitalist greed into the mouth of the revolutionary himself, and let a chorus of angels confirm that the charges were true. Few poets have given the grievance of the poor grander language.
And yet Iqbal stopped, decisively, short of Marxism. His objection was not to the diagnosis but to the cure. Marx, in Iqbal's view, had correctly seen that society was sick with inequality — and had then prescribed a medicine made entirely of matter. A philosophy that reduced the human being to economics, and emptied the universe of God and the soul of any sacred worth, could not, Iqbal believed, build anything that would last.
His judgement was memorably blunt. In the Javid Nama and elsewhere, Iqbal cast Marx as a kind of prophet without revelation — a man with the heart of a believer and a tablet with no divine writing on it. Marx had the moral passion of a prophet, Iqbal granted, but had grounded it in a worldview that left the human spirit with nothing to stand on.
This is a precise and still-useful position. Iqbal refused the false choice between an unjust order that ignored the poor and a materialist revolution that ignored the soul. He wanted the moral seriousness of the one without the spiritual emptiness of the other. Read today, his quarrel with Marx is not a relic of old debates — it is a thinker insisting that a just society and a meaningful one have to be built together, or neither will hold.