Every thinker chooses ancestors. Iqbal chose one above all others: Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet of love, dead more than six hundred years before Iqbal was born. Iqbal called him Pir-e-Rumi — Rumi the master, the spiritual guide — and treated him not as a historical figure to be studied but as a living teacher to be answered.
The clearest proof is Iqbal's masterpiece, the Javid Nama (1932). Modelled in spirit on Dante's journey through the afterlife, it sends Iqbal on an ascent through the planets and spheres — and the guide who leads him, the way Virgil leads Dante, is Rumi himself. One poet of love hands the lamp to another across the centuries.
What Iqbal took from Rumi was the primacy of ishq — love as the engine of the self and the cosmos. But the relationship was not imitation. Iqbal argued with his master, extended him, brought him into the 20th century. That is the deepest kind of inheritance: not copying a teacher, but continuing his work. Rumi belongs to no single nation or sect — and through Rumi, neither does Iqbal.