Iqbal's relationship with Europe was personal before it was philosophical. He had studied at Cambridge and earned his doctorate in Munich; he read European thought in the original and admired its science, its energy, and its restless will. No one could accuse him of dismissing a civilisation he did not know.
But Iqbal lived through the years that broke Europe's confidence in itself. The First World War had shown the continent capable of mechanised slaughter on a scale never seen; the 1920s and early 1930s brought economic collapse, sharpening empires, and the first dark stirrings of fascism. Across the educated world, the easy 19th-century faith that Europe carried civilisation forward was cracking — and Iqbal's poetry of those years registers the crack.
His charge against Europe, made repeatedly in the verse of this period, had two parts. The first was materialism: a civilisation, as he saw it, of dazzling outward power and starved inner life, brilliant at machines and poor at meaning. The second was empire: he condemned the way that power was used to dominate other peoples, and he did not soften the point to flatter the institutions that had educated and even knighted him.
One poem catches the mood exactly. In 'Lenin Before God', published in his 1935 collection Bal-e-Jibril, Iqbal imagines the dead Russian revolutionary arriving in the divine court and laying out an indictment of capitalist Europe — its exploitation of labour, its hollow promises, its worship of profit. Iqbal was no communist, and elsewhere he rejected Marxism firmly. But he lent Lenin that speech because he wanted Europe's own crisis spoken aloud.
What makes Iqbal worth reading on this is the balance he held. He never claimed the East was simply good and the West simply bad; he was as harsh on Eastern stagnation as on Western excess. His verdict on Europe between the wars was the verdict of a man who had genuinely learned from it and therefore had the standing to judge it — admiring its dynamism, refusing its idols, and warning, accurately, that a civilisation of pure power with no inner compass was heading somewhere terrible.