Iqbal's mind was formed partly in Europe. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he encountered the philosopher McTaggart; he earned his doctorate at Munich; he qualified as a barrister in London. He read European philosophy in the original and argued with it on equal terms.
The West reciprocated. As early as 1920, the Cambridge orientalist Reynold A. Nicholson translated Asrar-e-Khudi into English as 'The Secrets of the Self', carrying Iqbal's philosophy of selfhood to an English readership. His prose lectures, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, were delivered and published in English and remain studied in universities.
Iqbal's stance toward the West was neither worship nor rejection — it was engagement. He admired its science, its energy, its will; he warned against its materialism and its empires. He proves that one can learn deeply from a civilisation and still judge it freely. That posture — open, critical, unintimidated — is one of the most useful things a modern reader can take from him.