The most-sung patriotic poem of the subcontinent — Saare Jahan Se Achha, the Tarana-e-Hindi — was written by Iqbal in 1904. It imagines India as a shared garden, and contains the line, still quoted whenever the subject is communal harmony: 'religion does not teach us to hold enmity among ourselves.'
It was not an isolated mood. The young Iqbal wrote Naya Shawala — 'The New Temple' — addressed warmly to a Hindu friend, finding the sacred in the dust of a common land. He wrote Himala, a hymn to the Himalayas as the guardian of all of Hindustan. This was a poet in love with a composite civilisation.
Iqbal's thought later changed, and that change is real and is treated honestly elsewhere on this site. But the composite-India Iqbal is not a forgery or a footnote. He is the foundation. And the universal, cross-faith reading of Iqbal that this whole site is built on begins, quite literally, in his own earliest and most beloved verse.