When Asrar-e Khudi was first published in 1915, the immediate reception among Indian Muslims was lukewarm, with some strongly negative reactions coming from the established circles of religious authority. Overall, the message of this poem was seen either as too difficult or as deeply offensive; Asrar-e Khudi was either not understood at all, or it was…
Included in Asrar-i Khudi, Iqbal’s first book of Persian verse, is a poem titled “Al-Waqt Sayf,” time is a sword. The title comes from a saying attributed to the famous scholar and jurist Imam Ahmad bin Idris Al-Shafi’i (767-820 CE). Iqbal’s poem has three parts. Here I will attempt a paraphrase of the first part of this poem and…
In a previous post (“Excuse me, are you Homo duplex?”) I made an attempt to understand what Iqbal means when he distinguishes between the “appreciative self” and the “efficient self.” I am now going to make a second attempt at clarifying those concepts. The context of Iqbal’s discussion is the nature of time and the associated…