ABSTRACT
Iqbal was a poet as well as a philosopher. His philosophical ideas were at first rejected but later revered in the Muslim world. His education at European universities revealed to him the gulf that lay between the developing scientific culture of the West and the entrenched traditionalism of the Islamic world. At the same time it showed him that there were relationships and affinities between Muslim and western philosophies. He saw the possibility of a fruitful interaction of Islamic and western ideas and sought to bring about the compatibility of religious faith with philosophical reasoning, drawing on the work of Hegel, Bergson and Whitehead to provide a philosophical grounding for his synthesis. There is a strong vein of Sufist mysticism in Iqbal's57philosophy as well as in his poetry. 1 It is especially apparent in his analysis of the concept of God and in his poem ‘Secret of the Self (1915), which illustrates his concept of ‘selfhood’ ( khudi ) and which did much to revitalize the intellectual life of Muslims in India. In 1930 he became president of the Muslim League and proposed that there should be a Muslim India within India. In 1947, nine years after his death, the founding of Pakistan turned his proposal into a fact.
