The Best of Allama Iqbal
Allama Iqbal Early Life
Muhammad Iqbal was born on November 9, 1877 in Sialkot, India (now in
Pakistan). During the reign of Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan—according to
scholar Bruce Lawrence—Iqbal's Kashmiri Pandit ancestors from Kashmir
had converted to Islam. According to some sources: "The family had
migrated from Kashmir where Iqbal's Brahmin ancestors had been converted
to Islam." Iqbal often wrote about his being "a son of
Kashmiri-Brahmins but (being) acquainted with the wisdom of Rûm and
Tabriz."
Iqbal's father, Nur Muhammad, was a tailor,
who lacked formal education, but who had great devotion to Islam and
Sufism and a "mystically tinged piety." Iqbal's mother was known in the
family as a "wise, generous woman who quietly gave financial help to
poor and needy women and arbitrated in neighbor's disputes." After his
mother's death in 1914, Iqbal wrote an elegy for her:
