Advocates and Detractors of Iqbal: A Study Across Cultures

Criticism on Iqbal is as vast as ocean. A huge corpse of material has been published both in the East and West. Yet, no critic has passed a final verdict on him to cover all dimensions of his poetic thought and philosophy. Therefore, his works still need further interpretations in order to do justice with him. There is a need to take nothing on trust and a critic should break the fanciful myth that has been allowed to grow round Iqbal over the decades, and to expose the bogus and misleading premises that support a calculated misrepresentation of him. His critical canvas is so broad that it is not easy to write on him without knowing his indepth poetic thought, philosophy and sources of knowledge. The present paper tries to analyse the arguments and criticism, thesis and antithesis of both advocates and detractors of Iqbal. The emphasis is put on to project the real literary personality of Allama Iqbal on solid grounds. The findings of this paper are that Iqbal has been misrepresented by the detractors in the wide literary circles of the World due to misunderstandings of his poetic basis and philosophical thought. The crux of the Iqbalian philosophy is unbiased to any religious faith and sentiments whatever he has said and written in his prose and poetry have a solid background like theological, scientific, historical and logical evidences. The reason of their misunderstandings is their partial knowledge about the multidimensional personality of Iqbal. In contrary to that the advocates have analysed the whole personality of the poet and have minutely studied the basic sources of his knowledge. Therefore, the present paper is projecting Iqbal as the flawless revolutionary reformer and rational philosopher.