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Chapter I A faylasûf of Today At the end of his poem translated into English under the title The Mysteries of Selflessness,3 Muhammad Iqbal addresses a prayer to God entrusting Him with the posterity of his work. Thus, the same author who in the Prologue of another of his long philosophical poems entitled The Secrets of the Self, had declared that his message, bearer of 'things that are yet unborn in the world',4 was addressed to the future – I have no need of the ear of To-day, I am the voice of the poet of Tomorrow5 – came to wish that his thought, if it came to represent a thought 'astray' and 'thorns' dangerous to those coming across it, should be in this case 'choked' and deprived of growth as an 'untimely seed'. On the other hand, he implores, if it has reflected something of the truth, may the 'April shower' turn into 'pearls of great and glittering price'.6 We must no doubt imagine that the mirror was not without 'luster', to borrow his words, since the author presented by Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch as the greatest poet and most important philosopher of our era from the Indian subcontinent , translated into several languages, has become the 'intellectual model for several tens of millions of men'.7 Muhammad Iqbal was born 9 November 18778 in the Punjab city of Sialkot. It was his grandfather, Sheikh Rafiq, who came to settle in this town along with his three brothers, in 1857, following the example of numerous Kashmiri Muslims pushed into exile in the Punjab province by the political situation in this region. The biographies indicate that his father, a tailor by trade, was in a position to raise his children in a Sufi Islamic tradition, while supporting the full cost of a modern education, which he did not have himself, was able to direct his children on the path of brilliant scholarship. Thus Iqbal’s older brother, Ata Muhammad (1860–1940), undertook a career as an engineer while his younger brother was more of a literary type who was deeply affected, at Murray College9 in his native city, by the teaching of Maulvî Sayyid Mîr Hasan (1844–1929), an instructor particularly well versed in Arabic Islam and Open Society 2 and Persian writings.10 At the end of these first years of education, he held for several years a teaching position in philosophy at the Government College in Lahore before instigating a decisive phase in his life by going to Europe to pursue tertiary studies. His friend, Abdul Qadir, explains11 that his own travel to Europe encouraged Iqbal to join him there after obtaining the financial support for the expenses involved from his older brother. Regarding the three-year period spent by Iqbal in England, from 1905 to 1908, Abdul Qadir declares that they represented a crucial time in his personal story and in that of his work.12 In Great Britain, he encountered the schoolmaster Sir Thomas W. Arnold (1864-1930), the philosopher and orientalist who had been his teacher and his friend at Government College in Lahore where he taught from 1898 to 1904 before returning to London. Thus one year before Iqbal was to join him there: the Urdu poem that his departure from India inspired in his disciple is an expression of the desire Arnold transmitted to him to push, ever further, his quest for knowledge.13 At Cambridge, in parallel with his philosophical studies, Muhammad Iqbal received a training and a degree in law, which opened up the career he embraced on his return to his country. Notably, in 1907, he prepared a thesis entitled The Development of Metaphysics in Persia with, as its subtitle, A Contribution to the History of Muslim Philosophy.14 To the degree obtained from Cambridge, he was to add a doctorate from the University of Munich: after having spent several months in Germany and having acquired a certain knowledge of German, he presented there a version of his thesis in this language. This thesis, published in 1908, in London, with a dedication to his teacher Arnold, who he thanked for ten years of training in philosophy, immediately attracted a great deal of attention. As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had already written an abundant body of poetry in Urdu. His son, Javid Iqbal, was to say of this poetry that it belonged to his 'research period', which he places between 1895 and 1912. During this time, he...

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