Muhammad Iqbal

Sir Muhammad Iqbal, often addressed as Allama Iqbal, was a poet, philosopher and politician of British India whose verse and lectures gave intellectual shape to the demand for a separate Muslim homeland on the subcontinent. Born in 1877 in Sialkot in the Punjab to a Kashmiri tailor's family that had converted to Islam several generations earlier, he was educated at Scotch Mission College in his hometown and Government College in Lahore.

He went on to read philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn, and completed a doctorate at the University of Munich in 1908 with a thesis on the development of metaphysics in Persia. Returning to Lahore he practised law part-time while writing the long Persian and Urdu poems that made his reputation, including Asrar-i-Khudi, Bal-i-Jibril and Javid Nama, and delivering the English-language lectures published as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

His 1930 presidential address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad called for a consolidated Muslim state in the north-west of India, an early articulation of what would become Pakistan. He corresponded extensively with Muhammad Ali Jinnah in his final years, urging him to lead that effort, and is honoured in Pakistan as the country's spiritual founder.

Iqbal was knighted in 1922 for his services to literature and continued writing in both Urdu and Persian until his death in Lahore in April 1938, nearly a decade before partition.

The name Muhammad is Arabic for praiseworthy and is the most widely given male name in the world. He bore it through every page of his poetry and politics.