Allama Iqbal’s birth anniversary on November 9 this year passed by unnoticed and in sharp contrast to the way Iqbal Day used to be celebrated a few decades ago. This shows that his appeal for Pakistan’s new generation has suffered a decline, a matter of concern for all those who have drunk deep at the springs of his colossal genius as a poet of great power and vitality to derive immense pleasure and benefit through the years. If his poetry does not find favour with our new generation, is it because of their disillusionment with their ability to cope with future challenges or is it because with a defeatist mindset they find Iqbal’s recipes too inadequate to rejuvenate their dead frames? It is also likely that due to the resulting despondency, poetry as a literary genre has lost its hold on the Pakistani readership. Iqbal is a multi-dimensional genius and the irony with all such men is that the assessment of their art and philosophy often becomes lopsided or blurred because of the inadequacy of their critics to comprehend them in their totality. Iqbal can be seen as a poet, philosopher, revolutionary, reformer, theologian, visionary, political thinker or Muslim leader. However, Iqbal was first and foremost a poet and all other attributes may be seen to colour his poetry but do not describe his vocation or standing for which he became famous. In the realm of poetry, even views and attitudes do not matter so much as the medium or form through which those are put across. After independence, a great bulk of critical work on Iqbal unfortunately exploited his political views to constrict his philosophy to the sole object of making him a founding father and attributing to him the credit for conceiving a separate homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, despite the fact that at heart he was a pan-Islamist and a philosophic mystic whose struggle went far beyond the petty limits of nationhood. The prominent among early writers to politicise him are Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, Hafeez Malik, Aziz Ahmad, Ikram Chughtai, Riaz Husain and Muzaffar Husain Burney. There is another crop of critics who took a narrow view of his poetic art and presented him as a dry pedagogue without reference to his being a poet. Prominent among them are critics like Ali Abbas Jalalpuri (educationist), Dr Mubarak Ali (historian) and Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy (scientist), each looking at him from the angle of their own discipline. There is still a third category that considers his ideas too idealistic to be practical and therefore lacking appeal for the present generation. These include mostly our young, educated lot that has little knowledge of our oriental languages, history, culture and traditions. Some of the objections the present generation have against Iqbal include his mistrust of western democracy, vagueness of his concept of Islamic spiritual democracy, his various palpable contradictions and inconsistencies, his aversion to traditional Sufi thought, his vague notion of Mard-e-momin, his anti-nationalistic stand, his exhortations to Muslims to take up the sword, his call to return to pristine religion and his aversion to aql (rationalism) as against ishq (love). A close examination of these objections in the light of his work will reveal that most of them have either no basis or stem from misinterpretation or inadequate knowledge of his work and beliefs. Poetical work should essentially be interpreted in the light of its own rules and not those governing prose because poetic thought has countless layers of meaning and no defined frontiers under one title. Poetry at its best opens one’s eyes to the vast realm of possibilities, leaving much for the viewer to draw his/her own conclusion. Most of the labels attached to the image of Iqbal are based not on what his poetry presents but on the subjective cravings or propensities of his critics. Since it is not possible to take up each objection and examine its validity, I have therefore chosen Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy’s recent article titled, ‘Why Sir Syed loses and Allama Iqbal wins in Pakistan’, which generally represents the scepticism of the present generation about Iqbal’s art and work. Hoodbhoy, by comparing and contrasting the views of Sir Syed (in prose) and Iqbal (in his poetical works), concludes that Sir Syed accepted the challenges being faced by downtrodden Muslims and showed them the path to modernity and science by declaring learning of the English language compulsory for Indian Muslims, while Iqbal mostly left key questions unanswered or ambiguous. He only called Muslims to a return to the sword while his concept of khudi, being ambiguous, did not help Muslims in changing their fate. Thus, according to him, while Sir Syed tried to bridge the gap between science and religion, the Allama appears to widen it. He bemoans that in the struggle for Pakistan’s soul, Sir Syed’s rational approach failed while the Allama’s call for emotive reasoning won. Now this kind of ‘scientific’ approach to assess Iqbal’s work and philosophy is the bane of the present generation. A comparison of Sir Syed’s views with those of Iqbal did not make much sense. Such a comparison also militates against the norms and discipline of the genres of poetry and prose, the medium they used. Sir Syed’s views were temporal in nature and addressed Indian Muslims at a crucial time in their history while Iqbal’s views are universal in nature and addressed to man and humanity at large, showing him boundless possibilities of growth and expansion. This criticism epitomises the failure of this generation to truly understand and appreciate the great message of the poet who speaks to them straight from his heart through the soul-stirring medium of poetry whose impact is hundredfold stronger than anything said in simple prose. But the condition precedent to such understanding is that one should be fully and truly imbued with the charms and niceties of the poetic medium, the discipline of which is outside the scope of a scientist’s understanding. Iqbal occupies a place in the pantheon of the world’s most eminent literary geniuses. Unless we truly know the poetic medium and its discipline, we are likely to fall into the same error of judgment as most of his critics. Poetry is a very complex and sensitive medium, conveying the thoughts or perceptions of the poet in varying shades and meanings through an abundant use of metaphors, similes, imagery, symbolism, allusions, allegory, hyperbole, fancy and imagination within the aesthetic framework of cadence, rhyme, rhythm and metre. According to Wordsworth, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,” and is, “the impassioned expression, which is in the countenance of all science.” This implies that the spontaneity and power of a poet’s feelings are generated when his imagination is fully at work. This unusual combination is set in motion when the poet is seized by a latent faculty called intuition, which is made available to the poet’s perceptions at that heightened state of mind when he starts perceiving things ordinarily difficult to conceive. Since most realities are revealed to the poet through intuition, his experience becomes uniquely personal and difficult to share. It is the hallmark of all great poets that through the gift of their poetic craft they succeed in recreating the same experience in the minds of their readers. For the true appreciation of poetry we must know the difference between an ordinary truth and poetic truth. By poetic truth, we do not mean fidelity to facts in the ordinary acceptance of terms. Such fidelity we look for in science. By poetic truth, we mean fidelity to our emotional apprehension of facts. Poetic truth also has a human value to which scientific truth cannot possibly lay claim. A poet may not write with a conscious ethical aim, nor is it his business to instruct and guide. The poet’s business is to “stir and vivify, to inspire, energise and delight”. His tools leave a lasting impact on the human mind and inspire for generations to come. The inspiration from a complex and sensitive genre like poetry presupposes an enlightened state of mind and a peaceful environment, which is not possible when there is rank poverty in the masses engaged in a mad race for survival in a crippled economy. We have already lost much; it would be no surprise if Iqbal too is forgotten. The writer is a former member of the provincial civil service and can be reached at zafar.aziz.ch@gmail.com