Muhammad Iqbal (1877 - 1938)

Poesie als Sprache der Philosophie

Abstract

The works of the philosopher and poet Muuḥammad Iqbāl contain elements of Islamic mysticism, of his traditional Islamic education, his studies of law and philosophy in Cambridge, and of his interest in European philosophers and thinkers , especially Hegel and Goethe, but also Nietzsche and Bergson. The spectrum of languages he use d provide s for an inter cultural approach: Persian
as the language of the e ducated class of India, Urdu as medium of communication, Arabic as a part of his traditional Islamic education, English as a language of romanticism and of law, and German, with the option of combining poetry and philosophy. Through this multilingualism Iqbāl was in a position to unfold his vitalist philosophy , expressing or “translating ” it into poetry.
The result is a symbiosis of “three realms of thought”: India, the world of Islam, and western thinking, as Hermann Hesse wrote in his introduction to the German translation of Iqbals Jāvīd Nāmeh or “The Book of Eternity”. In this work I will try to shed light on why and how Iqbāl used the poetical language in order to present his philosophical thoughts in a spiritual context and to spread his reformatory ideas.