My Words Published in Daily The Nation on the occasion of 133rd birth anniversary of the Poet of the East, Allama Muhammad Iqbal.

When life is History.

Published in Daily The Nation
November 12, 2009
Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal is one of the most written about poets of Urdu. However, an authentic and reliable biography of Iqbal took a long time to appear. ‘Hayat-e-Iqbal’ was the first ever book on Iqbal, which appeared in 1938. After that, no year went by with out new books and articles on Iqbal being published. All these books provide the scholars with good source material but the need for a detailed and authentic biography of Iqbal was badly felt. Dr Javed Iqbal’s Zinda Rood, first published in 1984, filled this gap and is regarded as the most authentic biography of the poet-philosopher.

Recently, a fourth edition was published. Dr Javed Iqbal, being his son, was in a unique position to take advantage of all the original sources necessary to carry out an authentic research on Iqbal. This is the reason that Zinda Rood is by far the best biography of Iqbal to date.

According to the famous Iqbal scholar Professor Rafiuddin Hashmi, “Dr Javed Iqbal has very capably fulfilled his responsibilities as a biographer in Zinda Rood, which is a balanced and objective biography that describes all the aspects of Iqbal’s life in detail.

It makes you feel that Iqbal’s life was that of a great man”. If we want to take our country out of its present dire challenges, we would have to understand and follow the teachings of Iqbal. Zinda Rood is the best book to understand his teachings. One hopes that Dr Javed Iqbal would bring out a fifth revised edition with some more additions to this valuable book soon.
Tassawur Bosal
Mandi Bahauddin