Allama Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) wrote in Urdu and Persian, trained in philosophy at Cambridge and Munich, and is read today as a poet, a philosopher and a political figure at once — which is why quoting him is rarely simple. His early Tarana-e-Hindi is still sung in Indian schools; his later work developed khudi, a demanding idea of the realised self that motivational reproductions of his verse usually flatten into self-belief. Couplets here are verified against his collected work, with the poem named.