Allama Iqbal

Iqbal was born in Sialkot in 1877 and studied in Lahore, Cambridge, Munich and London. He returned a philosopher with a doctorate and a poet whose verse would be recited by people who had never read philosophy.

In his 1930 address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad he set out the case for a consolidated Muslim state in the north-west of the subcontinent. He did not live to see it: he died in Lahore in 1938, nine years before Partition.

His poetry is what carried the argument furthest. It travelled in classrooms, at mushairas and on the radio, in languages people already loved, long before it travelled in constitutional documents.