Revolution Through Revelation

A Comparative Study of Muhammad Iqbal's and Muhammad Akif's poetics

Abstract

Only a small contingent of Muslim intelligentsia from the last century has influenced the Muslim societies. Muhammad Iqbal, the philosopher-poet from the present-day Pakistan and Muhammad Akif from Turkey are examples of an intellectual mind in quest of restoring the lost glory of Islam, paradigmatically knowledge-oriented, and this paper argues that both Iqbal and Akif use poetry as a medium to convey the epistemology of Quranic thought and Apostolic literature(Hadith). But what makes these two poets extraordinary is the way they juxtapose the cultural and political operations of Western civilization with Islamic civilization. Utterly disillusioned with western civilization’s materialism and its commitment to bifurcation of Church with State both Iqbal and Akif marshal the cause of Muslim renaissance relying on the glory of Islamic values grounded on Quarnic injunctions, and the life of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). But what makes their work more enchanting as they choose the genre of poetry warding off the perils of putative didacticism and pay special attention to the compulsions of aesthetics and write in metaphors establishing their project that art and aesthetics is not the legacy only of western civilization.