Iqbal's final address to God and the Prophet

Abstract

Armaghān-e Hijāz (The Gift of Hijaz) is the posthumous work of Muhammad Iqbal, published a few months after his death in 1938. This poetic work remains rather incomplete, because we find blank pages in the original text by Iqbal. In fact Iqbal wanted to take this work with him as a gift on the pilgrimage he had been planning for a long time but in the last years of his life, his poor health did not permit him to undertake the journey. Armaghān-e Hijāz is Iqbal‘s only bilingual book with its first part in Persian and the second in Urdu. This translation deals with the first, selecting quatrains from the Persian part of the work. Thematically, we find that Iqbal divided these quatrains into the five sections; A respectful address to God, A respectful address to the Prophet, Address to the Muslim Ummah, Address to Humanity and Address to the lovers of God. The dominant theme of Armaghān-e Hijāz is the love of God and of the Prophet (peace be upon him) which stimulates all of his poetic thought. The title of the book refers to the region of Hijāz, where lie the two holy cities of Makkah and Madinah. Here we see Iqbal humbly submitting to God that through the quality and worth of his prostration, He can see whether Iqbal‘s soul is alive or not. For Iqbal, being alive means that the human soul is conscious of his raison-d‘être in this world.