Iqbal's Last Message to Humanity

Abstract

Iqbal’s last Message to Humanity is a sequel to Iqbal’s Final Address to God and the Prophet. The message is carried forward by the sequel to give the comprehensible perspective of Iqbal’s dialogue with Muslim Ummah, Humanity and the lovers of God. Iqbal draws attention of the humanity to the universal paradigm of human nature and the faculties related to the outward actions and its manifestation. The Muslim Ummah should follow the patterns of God so that they may attain purification of soul through the outward actions including the reflective thought process of human beings. The humanity again is linked up with Prophet Adam (peace be upon him) where humanity becomes connected to the Oneness of God. Iqbal is taking his readers towards the Oneness, Tawheed or what can be called the Ultimate reality of God. Iqbal terms the callous character building by Pseudo Saint and Mullah as a dead wood in his book. The current text is an effort to rediscover Iqbal’s message to mankind and to convey his thoughts to the contemporary French reader through the French translations of selected Persian quatrains from Iqbal’s Armaghān-e Hijāz (The Gift of Hijaz). In the course of selection of the quatrains to be translated into French, preference has been given to stanzas that introduce and expound upon the basic philosophical theme of Iqbal’s concept of khudi. While rendering the quatrains into French, I have been conscious of the fact that the French reader might not be aware of the concept of khudi nor of the associated lexique of Iqbal that helps the reader to comprehend and visualize this concept of khudi. The readers will find a brief comment in footnotes wherever it was felt that the translated lexique in French, though simple and self explanatory in the source language of the interconnected ideas have been interwoven to elaborate the macro concepts of time and space in finitude as well as in infinity.