Allama Iqbal’s poetry & prose must be taken as solid road in fields of national life: Farooq Rehmani

ISLAMABAD, Nov 08 (SABAH): Muhammad Farooq Rehmani, Chairman Jammu and Kashmir People’s Freedom League and ex-Convener All Parties Hurriyat Conference AJ&K while paying rich tributes to life and works of Dr . Allama Muhammad Iqbal on his 146th birth anniversary said that Iqbal was a great poet philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century, who changed the poetry theme affecting over all political narrative to suit freedom movement of his times, particularly the life and struggle of the Indian Muslims of the British colonial period.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, Farooq Rehmani said that in poetry he stressed upon dignity of mankind and was moved by the economic plight of the Indian Muslims drawing focus of Muhammad Ali Jinnah to ways of changing economic and social fortunes of the fellow Muslim countrymen by writing significant letters to an politician, who in his latter life became founder of Pakistan.

Muhammad Farooq Rehmani said that equally Dr. Iqbal’s heart was burning with the slavery of the Kashmiri Muslims, who were treated a wretched creature by their rulers for centuries. He said that Iqbal for some time as President of the Kashmir Committee Lahore made vital political contribution to the freedom movement of Kashmir in addition to his revolutionary and heart-rending poems on Kashmir.

He stated that the slavery of Palestine under the British mandate and rise of British-backed zionist movement for a Jew home land in Palestine was another sad development in Iqbal’s times and indeed the poet philosopher and political thinker like Iqbal could not remain indifferent to the issue of Palestine-Al-Qudus(wall of Buraq), and killings and displacement of the Palestinians. He not only wrote verses on Palestine but at the same time expressed his views in different seminars on Palestine and both Quaid-Azam and Iqbal had serious views on dangers of zionism in the Islamic world.

“Today, we are facing both these issues in their most terrible shape and unless and until the we keep before us thoughts of Iqbal and Jinnah and the Muslim leadership of the Arab and non Arab Muslim world became cognizant of the genocide in Palestine and demographic changes in Kashmir, backlash for callously indifferent Muslim rulers and their supporters would be unimaginable” he said.