A Voice Above: Muhammad Iqbal and the Islamic Poetic Process

This lecture centers poetry as a form of Islamic knowledge in colonial modernity. It will explore how poems were created in ways that connected religious knowledge with literary expression at a critical juncture for Islamic ethics in the late colonial period. Through the example of Urdu and Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), Dr. Bhat argues that Iqbal viewed the Islamic poetic process as essential to shaping a strong intellectual tradition. This talk will also highlight how religious elements- such as scripture, divine presence, etiquette, cosmology and pious attachments, played an important role in the formation of modern intellectual traditions.

Dr. Abdul Manan Bhat completed his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently teaches. Manan is a scholar of Islam, literature, and lived religion, and specializes in religious discourses on poetry in Islamic history with a focus on South and Central Asia. His current book project, entitled Divine Craft: Poetry, Bodies, and Islam in Modernity, explores the shifting relationship between religious knowledge and literary expression between the early modern and the modern period. Manan works primarily in Persian, Urdu, Arabic, and Kashmiri.

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