TEHRAN-Iran and Pakistan will produce a film about Allama Muhammad Iqbal, known as Iqbal Lahori, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance said after meetings with Pakistani officials in his trip to the neighboring country on Monday.

“The production of some joint films was put on the agenda, the first being about the late Iqbal Lahori, the preparations of which are underway,” Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaeili was quoted as saying by IRNA.

Last November, the Minister of Culture of Pakistan Jamal Shah announced that Iran and Pakistan had taken serious steps to produce joint films, including one about Iqbal Lahori as he is an important cultural and common heritage of the two countries.

Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) was a South Asian academic, poet, barrister, philosopher, and politician who is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary works in both Urdu and Persian languages. 

Iqbal is admired as a prominent classical poet in Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka and also by international scholars of literature.

He is widely known as the poet of Islam or the poet of the East. However, about 60 percent of the works of Iqbal is in the Persian language which makes him equally popular in Iran. His poetry has been translated into many languages.

Though Iqbal is best known as an eminent poet, he is also a highly acclaimed Muslim philosophical thinker of modern times. He is called the spiritual father of Pakistan. 

He was a strong proponent of the political and spiritual revival of Islamic civilization across the world, but in particular in South Asia; a series of lectures he delivered to this effect were published as “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”. 

After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he was named the national poet there. He is also known as the “Hakeem-ul-Ummat” (The Sage of the Ummah) and the “Mufakkir-e-Pakistan” (The Thinker of Pakistan).

SS/SAB