TEHRAN-The commemoration ceremony of Iqbal Lahori, great Muslim poet, philosopher and thinker of the Indian sub-continent, was held at Pakistan Embassy in Tehran on Thursday. 

The event was organized by the Embassy of Pakistan in collaboration with the Center of Excellence in Ferdowsi and Shahnameh, affiliated to the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, ISNA reported on Saturday.

At the ceremony, a number of Persian language professors delivered lectures about Iqbal's personality and poetry, calling him a poet who became the link between Iran and Pakistan with his Persian poems.

Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), widely known as Allama Iqbal, 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, 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 in 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