Poetry and politics

Khamenei argues that Iqbal was scarcely studied before the Iranian revolution of 1979 in Iran; it was only the Islamic government of Iran that realised many of Iqbal’s principles and would then aim to spread Iqbal’s message across Iran through books, ‘paintings’, and musicians rendering his poems into ‘popular tunes’ to reveal the debt the Iranians owed to Iqbal.[1] This reading of Iqbal’s place in Iranian intellectual history evidently serves an ideological purpose; the veracity of its claim must be investigated by sketching the rise of Iranian interest in Iqbal against the backdrop of Iran’s political history.