English Translations - International Iqbal Society - Allama Iqbal

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

Iqbal recited once in a garden in spring
A couplet cheerful and bright in tone and spirit:
Unlike the rose, I need no breeze to blossom.,
My soul doth blossom with my ecstasy.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

Thy body knows not the secrets of thy heart,
And so thy sighs reach not the heights of heaven;
God is disgusted with bodies without souls;
The living God is the God of living souls.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

Selfhood's apostate is the life of reason;
Its secret lies in communion with God;
If thou couldst guard it in thy poverty,
Thou art indeed a fakir greater than kings.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

The movement of days and nights is eternal, fast;
No one has seen the future or the past;
Thou art the only fact, the rest is fiction;
The present is the only time thou hast.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

That blood of pristine vigour is no more;
That yearning heart's power is no more;
Prayer, fasting, haj, sacrifice survive,
But in thee nature's old dower is no more.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

The mystic's soul is like the morning breeze;
It freshens and renews life's inner meaning
An illumined soul can be a shepherd's, who
Could hear the Voice of God at God's command.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

So man is the powerful lord of land and seas!
A lord of the world with an eye that hardly sees!
He knows neither himself, nor God, nor the world;
Is this, O Lord, Thy greatest masterpiece?

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

To be God is to do a million tasks;
To be God, no doubt, is a wearisome headache;
But-pardon me, O Lord-to be a man,
Is not a headache, but a heartache.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

This reason of mine knows not good from evil;
And tries to exceed the bounds that nature fixed;
I know not what has happened to me of late,
My reason and my heart are ever at war.

talha_ahad@yahoo.com (Talha Ahad)

It was Abul Hassan who stressed the truth,
That the soul does not expire with the body's death;
How could the sun have any light at all,
If it spurns and loses its own beams?