Who Was Allama Iqbal?

1. Sialkot, Lahore and the making of a poet

Muhammad Iqbal was born on 9 November 1877 in Sialkot, a town in the Punjab of British India, now in Pakistan, into a Kashmiri Muslim family of modest means. His father, Sheikh Noor Muhammad, was a tailor, and his mother was Imam Bibi. He was schooled at Scotch Mission College in Sialkot, where the scholar Shams al-Ulama Sayyid Mir Hasan taught him classical Persian, Arabic and Islamic literature, and where he developed the love of Persian poetry that would shape his life. He took his BA in philosophy, English literature and Arabic from Government College Lahore in 1897 and his MA in philosophy in 1899, and he began to write poetry in Urdu, publishing his first poems while still a student.

The Sialkot of Iqbal's youth was a small town, and the Lahore of his student years was the cultural capital of the Punjab, a city of colleges, newspapers and literary societies. Iqbal moved between the two worlds, the traditional world of his family and his teacher, and the modern world of English education and Western philosophy, and the tension between them became the central theme of his work. He was, from the start, a poet who thought in two languages and in two traditions, and his genius was to bring them together, to write Persian verse that engaged with European philosophy, and Urdu poetry that spoke to ordinary people in a language they understood.

There is a point worth making about Iqbal's early life that is often missed. He was not born into privilege, and he did not have the advantages of the wealthy families who dominated Indian politics. His father was a tailor, his education was paid for by scholarships and by teaching, and he worked hard for everything he achieved. That background matters, because his philosophy of khudi, of the self made strong through effort, was not an abstract idea for him; it was the story of his own life. He had made himself, through study and discipline, and he believed that others could do the same, and that a whole community could do the same. His life and his philosophy were one, and that unity is part of why his words still move people.

2. Europe: Cambridge, Munich and the philosophy of the self

In 1905 Iqbal travelled to Europe: he studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, under J. M. E. McTaggart, took a second BA in 1906 and an MA in 1907, and trained in law at Lincoln's Inn in London. He spent part of 1907 in Heidelberg studying German, and in November 1907 he submitted a doctoral thesis on the development of metaphysics in Persia to the University of Munich, receiving his PhD in 1908. The European years were decisive. He read Nietzsche, Bergson and the German idealists, and he engaged with the philosophy of the West at its highest level, while also studying the Islamic tradition in depth. He returned to India in 1908 with a philosophy that was neither purely Western nor purely traditional, but a synthesis of the two.

The central idea of that philosophy was khudi, the self. In Asrar-e-Khudi, The Secrets of the Self, published in 1915, Iqbal argued that the self is not an illusion to be dissolved, as some Sufi and Buddhist traditions taught, but a reality to be strengthened, through love, through action, and through the struggle against passivity. The English translation by R. A. Nicholson in 1920 carried the idea to Western readers, and it was, for many of them, their first encounter with a modern Muslim philosophy that was not a repetition of medieval theology but a creative engagement with the modern world. Khudi was, in Iqbal's hands, both a personal ethic and a political programme: the individual who strengthens the self becomes capable of freedom, and a community of such individuals becomes capable of self-rule.

The European years also changed Iqbal's view of the West. He admired its science, its philosophy and its energy, but he was critical of its materialism, its nationalism and its colonialism, and he believed that the West had lost the spiritual dimension that the East had preserved. His critique was not a rejection of modernity; it was an argument that modernity needed a soul, and that Islam could provide it. That argument, that the East and the West each had something the other lacked, and that a synthesis was possible, is the core of Iqbal's thought, and it is why he is read today not only in Pakistan but in Iran, in Turkey, and in the West, by readers who are interested in the encounter between Islam and modernity.

3. The poetry: Urdu, Persian and the voice of a people

Iqbal wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian, and his work in both languages is central to his reputation. His Urdu collection Bang-e-Dara, The Call of the Marching Bell, published in 1924, gathered his Urdu verse, including the poems Shikwa, Complaint, and Jawab-e-Shikwa, The Answer to the Complaint, in which a Muslim complains to God about the decline of Islam and God answers that the fault lies with Muslims themselves, who have abandoned action for prayer. The poems were immensely popular, and they are still recited in Pakistan today, because they speak directly to the experience of a community that felt itself in decline and that wanted to understand why. Iqbal's answer was always the same: the fault is not in fate, it is in ourselves, and the remedy is action.

His Persian poetry, which includes Asrar-e-Khudi, Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, The Mysteries of Selflessness, and Javid Nama, The Book of Eternity, published in 1932, is read across Iran and Central Asia, and it is in Persian that his philosophy is most fully expressed. The choice of Persian was deliberate: Persian was the literary language of the Muslim East, the language of Rumi, whom Iqbal admired above all other poets, and writing in Persian allowed Iqbal to address the whole Muslim world, not only the Muslims of India. His Persian verse is dense, philosophical and allusive, and it is harder to read than his Urdu, but it is the work that scholars study most closely, because it contains his mature thought.

The comparison with other poets of his tradition is instructive. Mirza Ghalib, the great Urdu poet of the nineteenth century, wrote about love, loss and the human condition with an irony that Iqbal admired but did not imitate. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the great Urdu poet of the twentieth century, wrote about revolution and social justice in a language that owed much to Iqbal's, but with a politics that was more explicitly socialist. Iqbal stands between them: he was a poet of the self and of the nation, whose verse was both personal and political, and whose language, in Urdu and in Persian, gave a whole people a way to talk about themselves. His poetry is not easy, and it is not always accessible to modern readers, but it is the foundation of modern Urdu literature, and it is still the standard against which other poets are measured.

4. The Allahabad Address and the idea of Pakistan

After returning from Europe in 1908, Iqbal practised law in Lahore and taught philosophy at Government College Lahore. He wrote poetry while building a legal practice, and from the 1920s he moved steadily into public life. He was elected to the Punjab Legislative Council in 1927 and served until 1930. In December 1930 he presided over the All-India Muslim League's annual session at Allahabad, where he delivered the address that is treated as the first formal statement of the idea that became Pakistan. In it he argued that the Muslims of north-west India, in the Punjab, the North-West Frontier, Sindh and Baluchistan, should have a consolidated state of their own, within or without the British Empire, because they were a distinct nation with their own culture, law and history, and because a single Indian nation, dominated by the Hindu majority, would not protect their rights.

The Allahabad Address is often described as the moment when the idea of Pakistan was born, and that description is broadly true, though it needs qualification. Iqbal did not use the word Pakistan, which was coined later, and he did not propose the partition of India as it eventually happened; he proposed a Muslim state within a federation, and his vision was of a community that would be free to develop its own culture, not necessarily of a separate sovereign country. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who led the Muslim League to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, acknowledged Iqbal as the ideological founder of the country, and he quoted the Allahabad Address as the foundation of his own demand for Pakistan. The relationship between the two men is central to Pakistan's history: Iqbal provided the idea, Jinnah provided the politics, and neither could have succeeded without the other.

The address has been debated ever since, and the debate is worth understanding. Some historians argue that Iqbal's proposal was a response to the failure of Hindu-Muslim unity, and that it was a practical solution to a real problem. Others argue that it was a step towards the partition that divided India in 1947, with all the violence and displacement that followed, and that Iqbal bears some responsibility for that outcome. Still others argue that Iqbal's vision was of a Muslim state that would be tolerant and inclusive, and that the Pakistan that emerged was not the Pakistan he imagined. All three readings have evidence behind them, and the debate is, in the end, a debate about Pakistan itself: what it was meant to be, what it became, and whether the gap between the two is Iqbal's fault or history's. Iqbal died before partition, and he never had to answer for it, which is both his good fortune and the reason his reputation has survived intact.

5. Politics, the Round Table and the last years

Iqbal's political career after Allahabad was active but frustrating. He attended the Round Table Conferences in London in 1931 and 1932, where he argued for the political rights of Indian Muslims, and he continued to write and to speak about the future of Muslims in India. He was, by temperament, a philosopher rather than a politician, and he was often impatient with the compromises and the manoeuvring of political life. He admired Jinnah's leadership, and he urged Jinnah to take charge of the Muslim League, but he did not himself seek high office, and he remained, to the end, a poet who had entered politics rather than a politician who wrote poetry. That distinction matters, because it explains both his influence and his limits: he could articulate an idea, but he could not build a party, and the building was left to others.

His last years were marked by ill health and by a sense of urgency. He knew he was dying, and he worked to complete his major works, including Javid Nama, which he regarded as his masterpiece, a poetic journey through the heavens in the company of Rumi, in which he explores the nature of the self, of time, and of God. The poem is difficult, and it is not widely read outside scholarly circles, but it is the fullest expression of his philosophy, and it shows a mind that was still growing, still asking questions, and still unwilling to accept easy answers. He also wrote letters to Jinnah, urging him to press forward with the demand for a Muslim state, and those letters, published after his death, became part of the founding documents of Pakistan.

He died in Lahore on 21 April 1938, aged 60, and is buried beside the Badshahi Mosque, in a tomb that has become a place of pilgrimage. His death, nine years before the creation of Pakistan, meant that he never saw the country he had imagined, and never had to confront the gap between his vision and the reality. His funeral was a national event, and his reputation grew after his death, as Pakistan adopted him as its national poet and its ideological founder. The fact that he died before Pakistan existed has allowed each generation of Pakistanis to claim him for its own purposes, and his verse has been quoted by governments, by opposition movements, and by ordinary people, for causes that Iqbal himself might not have recognised.

6. Khudi, the West and the debate over Iqbal

Iqbal's philosophy of khudi has been debated since it was first published, and the debate continues today. His supporters argue that khudi is a philosophy of empowerment, a call to individuals and to communities to take responsibility for their own fate, to develop their talents, and to resist passivity and fatalism. They point to the influence of his ideas on the Pakistan movement, on the reform of Islamic thought, and on the self-confidence of Muslims in the modern world, and they argue that his synthesis of Islam and Western philosophy is one of the most creative achievements of modern Muslim thought. His critics argue that khudi is individualistic, that it undervalues community and tradition, and that it was used to justify a politics of separation that divided India. They also argue that his critique of the West was selective, and that he admired Western philosophy while rejecting Western politics, a position that is easier to state than to sustain.

The debate over Iqbal's attitude to the West is particularly interesting. He was, as his European education shows, deeply engaged with Western thought, and he read Nietzsche, Bergson and Goethe with admiration. He was also a critic of Western imperialism, of its materialism, and of its nationalism, and he believed that the West had lost its spiritual bearings. Some readers see this as a contradiction; others see it as a deliberate synthesis, an attempt to take what was valuable from the West and to combine it with what was valuable from the East. Iqbal himself described his project as a reconstruction of Islamic thought, and the title of his most important prose work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, published in 1930, captures that ambition: not a rejection of modernity, but a rebuilding of tradition so that it could meet modernity on equal terms.

There is also a debate about Iqbal's place in the wider world. In Iran, he is admired as a Persian poet and a philosopher, and his work is studied in universities. In Turkey, he is read as a thinker about the future of Islam. In the West, he is less well known, though scholars of Islamic thought regard him as one of the most important Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. In Pakistan, he is a national icon, and his birthday, 9 November, is observed as Iqbal Day, his verse is taught in schools, and his image is on currency and stamps. The gap between his national status and his international reputation is itself a measure of his importance: he is a poet who belongs to a nation, and a philosopher who belongs to the world, and the two roles do not always sit comfortably together.

7. Legacy: the poet who dreamed a country

Iqbal's legacy is secure in Pakistan, where he is remembered as the national poet and the ideological founder of the country, and it is growing elsewhere, as scholars and readers discover his philosophy and his poetry. His verse is taught in schools, his philosophy is studied in universities, and his Allahabad Address is treated as the first formal statement of the idea that became Pakistan. Beyond Pakistan, his Persian poetry is read in Iran and Central Asia, and his prose work on the reconstruction of Islamic thought is studied by scholars of Islam around the world. He is, by common consent, one of the most important Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, and one of the few poets whose work changed the political map of the world.

His legacy also includes the question he posed, which is still the central question of Pakistan's history: what does it mean for a community to be a nation, and what kind of state should that nation build? Iqbal's answer was that a nation is defined by its culture and its faith, not by its territory or its language, and that a Muslim state should be a place where Islamic values and modern institutions could coexist. Whether Pakistan has lived up to that answer is a question that Pakistanis argue about constantly, and Iqbal's verse is quoted on both sides of the argument. That is, in a sense, the measure of his importance: he gave a country its founding idea, and the country is still arguing about what the idea means.

For readers who want to go further, the best starting points are Iqbal's own works, above all Asrar-e-Khudi and Bang-e-Dara, which are available in translation, and The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, which gives his philosophy in prose. The Iqbal Academy in Lahore preserves his papers and his library, and several modern biographies trace the full arc of his life, from Sialkot to Cambridge to Lahore. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; his poetry gives his voice, and it is a voice that still speaks, in Urdu and in Persian, to readers who have never been to Pakistan and who have never heard of the Allahabad Address, because it speaks about the self, about freedom, and about the human capacity to remake the world.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Muhammad Iqbal
• Wikipedia — Muhammad Iqbal
• Encyclopedia.com — Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pakistan, history (Iqbal and the Pakistan movement)

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• Who Is Vladimir Putin? — Vladimir Putin has led Russia since 2000 — as president and, for four years, as prime minister. This explains his rise, his rule and his role in the world.
• Who Is Warren Buffett? — Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile mill into a vast conglomerate, and his letters taught generations value investing.
• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.