by IMRAN MULLA
Since the start of the Iran war, in India and Pakistan there has been a renewed interest in Iran’s cultural ties with South Asia
In March 1986 Sayyid Ali Khamenei, who would three years later become Iran’s supreme leader, gave a speech at a major conference in Tehran on the Indian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal.
Iqbal lived in British India and engaged in the politics of that land. He died in 1938 and never visited Iran.
But Khamenei told his audience that Iqbal was a “luminous spark that washed out the darkness of the days of suffocation and repression from our hearts (through his impressions, poetry, counsel and teachings) and projected a bright picture of the future before our eyes”.
Describing himself as someone “who for years had been a follower of Iqbal and has lived emotionally in his company”, Khamenei insisted the poet “belongs to this nation”.
“Iqbal, whose heart ached to see the Muslim people having lost their human and Islamic personality,” he said, should he have lived to visit Iran after the Islamic Revolution, “could have seen a nation standing on its feet, infused with the rich Islamic spirit.”
The supreme leader, killed earlier this month in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, was able to engage so deeply with Iqbal’s work because much of his oeuvre was in Persian.
This was the case even though Iqbal is remembered in South Asia almost entirely for his Urdu poetry.
Since the start of the current Iran war, in India and Pakistan there has been a renewed interest in Iran’s deep cultural ties with the subcontinent.
Enormous protests have erupted across Pakistan against the US-Israeli war, and not just by Shia Muslims who revered Khamenei as their religious leader.
The Pakistani government was swift to criticise the killing of Khamenei, while India – a longtime ally of Iran – has failed to do so.
Perhaps in response to this, and to the Indian government’s strong ties with Israel, in the past week a flurry of articles have emerged in the Indian national media highlighting the country’s deep shared heritage with Iran.
A shared history
This shared heritage has been largely forgotten in the subcontinent. Most people can’t speak Persian and schools tend not to teach the language, a legacy of reforms during British rule that promoted English as the subcontinent’s lingua franca.
In Pakistan in the 1980s, the government of General Zia-ul-Haq embarked on a drive to replace Persian vocabulary in Urdu, a language formed from a fusion of Persian and Hindustani, with some Arabic words – hence “Allah Hafiz” as the term for goodbye becoming more common than the Persian “Khuda Hafiz”.
More recently in India, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has sought to de-emphasise and in many cases erase the Muslim aspects of India’s heritage.
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