پس چہ باید کرد اے اقوام شرق

ہر کہ آیات خدا بیند، حر استاصل این حکمت ز حکم "انظر" است

English translation

He who sees God’s signs is a free man; the basis of this wisdom is God’s order: ‘Look’.
(‘Signs of God’, ayat-i Khuda here and ‘light of God’, anwar-i Haqq in a subsequent verse, signifying the world of phenomena, imply Iqbal’s belief in Pan-psychism. ‘The world, in all its details, from the mechanical movement of what we call the atom of matter to the free movement of thought in the human ego, is the self-revelation of the ‘Great I am’. Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is an ego’ (Reconstruction)

(‘Look’, unzur, refers to the Qur’anic verse (17-20): ‘See they not the clouds how they are created? And the heaven, how it is raised high. And the mountains, how they are fixed! And the earth, how it is spread out’… The point Iqbal wishes to emphasize here is that in science when we are dealing with concrete objects of the material world, we are, as a matter of fact, dealing with an aspect of God’s behaviour and, therefore, Iqbal says: ‘The scientific observer of nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer’ (Reconstruction).

Translated by Bashir Ahmad Dar

Urdu translation

جو بھی حق تعالے کی آیات دیکھتا ہے وہ مرد حر ہے، حکمت اشیاء کائنات 'انظر' کے حکم پر مبنی ہے۔

About this couplet

This is couplet 9 of 65 in “⁨پس چہ باید کرد اے اقوام شرق⁩” (O Nations Of East), from Allama Muhammad Iqbal's Persian book Pas Chih Bayad Kard (⁨پس چہ بائد کرد اے اقوامِ شرق⁩), published in 1936.

Read it in the poem

۹ / ۶۵