Reason, Purpose, and Prototype: Iqbal’s Vision for the Engineer

Today, 9 November, marks the 149th birthday of Muhammad Iqbal. Pakistan will mark it with recitations, seminars and the usual portraits. Few of those events will ask what the poet has to say to the people on whom the country’s future most visibly depends: its engineers.

A caveat first. Iqbal wrote no poem called “The Engineer.” He was a philosopher and lawyer, trained at Cambridge and Munich, and his doctorate was on the development of metaphysics in Persia. But across the main collections he published between 1915 and 1938, one concern recurs: what it means to make things, and what making does to the maker. That is the profession’s central question, and few poets have pressed it harder.

The foundation is Asrar-e-Khudi (1915), his Persian poem on the self. Iqbal’s claim is that a person becomes real through action, by taking the world as raw material and shaping it. He had no patience for passivity dressed up as piety or humility. The world, in this poem, is unfinished, and the human being is its collaborator. An engineer who has absorbed this does not treat a failing grid or a flooded valley as fate. He treats it as a problem that someone has to solve.

Iqbal keeps coming back to figures who attack matter with will. The best known is Farhad, the legendary mountain-cutter of Persian romance, who in the classical telling carves through rock for love. Iqbal draws on the broader tradition of defiant labor against stone, and I would encourage readers to check exactly where in his verse each such reference appears, since I won’t guess at poem titles. But the point survives any citation: for Iqbal, resistance from the material world is not a reason to stop. It is the occasion for skill.

He is equally known for the Shaheen, the falcon that builds no nest and lives on mountain heights. It appears heavily in Bal-e-Jibril (1935) and again in his later Urdu work. Schoolchildren learn it as a symbol of courage. Read it as an engineer would, and it describes a temperament: independent, exacting, unwilling to settle for inherited comforts. The Shaheen does not wait for permission to rise.

But Iqbal did not worship technology, and this is the half of the story that gets lost in speeches. He had watched Europe’s industrial civilization up close, and his verse is full of unease about what happens when power outruns purpose. Reason without love, in his telling, produces cleverness that serves appetite. Machinery can make a society rich in instruments and thin in conscience. His targets were never tools themselves. They were the hollowing out of the person using them.

Javid Nama (1932), his Persian epic of a journey through the heavens with Rumi as guide, gives this critique its widest frame. Moving through the spheres, Iqbal meets voices commenting on the failures of modern civilization, including its materialism and its faith in knowledge detached from higher purpose. Engineers reading it today will recognize arguments that now arrive under new names: sustainability, responsible technology, the ethics of weapons and surveillance.

His prose points the same direction. In The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, published in 1930 from lectures he delivered in India, Iqbal argues that the spirit of observation and experiment is central to a living civilization. He credits earlier Muslim thinkers with advancing empirical method, and he laments that his own community had let that energy fade into mere preservation. For him, guarding old knowledge without extending it was a slow form of loss.

What would it mean for engineering education in Pakistan to take this seriously?

First, it would reverse the habit of imitation. Our programs lean heavily on borrowed textbooks and examinations that reward reproduction, which is precisely the passivity Iqbal attacked. Students should spend real time on real problems, such as a village water scheme, a factory’s wasted energy or a failing municipal system, where the answer is not in the back of the book.

Second, it would change what we reward. If marks depend on recalling derivations, students will recall derivations. Assessment should value the sharpness of a question, the originality of an approach and the honesty of an analysis that admits its limits. A failed prototype, carefully dissected, is worth more than a perfect copy.

Third, it would restore the humanities to technical training. Iqbal never separated the maker from the moral being. An engineer who can optimize a system but has never asked whom it serves has been trained only halfway. Philosophy, history and literature are not decoration on a technical degree. They are where students learn to ask what their work is for.

Skeptics will say Pakistan’s graduates need jobs, not poetry. That is fair, and nothing here argues against rigor or employability. But it mistakes the order of things. Iqbal’s insight was that capability follows character: a person who believes the world is workable and feels responsible for working it will learn the technique, while a person trained only in technique may never develop that belief. The engineers who create employment, not merely compete for it, tend to be of the first kind.

Iqbal asked a great deal of the individual, and he would have asked a great deal of the engineer. Build, he would say, but know why. Master matter, but do not let it master you. Take the inherited knowledge seriously enough to extend it.

If we want to honor him on his birthday, we could do worse than to ask, in every engineering classroom, whether the students in it are being taught to make something new.