Remnants of Eternal Possibility

Abstract This article presents a new way of considering the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) by arguing that Iqbal's lyric poetry, particularly the ghazal, should be read as a mode of expression that sets out its own methodology for negotiating the new demands colonial modernity made of the Muslim subject's relationship to tradition. Through a close reading and analysis of a Persian ghazal from Iqbal's 1923 Payām-i Mashriq (Message of/from the East), this article proposes that Iqbal's ghazals offer a lyric method in which the resources of the Persianate poetic tradition navigate these demands on the self and its representation. With an analysis of formal and rhetorical features, mainly apostrophe and the imperative voice, as well as a consideration of Iqbal's philosophy of time and the representation of temporality in the lyric, one can see how the poem reorients the connection between tradition and modernity not as historical trajectory, but as co-constituted in lyric time in an ambivalent, mutually generative relationship.