Muhammad Iqbal was born at Sialkot in 1877, studied at Lahore, Cambridge and Munich, and practised law at Lahore while writing the poetry that made him the national poet of Pakistan.
He wrote in Urdu and Persian. Saare Jahan Se Achha, written in 1904, is sung in India as a patriotic song about undivided India. Shikwa and Jawab-e-Shikwa, the complaint to God and God's answer, are among the most recited poems in Urdu.
In his 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League at Allahabad he proposed the consolidation of the north-western Muslim-majority provinces into a single state within or without the British empire. That address is treated in Pakistan as the intellectual origin of the country and its interpretation is argued about in detail.
He died in 1938, nine years before Partition. His 1930 proposal for a single north-western Muslim state would have excluded the Ambala Division and perhaps other districts where non-Muslims predominated, so it did propose detaching part of Punjab, though not the partition that came in 1947.
A Punjabi who wrote in Urdu and Persian and hardly at all in Punjabi is the national poet of a country whose largest province is Punjabi-speaking. That is not incidental to the position of the Punjabi language in Pakistan.
His doctorate at Munich was on the development of metaphysics in Persia, and the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, delivered as lectures at Madras and Hyderabad at the end of the 1920s, is the work he took most seriously himself. It is philosophy rather than verse and it is far less read than any of the poems.
He was knighted in 1922 and sat in the Punjab Legislative Council from 1926. He was inside the province's constitutional politics for the whole period the Unionists ran it, and the relationship between his position and theirs is a good deal more complicated than either side's later account of him allows.
He was a Punjabi who wrote almost nothing in Punjabi. That is the ordinary condition of the Punjabi literary elite of his generation on both sides.