Iqbal creator of new paradigms

I was simply shocked when an Iqbal scholar who also happened to hold a senior position at Iqbal academy said in a published interview that Iqbal is a great poet but not a great philosopher.

I always thought like multitudes that Iqbal was a great poet philosopher, and my conviction grew more when I read along with Javidnama, The Reconstruction of Religious Thoughts in Islam. But after that shocking revelation of Iqbal scholar I started rereading the Reconstruction again and this time I found that calling Iqbal a philosopher was extremely unfair.


Like Iqbal scholar I have my own perception about all this, I think Iqbal cannot be termed only as a Poet, Philosopher, Mystic or a Sufi, to me he is an Artist. To me poet means an imaginative person, Philosopher the one who thinks he is imaginative but is one who contemplates, Mystic is the one who sees what can be imagined and Sufi is one who lives like what a Mystic imagines. But to me an Artist is one who creates from imagination a new world and Iqbal was one of those few artists who were par excellence and who is a creator of a new world, a world that did not explode at the time of creation when God pronounced Kun ( کن ) and it was, but God also wanted from His creation some creative souls who would answer the Kun with Faukoun ( فیکون ) and Artists like Iqbal took that challenge and responsibility, and the result is 9 glorious books or nine new paradigm that are nine new ways of understanding the past, the present but more importantly the future.