Allama Muhammad Iqbal Studies in China : Liu Shuxiong - Peking University

Iqbal and His Asrar-i-Khudi By Liu Shuxiong 

Esteemed Professors and Scholars, Ladies and Gentlemen, 

I am honored to join the Center for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar and pleased to have a talk on Iqbal. I am a teacher of Urdu in the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University and I would like to take this opportunity to briefly introduce Iqbal studies in China and exchange views on Iqbal, a Muslim poet-philosopher of South Asia. I define Iqbal as a Muslim poet-philosopher of South Asia rather than of India or Pakistan, because he may be considered as a poet of both countries. My today’s talk consists of three topics. They are: 1. Iqbal Studies in China, 2. Iqbal’s Personality, 3. His philosophical Masnavi Asrar-i-Khudi (Secrets of the Self)

Iqbal Studies in China Among numerous Chinese scholars of Islamic literature and culture, there is a group of scholars, who are interested in Iqbal studies and have published a considerable number of papers and articles on various Chinese magazines and periodicals. They also published some translations and research books. a) About translation: Selected Poems of Iqbal is the first book of Iqbal’s poems published in China in 1957. One year later, another book with the same title was published in another press. Both of them were translated into Chinese from English version, not from the original text. Twenty years later, the People’s Literature Press published Selected Poems of Iqbal on Iqbal’s centennial anniversary in 1977, which was selected and translated from Iqbal’s Urdu poems. There are 37 poems in the book. I translated and published Iqbal’s Persian Masnavi Asrar-i-Khudi in 1999. Dr. Javid Iqbal, Muhammad Iqbal's son and the Executive Vice President of Pakistan Iqbal Academy, wrote a preface entitled in a line of Iqbal Himalayas Spring Is Boiling up. He speaks highly of the translation work and expatiates on the significance of Iqbal's philosophical idea Khudi.It was in the summer of 1991 when I visited Iran together with the teachers and students of Persian language of my university, I learnt a great deal from the trip and it deepened my understanding about the Islamic culture and the life of Muslims. After coming back, I began to learn Persian in order to read Iqbal’s Persian poems directly, which had been a desire from the days when I began to study Iqbal’s Urdu poems at the beginning of 1980s and got to know that most of Iqbal’s poems were written in Persian. I finally finished the translation in 1998. Going with the translation from the original texts of Iqbal’s works, scholars also translated and introduced foreign research work in China. For example, the book Contemporary Indian Philosophy by an Indian scholar Basant Kumar was published in 1991. This book discusses seven important contemporary Indian philosophers and thinkers including Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan and Muhammad Iqbal. The translator considered these seven philosophers representing the most influencing philosophical systems of contemporary India. On the other side, a research fellow from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (abbreviated as CASS) wrote an article On Iqbal Studies Abroad and made an introduction on publications on Iqbal’s studies in South Asia, Europe, Middle East and South East Asian countries. As a result, the Chinese literary circle got to know the situation of Iqbal studies of the outside world.

Full Paper PDF :

https://southasia.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Iqbal%20and%20His%20Asrar-i-Khudi.pdf