Iqbal’s Falcons and Nightingales: Metaphor, Modernity, and the Poetics of Islam in South Asia

Abstract Recent scholarship in Islamic studies has proposed ambiguity, especially in the form of literary metaphor and paradox, as integral to pre-modern Islam. However, literary ambiguity has also afforded an interpretive lens for articulations of modern Muslim identity. This article analyzes how two metaphors for the self – the nightingale and the falcon – function in Persian and Urdu ghazal s of Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), for whom the resources of pre-modern Sufi poetry, especially ambiguity and paradox, become a method of meaning-making for the modern era. Iqbal’s use of these metaphors presents a nuanced view of the tensions between the inheritances of tradition and the demands of modernity for South Asian Muslims in the colonial era, and allows us to attend to the intersections of religion, literature, and politics in modern Islamic thought from the point of view of languages, genres, and geographies that remain marginal to the field of Islamic Studies.