IQBAL AND SARTRE

The main thrust of the work titled "Iqbal and Sartre on Freedom and Creativity" is towards investigating the concept of freedom and creativity in the philosophies of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), a renowned poet-philosopher of the East and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), a famous French existentialist thinker and litterateur. Both influential thinkers have placed human freedom and creativity at the heart of their value-systems and dealt with the problem from an existentialist perspective. A comparison and contrast of their positions regarding freedom, an issue that has acquired new dimensions in the context of the present historic situation in which an individual's identity and freedom have been threatened by bureaucracy, technology and an all-embracing collectivism would not only be philosophically significant but contemporaneously relevant as well. This study becomes all the more interesting in view of their contrasting beliefs-Sartre is a self-professed atheist, and Iqbal is firmly committed to the Islamic faith. However, both of them are the champions of human freedom and creativity. The similarities and dissimilarities of their philosophical out-looks are equally glaring.