PAYĀM-E MAŠREQ, title of a collection of Persian verse, by
Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal begins his Urdu preface to the work with
the following words: “The Payām-e Mašreq owes its inspiration to
the Western Divān of Goethe, the German philosopher of life,
about which the Israelite poet of Germany, Heine, says: ‘This is
a bouquet presented by the West to the East as a token of regard
... This Divān bears testimony to the fact that the West, being
dissatisfied with its weak and cold spiritual existence, now
seeks warmth from the bosom of the East’” (Kolliyāt-e Eqbāl,
Fārsi, p. 173). In other words, Iqbal clearly intended his third
large-scale Persian work as a response, and in many ways as a
tribute, to the West-Östlicher Divan of Goethe, a poet for whom
he had a profound admiration, and with whose verse he had become
acquainted during his stay in Germany in 1907. It would,
however, be wrong to imagine that Iqbal’s work was (as it is
sometimes assumed) written in imitation of Goethe’s Divan, even
though it does contain