The Mosque of Cordoba (poem)

This article refers to the Urdu poem by Muhammad Iqbal. For the building, see Cathedral-Mosque of Córdoba

The Mosque of Cordoba (Urdu: مسجد قرطبہ‎, translit. Masjid-e Qurtaba) is an eight-stanza Urdu poem by Muhammad Iqbal, written circa 1932 and published in his 1935/6 collection Bāl-e Jibrīl ('The Wing of Gabriel'). It has been described as "one of his most famous pieces" and a "masterpiece". It has also been compared to Ahmad Shawqi's Arabic poem Siniyyah for its locating in Islamic Spain "the embodiment of the ideal, non-territorial Islamic nation" that is, in both poems' world-views, "the source of world history."

Iqbal travelled to England in 1931 to participate in the second and third Round Table Conferences in London. He returned to India via Spain (as well as France and Italy), and it was at this time that he visited the eponymous mosque, though by that time it had long since been converted to a cathedral. Nevertheless, it was at what has been described as one of the "high points of his emotional life" that he composed the majority of the poem, as its subtitle clearly indicates:

The visit must indeed have inspired him, as the resultant poem is one of the very few occasions in which Iqbal praises art or architecture. Annemarie Schimmel has observed,

The poem is written in the rajaz metre, with the following pattern of long (–) and short ( ˘ ) syllables divided into four feet:

with an optional caesura or additional short syllable at the end of each line.

The eight stanzas are thematically quite distinct, but linked together in a natural progression of ideas.

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