Muhammad Iqbal — the poet read and loved across the subcontinent — wrote often of the shaheen, the falcon. For him it was never only a bird. It was his image of a self that lives by its own nature: self-reliant, unhurried by the crowd, at home in high and difficult places, and built — simply built — to fly.
We have gathered seven of his couplets here because, read slowly, they say something a parent of a nonverbal or autistic child is rarely told kindly: that to move through the world differently is not to move through it wrongly.
None of this is medical advice, and none of it is a method. It is older and quieter than that — a few lines of poetry to keep nearby, for the nights that need them. Each couplet links to its full page, with the original Urdu and a recording, on Iqbal for All.
One · The same sky
Parwaz hai dono ki isi ek faza mein —
Kargas ka jahan aur hai, shaheen ka jahan aur
“Both take flight in this very same sky — yet the vulture’s world is one thing, and the falcon’s another.”
Your child lives under the same sky as every other child — the same school, the same street, the same family table. And still their world is genuinely a different world: differently lit, differently loud, differently ordered. Iqbal is not ranking the two birds. He is saying, plainly, that two beings can share one sky and not share one world — and that this is simply true, not a fault to be corrected. Much of the exhaustion of these years comes from being told your child should experience the shared sky in the shared way. They are flying. It is their own world they are flying through.
Bal-e-Jibril, 1935 · Read this couplet →
Two · Flight is your work
Tu shaheen hai parwaz hai kaam tera —
Tere saamne aasman aur bhi hain
“You are a falcon — flight is your work. There are still more skies in front of you.”
On the hard days it can feel as though your child’s way of moving through the world is a problem to be corrected — a list of things not yet done the usual way. Iqbal turns it over. To the falcon he says: flight is your work. Not your deficit, not your delay — your work, the thing you are for. And then the line that matters most at 11pm: there are still more skies ahead. Wherever your child is today is not the ceiling. The sky has not closed. It was never going to.
Bal-e-Jibril, 1935 · Read this couplet →
Three · Not the palace dome
Nahin tera nasheman qasr-e-sultani ke gumbad par —
Tu shaheen hai, basera kar paharon ki chattanon mein
“Your nest is not on the dome of a royal palace. You are a falcon — make your dwelling on the rocks of the mountains.”
So much of the worry is really one worry: my child does not fit the tidy place. The standard classroom, the milestone chart, the smooth expected path — the palace dome, polished and admired. Iqbal says, gently, that the falcon was never meant to live there. Its home is the bare mountain rock — harder, wilder, and entirely right for what it is. If your child is not at home in the polished places, that is not the falcon failing. That is the falcon knowing, before anyone told it, where it actually belongs.
Bal-e-Jibril, 1935 · Read this couplet →
Four · The one who truly sees
Hazaron saal nargis apni be-noori pe roti hai —
Badi mushkil se hota hai chaman mein deedavar paida
“For thousands of years the narcissus weeps over its own sightlessness — only with great difficulty is a truly seeing one born in the garden.”
Iqbal’s word is deedavar — the one who truly sees. He says such a one is rare, and arrives in the garden only after a long, patient wait. Parents of children like ours are asked, constantly, to read a child by what is visible on the surface this week. This couplet asks for the opposite patience: to assume the sight is already there, behind the silence, behind the delay — and that being slow to show the world is not the same as having nothing to show. Presume the seeing. It is almost always already there, waiting for its own time to be believed.
Bang-e-Dara, 1924 · Read this couplet →
Five · The petal and the diamond
Phool ki patti se kat sakta hai heere ka jigar —
Mard-e-nadaan par kalaam-e-narm-o-nazuk be-asar
“A diamond’s heart can be cut by the petal of a flower — yet on a foolish man, soft and gentle words have no effect.”
Iqbal’s image is startling: the hardest thing there is, a diamond, yields not to a hammer but to a petal. Force is not the strong tool here. Gentleness is. On the days when nothing seems to be working and the temptation is to push harder, this couplet is a quiet correction. The patient, soft, unhurried approach is not you giving up or going easy. It is, in Iqbal’s reckoning, the approach with the real power in it — the one that reaches the diamond. Your gentleness is not the lesser path. It is the one that cuts through.
Bang-e-Dara, 1924 · Read this couplet →
Six · Do not despair
Na ho naumeed, naumeedi zawal-e-ilm-o-irfan hai —
Umeed-e-mard-e-momin hai Khuda ke razdanon mein
“Do not despair — despair is the downfall of knowledge and insight. The hope of a person of conviction stands among those who know the deepest secrets.”
It is the most reasonable feeling at the end of a long day, and Iqbal does not scold it. He says something more useful: that despair is not only painful, it is costly — it is where knowledge and insight themselves come undone. When you have lost hope you stop noticing, stop trying the next small thing, stop seeing what your child is actually doing. Hope, here, is not cheerfulness and not pretending. It is a discipline — the deliberate choice to keep your eyes open — and Iqbal treats it as the ground everything else is built on. You do not have to feel hopeful tonight. You only have to not let go.
Bal-e-Jibril, 1935 · Read this couplet →
Seven · A child’s prayer
Lab pe aati hai dua ban ke tamanna meri —
Zindagi shama ki surat ho khudaya meri
“My longing rises to my lips as a prayer: O God, may my life be like a candle’s flame.”
This last one is different. Iqbal wrote it as a child’s prayer — a poem meant to be said by a young voice — and generations of children across the subcontinent have. The wish in it is simple: let my life be like the flame of a candle. Not the brightest light, not the loudest. A candle — small, steady, and giving warmth to the dark around it. It is a gentle thing to hold on a hard night: that this is what a life can be for, and that your child, in their own way and their own time, is already learning to be exactly that kind of light.
Bang-e-Dara, 1924 · Read this couplet →
If a couplet here meant something to you, it has a fuller home. Iqbal for All carries the originals in Urdu and Hindi, with recordings — a cross-faith library of the poet, made for everyone.