PM Khan misquotes Iqbal, admits mistake after social media backlash
In a tweet on Saturday (June 7), Prime Minister Imran Khan got it wrong again. He misquoted poet and philosopher Allama Iqbal but admitted his mistake after he was criticised on social media.
The premier had tweeted an image with a poem and a picture of Allama Iqbal, attributing the poem to him.
This poem by Iqbal reflects how I try to lead my life. I urge our youth to understand and absorb the poem of the great Iqbal and I guarantee them that it will release their great God-given potential that we all possess as His greatest creation Ashraf ul Mukhluqat. pic.twitter.com/oyxkTlMrdc
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) June 6, 2020
“This poem by Iqbal reflects how I try to lead my life. I urge our youth to understand and absorb the poem of the great Iqbal and I guarantee them that it will release their great God-given potential that we all possess as His greatest creation Ashraf ul Mukhluqat,” he captioned the picture.
Within minutes, hundreds of people corrected the PM and told him to fact check his tweets before sharing them.
Shortly after the backlash, the prime minister accepted his mistake but said that he still stood by the message of the poem irrespective of its author.
I stand corrected – this is not Allama Iqbal’s poem but the message conveyed is what I have stood by and tried to follow and if our youth absorbs this message it will release their great God- given potential that all of us possess as His greatest creation Ashraf ul Mukhluqat. https://t.co/SvDVrakc5d
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) June 6, 2020
Following this, Iqbal has become a trend on the social media website.
On the other hand, another poet, Asad Maroof, who has written a similar poem to the one the PM shared that he started getting calls that the premier had shared his poem and misquoted him.
Maroof told SAMAA TV that although the poems were similar, it wasn’t his. “What the prime minister shared is a nazm while what I wrote was a ghazal,” he clarified.
Previously, PM Khan had also misattributed a quote by Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore to Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Jibran.
Article source: https://www.samaa.tv/news/pakistan/2020/06/pm-khan-misquotes-iqbal-admits-mistake-after-social-media-backlash/