TOMORROW is the 63rd anniversary of the death of Dr Sir Mohammed Iqbal.

The Muslim scholar and internationally acclaimed philosopher poet, simply known as "Allama Iqbal" died on April 21, 1938, at the age of 61.

Allama Iqbal is hailed as a national hero of Pakistan, second only to Quaid-E-Azam, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, although he died almost a decade before the birth of Pakistan in August 1947.

This is because Iqbal was the spiritual founder of Pakistan and had worked for political unity among the Muslim nation of India and tried to reformulate the basic ideas of Islamic theology in the academic language of the modern world.

In 1930, he proposed the idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of northwest India, where they were in a clear majority, to safeguard their Islamic identity.

His brand of Muslim nationalism was based on faith, Islamic history and culture rather than on race or geography.

Iqbal was born in the Punjabi town of Sialkot and educated there and in Lahore.

He also spent three years in the United Kingdom at the universities of London and Cambridge in the early years of the last century.

He qualified as a barrister and earned his doctorate of philosophy from Munich, Germany, and was knighted by the British Crown and has many books to his name.

Consequently, many academic institutions and university departments are named after him, including the Iqbal Chair at Cambridge.

He is buried in a beautiful mausoleum at the entrance to the Moghal built Badshahi Mosque in Lahore.

A RECENT study by the Department of Transport makes disturbing reading for the Asian community, as according to it "disproportionately higher numbers of Asian children are involved in road accidents than other groups".

The study carried out in Birmingham shows that a distinctly higher number of the 6,000 children killed or seriously injured each year are of Asian origin.

This may be because Asian parents either fail to supervise their children properly or are overprotective, giving the children few opportunities to learn about road safety.

The study recommends that the Asian families should improve their knowledge of road conditions and road safety.

To this end free road safety advice leaflets have been published in Asian languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Gujrati and Bengali and should be available from local councils.

However, at the time of going to press both Wycombe District Council and the Road Safety Department of Bucks County Council had yet to receive these leaflets from the DoT.

The leaflets are also to be distributed to community centres and mosques.