[2][3] His father, Faizur Rahman Ahmed, was a police officer who was killed in the Liberation War of Bangladesh.

[citation needed] He spent his childhood in different parts of Bangladesh because of the transferring nature of his father's job.

[4] His younger brother, Ahsan Habib, is a cartoonist who is serving as the editor of the satirical magazine, Unmad.

[8] After obtaining his PhD degree, Iqbal worked as a post-doctoral researcher at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1983 to 1988 (mainly on Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics).

He eventually abandoned the idea of working there, and accepted an offer from SUST,[13] where he joined the computer science and engineering department and became its head.

[16] However they withdrew their resignation letters on the next day after the authority decided to go on with holding combined admission tests.

[13] While studying at the University of Dhaka, Iqbal's story "Kopotronik Bhalobasha" ("Copotronic Love") was published in the weekly Bichitra.

Later he wrote a series of Kopotronik stories and published them as a collection titled Copotronic Sukh Dukkhu.

[29] Iqbal survived a stabbing attack in the head on 3 March 2018 in a prize-giving ceremony in SUST campus in Sylhet.

[47] He received criticism for endorsing anti-Islamic activities referenced in Shah Ahmad Shafi's open letter named An Open Letter from Shah Ahmad Shafi to the Government and the Public related to the Shahbag protests in 2013.

However, after the publication of the "Science (Investigative Reading)" textbook, accusations of plagiarism and mechanical translation arose.

This comment led to criticism on social media, and on the same day, several bookstores in Bangladesh, including Rokomari, stopped selling his books.