Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal slips a measuring tape around prophecy and pulls hard: don’t appraise a religious vision by its private ecstasies or metaphysical claims, judge it by what it manufactures in public. The pivot is “therefore,” the word that turns mysticism into accountability. A prophet’s “experience” is not treated as untouchable revelation but as a force with outputs: a “type of manhood” and a “cultural world.” That framing is modern in the most bracing sense, close to pragmatism and social psychology, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to armchair theology. If a message can’t be read in the lived character it generates, it doesn’t get to demand obedience on credit.

The loaded phrase is “manhood.” In Iqbal’s era, it signals more than masculinity; it’s moral stamina, selfhood, agency. He’s writing as a Muslim poet-philosopher under late colonial pressure, watching traditions get reduced either to ritual fossil or to a defensive identity badge. His intent is to rescue religion from both: the private, pietistic retreat and the hollow public slogan. A genuine prophetic spark should produce khudi (selfhood) robust enough to create, not just comply.

Subtext: this is also a test that can indict Muslims as much as it can vindicate Islam. If the “cultural world” that “sprung out” of a message becomes stagnant, unjust, or servile, the problem may not be the prophecy but our degraded reception of it. Iqbal’s criterion is ruthless: revelation earns its authority by the human beings it forms and the civilization it makes possible.