Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal turns a lofty aesthetic question into a recruitment pitch: if poetry’s job is to "make men" - to shape character, courage, and collective purpose - then the poet isn’t a decorator of feelings but a builder of people. The line is engineered to collapse the distance between art and action. "Object" sounds almost clinical, as if poetry can be judged by outcomes, not ornament. Then he flips the prestige hierarchy. Poetry, so often treated as a private indulgence, becomes the "heir" to prophecy, a public office charged with moral direction.

The subtext is a rebuttal to both colonial modernity and decadent romanticism. In a world where imported institutions and local fatalism could leave Muslim societies feeling spiritually exhausted, Iqbal insists that imagination is not escapism; it is a technology of selfhood. His larger project - khudi, the cultivation of an active, self-possessed ego - depends on language that can ignite will, not merely describe sadness. That’s why "make men" lands with a deliberately gendered, bracing force: it evokes formation, discipline, and agency, not self-expression.

"Prophecy" here isn’t a claim to supernatural status so much as a claim to function. Prophets reorder a community’s sense of time: they name what is rotten, what is possible, what must be sacrificed. Iqbal argues poetry can do the same when it refuses to be merely pretty. It can diagnose a civilization’s malaise and draft a new horizon - not by issuing policy, but by changing the kind of person who could carry it out.