Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal’s line tries to make metaphysics feel less like a fog and more like anatomy. “Divine life” isn’t pictured as a distant ruler or a static, clockmaker god; it’s imagined as something intimately present, distributed, and responsive - the way a soul is said to inhabit a body without being reducible to any single organ. The analogy is doing strategic work: it preserves transcendence (the soul is not just flesh) while insisting on immanence (the soul is nowhere absent in a living body). That balance is central to Iqbal’s project.

The subtext is a quiet rebellion against two dead ends he saw in his moment: a fatalistic religiosity that turns God into an excuse for human passivity, and a mechanistic modernity that drains the cosmos of meaning. By framing the divine as “in touch,” Iqbal emphasizes relationship, motion, and attention. It’s a God-world link that implies feedback, not mere command; an invitation to agency, not surrender.

Context matters: Iqbal is writing in the pressure chamber of late colonial India, when Muslims were negotiating identity, political power, and the seductions of Western scientific rationalism. His poetry and philosophy (especially in Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam) repeatedly argue for a dynamic universe where the self (khudi) matures through action. This line smuggles that ethic into an image: if the universe is a “body” suffused with living contact, then human striving isn’t noise in an indifferent machine; it’s participation in a vital order.