Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

A self-portrait as a riddle, then a dare: Iqbal casts the speaker as "hidden meaning" precisely to refuse being pinned down by language, doctrine, or the tidy labels of empire and orthodoxy. The line "made to defy / The grasp of words" isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-capture. In Iqbal’s world, words can become cages when they harden into slogans, when religion becomes mere recitation, when identity becomes a bureaucratic category. His speaker slips the net and "walk[s] away" - not into chaos, but into agency.

The charge of the passage is the coupling of "free will and destiny". Iqbal doesn’t pick a side in the old debate; he stages their collision inside the self. Destiny is real (history, God, the weight of inherited conditions), but it’s not permission to be passive. Free will is real, but not the shallow freedom of consumer choice. He’s arguing for khudi, the cultivated selfhood that earns its autonomy by discipline, risk, and moral purpose.

"Living, revolutionary clay" is the most modern image here. Clay suggests humility and materiality - made stuff, not pure spirit - yet it’s alive, still wet, still shapeable. Revolution, then, isn’t a one-time rupture but an ongoing act of remaking. In the context of early 20th-century Muslim reform movements and anti-colonial ferment, Iqbal turns lyric poetry into a political technology: an insistence that a people, like a person, can refuse being finished by someone else’s hands.