Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal’s most provocative move here is pretending to step out of the very room he helped build. When a figure canonized as a poet insists he’s “never considered” himself one and claims “no interest” in artistry, it isn’t false modesty so much as a strategic refusal of the decorative. He’s drawing a line between poetry as ornament and poetry as instrument: verse as a vehicle for argument, awakening, and moral pressure rather than a private aesthetic hobby.

The subtext is a rebuke to the salon version of literature that was fashionable in late colonial South Asia, where “poetic artistry” could mean virtuosity unmoored from consequence. Iqbal’s era was saturated with the politics of language and culture: Persian as a prestige inheritance, Urdu as a public medium, English as administrative power. Against that backdrop, to disclaim “artistry” is to reject the idea that the poet’s job is simply to sound beautiful within inherited forms. It’s also a way of reclassifying himself: not an entertainer, not a lyric confessor, but a thinker using rhythm as a delivery system.

There’s a slightly mischievous power play in it, too. Only someone with undeniable command of poetic craft can afford to act bored by craft. The line works because it swaps the reader’s expected hierarchy. The poem isn’t aiming to be admired; it’s aiming to do something to you. In Iqbal’s hands, that “no interest” becomes a demand: don’t grade me on elegance, measure me by the change I’m trying to provoke.