Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal is smuggling a manifesto into a neat little syllogism: if poetry’s job is to “make men,” then it inherits the authority once reserved for prophets. That verb choice matters. “Make” doesn’t mean entertain, decorate, or even console; it means form - forging character, will, and moral posture. In Iqbal’s world, the poem isn’t a private aesthetic object. It’s a public instrument, meant to produce a certain kind of human being capable of action.

Calling poetry the “heir of prophecy” is deliberately audacious, but it’s not mere self-flattery. It’s a claim about what happens when a culture’s traditional sources of guidance falter under colonial pressure, modernity’s disorientations, and the erosion of shared metaphysical certainty. Prophecy, in its classical sense, doesn’t just predict; it calls, warns, reorganizes values. Iqbal implies that in an age when literal prophets are absent, the poet must take up the work of moral imagination: naming what is worth longing for, what is worth resisting, and what kind of self can endure history.

The subtext is also polemical: poetry that doesn’t reshape the reader is, by his standard, incomplete. Iqbal’s own era - British India, rising nationalism, debates over reform in Muslim societies - demanded language that could galvanize without reducing life to slogans. This line positions poetry as the bridge between vision and discipline: prophecy’s fire, delivered through art’s rhythm, ambiguity, and emotional voltage.