Time & Perspective Quote by Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Duty is doing a lot of political work here. Jinnah frames Islam less as private faith than as a disciplined civic engine: a system that "expects" performance, not merely belief. The line reads like exhortation, but its real target is collective inertia. By making obligation the key verb, he recasts Muslim identity as something proved through action and organization, not inherited sentiment. In the late-colonial moment he was operating in, that distinction mattered: a community arguing for political recognition could not afford to look like a loose cultural category. It had to behave like a people with a program.

The subtext is defensive and ambitious at once. "Justify ourselves" implies a court of judgment: history, rival communities, the British, perhaps even internal skeptics. It hints at an anxiety that Muslims have fallen short of their own narrative, that the "glorious past" has become a sheltering myth rather than a standard to meet. Jinnah uses that past as both motivation and leverage, converting nostalgia into a deadline. "Time will come soon" is not prophecy so much as mobilization rhetoric, a promise designed to create urgency and to discipline dissent by projecting inevitability.

Contextually, this is the language of nation-making before the nation is secured: moral vocabulary deployed for political consolidation. He invokes Islam not to retreat from modern politics but to justify entry into it, signaling that collective self-respect will be earned through responsibility, unity, and institutional seriousness rather than romantic reverie.