Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal drops a quiet provocation: treat Christianity less as timeless revelation than as an organism with a life cycle. Calling its role a "biological mission" borrows the prestige of modern psychology and evolutionary thinking to argue that religions function as adaptive systems, not just metaphysical claims. The line is doing two things at once: diagnosing a Western faith as historically "spent", and positioning modernity as a perceptual break so severe that even sincere believers can no longer access what Christianity once meant in its native environment.

The subtext is an anti-nostalgia warning. Iqbal is saying: stop pretending you can retrieve the early Christian experience by reading it through contemporary categories - the "modern man" has been rewired by secular institutions, scientific authority, and a different moral economy. Under the newer psychology, faith becomes legible as a response to particular civilizational needs (cohesion, ethics, inwardness), and once those needs are met or replaced, the form loses explanatory power. That is not simply an insult to Christianity; it's an indictment of the modern habit of flattening the past into a museum piece, intelligible on our terms.

Context matters: Iqbal is a poet-philosopher writing in the late colonial period, watching Europe export both power and ideas, including the social sciences that claimed to explain religion away. He uses that language strategically, turning it back on Europe to argue that spiritual traditions rise and fall with historical conditions. The sting is that modernity isn't neutral; it's a filter that makes certain kinds of meaning - especially sacramental, communal, metaphysical meaning - nearly unreadable.