Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

Freedom here isn’t a slogan; it’s a spiritual training regimen. Iqbal’s “Ego” isn’t the petty, Instagram-ready self. In his philosophy of khudi, the self is a real, developing force - something you forge. The first move is bracingly modern: the ego is “partly free, partly determined.” He refuses the easy comfort of pure fate and the equally easy romance of total autonomy. You’re constrained by history, body, society, impulse. You’re also responsible. That tension is the engine of growth.

The line that jolts the contemporary reader is the pivot: freedom increases not by dissolving the self into some cosmic blur, but by “approaching the Individual who is most free: God.” Iqbal deliberately uses “Individual” for God, a word that sounds almost political, even existential. The subtext is a rebuttal to both colonial-era fatalism and mystical quietism: if God is the highest agency, then the route to human agency is alignment, not escape. Nearness to God is not submission-as-erasure; it’s submission-as-intensification, where discipline, purpose, and moral clarity expand what the self can choose and become.

Context matters: Iqbal is writing in a world where Muslims in British India are negotiating modernity, power, and identity. This sentence reads like a compact manifesto: don’t accept determinism as an alibi, don’t mistake freedom for drift, and don’t let modern individualism monopolize the language of selfhood. For Iqbal, the fullest self is the most answerable one.