Faith & Spirit Quote by Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal is picking a fight with the kind of religion that hides behind diagrams. By insisting on the "immediacy" of mystic experience, he refuses to let God be quarantined in abstractions, safe for theologians and philosophers to debate but impossible for ordinary life to touch. The provocation is in the comparison: we know God "just as we know other objects". Not as a hypothesis, not as a conclusion, but as a direct datum of consciousness. That phrasing yanks divinity out of the library and drops it into perception.

The subtext is also political and civilizational. Writing in a late-colonial milieu where modern education often arrived packaged with European rationalism, Iqbal is neither anti-intellectual nor anti-modern; he is anti-reduction. He’s warning that when faith becomes a "system of concepts", it starts behaving like any closed ideology: internally consistent, externally dead. Mysticism, for him, is not escapist vapor but a claim about epistemology - what counts as knowledge, and who gets to call something real.

As a poet, he understands that language can either point or replace. "Mathematical entity" is not a cheap jab at science; it’s a critique of treating God like a solved problem. Iqbal wants religion to remain an encounter, not a model. The line works because it reframes devotion as experience before argument, making spirituality sound less like submission to doctrine and more like contact with the world - immediate, risky, and impossible to fully domesticate.