Time & Perspective Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal is dangling a provocation: treat history like a science and you don`t just get better timelines, you get better humans. Coming from a poet, that pivot toward "scientific treatment" isn`t a surrender to cold empiricism; it`s a bid to discipline a culture tempted by nostalgia, fatalism, or inherited slogans. He wants history to function less as a shrine and more as a laboratory where societies test ideas against consequences.

The phrase "wider experience" is doing quiet work. Scientific history, for Iqbal, stretches the self beyond parochial memory: you learn patterns across civilizations, not just the comforting myths of your own. "Greater maturity of practical reason" signals his deeper target: moral and political adulthood. He is implicitly criticizing communities that live off reverent repetition rather than judgment, replacing reactive sentiment with deliberation about means, ends, and trade-offs.

Then he vaults to "life and time", where his metaphysics shows through. Iqbal wrote in a colonial moment when Muslim intellectuals were pressured to either romanticize the past or mimic Europe. His answer is neither: understand time as dynamic, creative, and unfinished. A "scientific" history makes time real not as a museum corridor but as a force that reshapes agency. The subtext is reformist: if time is alive, your tradition can be alive too, but only if you stop treating history as destiny and start treating it as evidence.