Life & Wisdom Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal is trying to dissolve a modern nerve: the idea that religion and science are rival gangs fighting over reality. By insisting they are "identical in their final aim", he performs a rhetorical judo move. He concedes methodological difference (an olive branch to empiricism) while reclaiming the prestige of modern "process" language for faith. Religion isn’t framed as inherited dogma; it’s framed as inquiry. That single word, "processes", matters: it casts belief as active, experimental, even developmental, not a static set of answers.

The subtext is political and civilizational. Writing in the late colonial era, Iqbal is addressing Muslim societies pressed between two demands: adopt Western scientific modernity, and keep religious identity intact. He refuses the forced choice. His argument isn’t that religion can be proven in a lab; it’s that both enterprises are, at their best, truth-seeking disciplines with different tools. That lets him critique two caricatures at once: a piety that treats tradition as a substitute for thinking, and a scientism that turns method into metaphysics.

The phrase "the most real" gives away the deeper ambition. It’s not merely factual accuracy; it’s ontological weight - reality as something layered, not exhausted by measurement. Iqbal, the poet-philosopher, is smuggling a hierarchy of meaning into a sentence that sounds ecumenical. Science maps the world; religion, he suggests, tries to meet it at its deepest depth. The line works because it flatters the modern mind without surrendering the spiritual claim that reality is bigger than what we can instrument.