Science & Tech Quote by Muhammed Iqbal

Iqbal slips a quiet provocation into that calm phrase "higher religion": he is not defending dogma, he is demoting it. Religion, at its most serious, becomes a method - "a search for a larger life" - measured less by creeds than by what it does to the self. The line plays a clever reversal on modern prestige: science is usually cast as the grown-up in the room, the discipline that finally learned to trust evidence. Iqbal counters that religion, when it is alive rather than inherited, has always been an empirical project of its own: grounded in experience, not hearsay.

The subtext is a critique of two enemies at once. On one side, a fossilized religiosity that confuses repetition with truth; on the other, a colonial-era confidence that treats Western scientific rationality as the only legitimate form of knowing. By insisting that religion "recognized the necessity of experience... long before science learnt to do so", Iqbal is not dunking on science so much as reminding it of its own limits - and reminding religious readers that revelation without lived verification is just bureaucracy with metaphysics.

Context matters: writing in the early 20th century, amid Muslim political decline, European domination, and internal calls for reform, Iqbal argues for a reconstruction of religious thought that can face modernity without becoming its mimic. Experience here points toward the Sufi and philosophical traditions of inward testing, ethical transformation, and existential risk. He frames religion as a laboratory of meaning - one where the experiment is the human life itself.