Iqbal was not a poet who ignored science. He read the new physics of his time with real attention, and it shows most clearly in his prose masterwork, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, delivered as lectures and published around 1930 — the same years Einstein's relativity was reshaping the educated world's picture of reality.
Iqbal admired Einstein and took relativity seriously. But on one point he pushed back hard. Einstein's physics treats time as a fourth dimension woven into space — 'spacetime'. Iqbal saw a consequence he could not accept: if time is just another dimension of space, then the future is already laid out, as fixed and finished as the past, and genuine novelty becomes an illusion.
For Iqbal that was unliveable. His entire philosophy rests on a universe still being made, on real creative time — the lived, flowing duration he had drawn from Bergson. So in the Reconstruction he made the distinction precisely: he honoured relativity as physics while refusing to let it become a metaphysics that froze the future and emptied human striving of meaning.
This is a model of how a thinking person can meet science — neither worshipping it nor fearing it. Iqbal mastered the new physics well enough to state its claims fairly, accepted what the evidence supported, and reserved the right to argue, on philosophical grounds, about what it could and could not say. A century on, with science larger in our lives than ever, that posture of informed, respectful, unintimidated engagement is one of the most practical things Iqbal still offers.