Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding War as Pathology of Judging Consciousness. It is rarely that one is able to realize that man’s greatest sin is being – to claim autonomy and idolize self will or attachment to sense of agency. At such rare moments one can appreciate why the first question is not “Why is there being rather than nothingness?” but “Is it just to be?” for Levinas, arguably the greatest Jewish philosopher of the postmodern world. For him the human is an “unreasonable animal” because it “cannot not admire saintliness. . . that is, the person who in his being is more attached to the being of the other than to his own.” Contrary to the laws of being, or first truth of ontology as “the struggle to be”  ethics is “against nature because it forbids the murderousness of my natural will to put my own existence first.”       The Hindu Right has been premised on othering Muslims and in turn the most influential Islamist ideologue has construed Islam as an ideology in opposition to the other identifi

Understanding World Religions non-ideologically with special reference to Islam and Buddhism. One of the central problems in politically inflected religious revivalist movements including Islamist ones is inadequate theorization or understanding of the object and subject of religion due to marginalization or suspicion of/veto against philosophy, mysticism, art and advances in number of sciences including mythology, comparative religion and certain natural/social sciences. In general they have a) simplistic b) homogenizing c) literalist d) exclusivist e) ideologically framed reductionist understanding that can’t withstand questioning from sciences while being vulnerable to many pathological deformations. Their standard reaction (as distinguished from response) to their critics which include mainstream traditional scholars, mystics, scientists, philosophers and artists is accusation of inauthenticity/Westoxication. They are more likely to judge, speak to, accuse, dismiss the religious/

The article( Connecting Religion and Politics ) published on 6th Feb, 2019 on the Readings page of GK, in response to my column( Factoring Religion in Politics ), following points may be noted Point 1: I have been accused of using vague expressions like a) “spiritual democracy”. Please ask Iqbal you own to disown his “vague” expression. Murad Hofffman’s concluding paragraph in Islam in the 21st century advocates and explains this spiritual democracy and sounds like a perennialist though he isn’t  known to be one.  b) culture being “grounded in metaphysics” – this is the most clear statement a Muslim is expected to make as part of his creed. Why forget my repeated use of term metaphysics as scientia sacra, science of First Principles that grounds ilm al-aqeedah ? Religious roots of culture grounded in Metaphysics can’t but be unalterable against “civilizational and ideological formations,” - the point is well noted by Alija Izatbegovitch, among others. Point 2: I have catalogued Is