Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

The Master on Life and Afterlife. Ghalib is a sad angel, Who from the intoxication of nearness Has brought divine revelation In the form of his ghazals. (Yusuf Hussain’s translation. Other translations here are from the same work Persian Ghazals of Ghalib )       Indeed Ghalib has bought a “revelation” that has been such a healing and joy and a fount of beauty. One must be thankful for the privilege of being born in a land and with a language of Ghalib. Ghalib’s Islam as an “Answer” to Difficult Questions Every Muslim in the subcontinent who can read poetry but is disturbed over routine disharmonies or complains about this or that issue in life would be required to answer one question on the Day of Judgment: Have you read Ghalib? Ghalib “answers” all our complaints we might conceive or imagine against Fate or providence or people or God. Since God created Ghalib, He has been largely relieved of entertaining many a question on wonder, love, beauty, betrayal, poverty, faith and inf

Zargar masterfully handled language and sounds too profane at places and deconstructs romantic-mystic, revelation-intuition or scriptural-experiential binaries. All great poets and mystics and philosophers have one thing in common: rejection of Mullaism identifiable with dry, empty, legalistic, judgmental dualistic mode of thought and action. One might loosely identify it with zahir parasti (worship of form/letter) that has been associated with a class of jurists and those scholars who don’t pay attention to esoteric or mystical/symbolist dimension of scripture. In the Muslim world Mullaism has donned political guise. The term Mulla has lost its honorific connotations from quite some time though this degeneration in its traditional status has been especially exacerbated in modern age. Newer movements and trends in philosophical, theological, and socio-economic spheres have all contributed to delegitimizing Mullaism as an ideology that once had a significant say in public spaces. Ne

Angels greet all of us though we are often absent to return the same. The best or most influential minds happen to transcend simplistic construction and politicized framing of the tussle between the two. Key mutual misgivings need to be addressed.       If religions seem to divide mankind, mythologies, artistic/mystical/wisdom traditions and metaphysics underlying them that secular thinking better engage unite. Famous new atheists like Dawkins and Harris don’t fail to register their love for certain images of the Sacred. In fact Harris proposed something like Unitarian advaitic spirituality for secular worshippers. Worship we must anyway. Russell’s “Free Man’s Worship” or Spinoza’s intellectual love of God or Heidegger’s paean to Being or Derrida’s commitment to Justice and Levinas’s to the Other all succeed to preserve an essential aspect of spiritual life. It was Whitehead who noted that “the essence of education is it be religious.” Buddha didn’t propose anything that fights s