Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Questions that our posterity will ask Posterity and in fact the current generation will ask us few difficult questions. As parents I don’t think we have any answers. A few questions and issues they will raise I discuss today. What we have made of Human Resource Management in Kashmir? Once it was not a big problem. Take the case of log winters, handicrafts and extensive local manufacturing of important woolen, matting and other commodities in most houses. Neither women nor the elderly people were jobless. Today even our youth are unemployed. And most of the jobs are in sectors that are not really productive or contributing in real sense to solving local problems. Previously it was almost all green. Just take the example of constructing house. A few decades back it cost almost nothing. Only certain patience. In the first year bricks were prepared. In the next year other requirements were gradually completed. Then labour was mostly either free or community based. Hardly anyone was hir

He lacerates our ego, decimates self righteous attitude, and rips apart all pretensions Reading Camus’ The Fall is like consenting to be operated without anaesthesia. Nothing exposes better our moral weaknesses, our complacency, our guilt. Reading his The Plague calls for almost superhuman courage to experience life as plague without shrinking from responsibility to ameliorate it. His The Stranger has a hero who doesn’t feel about anything including the death of his mother thus critiquing modern alienation. Camus lacerates our ego – self righteous attitude and pretensions. Be ready for soul hammering in the works of Camus. One can emerge much more humble and compassionate after baptism in the fire of his works. He sees through the sickness, the cancer of the soul of modern man. There are dangers too, however. We have to be respectful but critical. Great lessons in ethics need to be learnt but corroding skepticism following from failed mystic adventure and dogmatic rationalism and

Can Philosophy be summoned in the court of Religion? The thesis that philosophy and religion are antithetical is historically wrong, conceptually flawed and religiously unacceptable and philosophically a dogmatic assertion that forecloses open ended nature of rational inquiry. It implies that all great philosophers that include almost any great name you think from Phythaogoras  to Wittgenstein rejected religion in the name of philosophy, Muslim philosophers including Ibn Sina, Suharwardi, Mulla Sadra, Ibn Rushd and Iqbal were hypocrites when they affirmed faith, there is no such thing as Prophetic philosophy and great works of people like Corbin are rubbish, theology is not a rational discourse, Sufism that has been a bridge between philosophy and religion doesn’t exist and such people as Ibn Arabi were building castles in the air. We have to refute arguments of such giants as Augustine, Aquinas, Farabi and Ibn Rushd to assert the thesis of antithesis. Leaving alone ancients from al

We hail Shaikhul Alam as our patron saint, as Alamdar but there are huge academic debates that have generated much heat and little light. There are some who contest the term Shaikhul Alam and favour Nund Rishi. There are others who spend much energy on proving Lalla’s Saivist or Islamic credentials. There is huge confusion on what is authentic text of our Sheikh. There are editions of Shaikh’s poetry that reflect compiler’s ideological orientation. There are debates that seem to be never ending because wrongly framed on Arabic/Persian/Sanskrit origin of Reshiyyat. Some have an agenda of projecting Lalla as the saint of Kashmir while for some it is debatable if she existed at all. There is much loose talk and conceptual confusion in the use of such terms as mysticism, Sufism and Reshiyyat in writings on Shaikhul Alam and his legacy or Kashmiri’s spiritual landscape. I propose to turn to scholars of perennialist school to clarify key terms and accordingly explicate the convergence and

Questions for State Women’s Commission We have one of the most violent societies with respect to women. All of us know cases of violence against women. All of us are responsible in some measure. Have we participated in any movement that targets this issue? Aren’t we violent in our own homes? Do we recognize her rights, her right to be herself, her right to choose modest way of dressing, her right to pursue education and travel to fulfil her dreams, and many more such rights? To put my case clearly let me state some of the lesser known points for consideration of the State, State’s women commission, NGOs, religious authorities who can make the difference. Islamic law doesn’t oblige daughters-in-law to: ·         Do domestic chores in husband’s family. ·         Accept any dictation regarding preparation of meals, washing of clothes from either husband or mother in law or any member of husband’s family. ·          Share her salary with husband or his family.

Without confounding any rights movement for feminism and without commenting on feminism as such I want to note the key statements of certain important texts that state the case of gender discrimination so well. There is a very profound observation by Iqbal; he is troubled by the problem of women’s oppression and sees hardly any neat solution. Today it should be contrasted with the confidence with which people comment on the question and assert that they have all the answers, that if we could enforce certain laws the problem will be over. They bring the sacred authority of Islam to clinch the case as if Islam is not an open enquiry and call for using reason to solve our problems. They think we can bank upon clear, concrete legal opinions that need simply to be implemented missing to note that neither Capitalism nor the State nor the violence that is peculiar to Modernity were there 1400 years before, so calling for far more nuanced understanding of gender discrimination and Islam’s