Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

What is freedom of expression? Freedom to argue, to persuade, to demonstrate, to plead for one’s convictions or ideas. It is not freedom to curse, to mock, to deface, to hurt, to kill. No civilization accepts this latter view of freedom. Another point is, what is freedom? Is it license to follow our desires or passions or it results from understanding and following the rational view? In other words, is it slavery of body and psyche or freedom of spirit?  I don’t think one needs further discussion on this point. My point today is little mystical and metaphysical understanding of the phenomenon of prophecy, especially the Prophet of Islam (SAW). Once we consider this,   one can pity the ignorance of those who seek to slander both freedom and truth in the name of spurious notions of them. A world not sharing the faith of a Muslim can't understand the deeper philosophy that grounds this faith and if it does it, it will understand why Muslims love the Prophet (SAW) above everything el

Why isn’t it easy for our political parties to negotiate to be able to form a stable government in which opposition parties and critics too could largely trust or desist from mudslinging? Even if they do succeed in forming one, isn’t it going to be ever under strain? Aren’t all parties uneasy bedfellows when it comes to sharing power? I am not going to answer these questions – we know them anyway – but  transpose these questions to domestic sphere. Seeing the stalemate in domestic politics of home where only a few family members tied by blood relationships I have no surprises to be shocked by any arrangement that ensues and that have ensued in our history by different permutations and combinations in politics. If we are so divided at family level, if there is difficult to find the undisputed leader or trust in a leader at home level (most of us don’t practically buy the thesis inherited from our tradition that husbands are leaders (qawamoon?), if most mothers-in-law have grudges agai

What do we owe to victims? Everything, Levinas would say. Today many flood victims are crying for help and few are left to care or speak for them. Who can say that we care as we should?  Our tradition records that those who could and didn’t care would be thrown into a similar situation and tasted want and lack. The first question is: Are we in any way responsible or guilty for miseries of flood victims? Yes, argue Dostovesky and Levinas. What do we owe to victims? Everything, Levinas would say. Nothing breaks one’s back more than reading Levinas as he shows how little we really care about God in the Other, in neighbours, in strangers. He shows that we can’t even claim to be beginners in the science and practice of ethics. For him, philosophy is ethics and this is where ancient philosophers and world religions meet – philosophy is fundamentally a practice of virtue and not ratiocination or speculation and that explains the notion of prophets as teachers of wisdom ( hikmah ). We choo

Political stalemate today after fractured mandate and enormous contradictions in our political culture – I wonder if we have any today – are in one sense traceable to loss of culture. And this loss of culture follows disregard or atrophy of indigenous and cultural languages we inherited. Cognitive psychology informs us that we learn in our mother tongue, that our mind needs to translate in mother tongue and then cognizes whatever it is taught in other languages. What a tragedy if our minds are confused in which language to translate as it is through an odd mixture of non-classical Urdu, Hinglish and parts of Kashmiri that we are initiated into the world of culture.   Some of our best na’ats , munajaat , prayers are in Persian and Kashmiri. It means we are evolving into a monstrosity that can’t even pray properly. From both Arabic and Sanskrit – the languages of scriptures – we are already weaned away without even tasting them. It means our linguistic unconscious is quite impoverished

All ideologies are exclusive and could lead to violently excluding the right to disagree. Islam is not an ideology but fundamentalism is. Fundamentalism doesn’t know, as Wahidudin Khan often emphasizes, that we live in a different world, that we no longer understand the language of legalism that uses fatwas instead of communicative dialogue, that sectarianism is against both spiritual humanism and basic ethos of a globalized world. All ideologies are exclusive and could lead to violently excluding the right to disagree. Islam is not an ideology but fundamentalism is. It is vain to appropriate such terms as fundamentalism  (see this in some popular preachers) and give it an Islamic dress as implying firm belief in fundamentals of religion. Historically literalism has been both exclusive and violent. In the history of Islam exclusivist ideological battles have given us some heinous wars and killings and we can trace them to Kharjite mind set if not even farther in the past. And the

John Derrida is considered one of the chief architects of postmodernist worldview. We are living, willy-nilly, in the postmodern age. And one of the chief characteristics of this is incredulity toward ideologies, especially those ideologies that make big claims. Deconstruction that Derrida advocated consists in taking nothing on face value, in noticing the gaps and absences and contradictions in the terms in which an argument or claim is made. It teaches us valuing difference and suspecting totalitarianism, fundamentalism and all such discourses that speak in the name of God/Truth/Future/Utopia/ Justice. Derrida said that Justice can never be done in absolute terms and all one can do is to approximate it and ruthlessly questions all judgments, all claims of justice from authorities. Deconstruction deconstructs all constructions imposed on people through sheer power or force or propaganda. We need the language, if not the methodology, of deconstruction to present truth to power, to sh

People don’t want a particular alliance but their leaders or representatives want or are compelled to accept some arrangement. Kashmiris feel they will be sold cheap and in their name, there will be tons of justifications for any action taken by those who chose to rule. Let us note how easy it has been to trivialize people’s mandate. How shocking we find yesterday’s arch rivals hugging one another. How shameful to invent ever new excuses for consenting to this or that action that previously few weeks back parties openly opposed. Even God is bound by the principle of non-contradiction as far as He operates in the world governed by reason and logic. But politicians seem to have license for flaunting even the laws of logic including the law of non-contradiction. BJP-PDP alliance is not acceptable to vast majority of Jammu and Kashmiri’s voters. So isn’t any other alliance to another large section of voters. But do voter’s wishes matter or mandate matters?  Who should decide? Isn’t the b