Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

The world of Islam is bleeding. Neocolonialist interventions don’t explain the whole story. Does the Muslim world need to introspect? Is political Islam part of a problem or a solution? Let us ask great Muslim political thinker Al-Farabi whom all revivalist ideologues have ignored. Political Islam as a reaction to onslaught of colonization and aggressive secularization sought to fight a political battle in the name of Islam. How far is this project intellectually sustainable and integrally orthodox or rooted in the Islamic tradition? It’s rather depressing record so far at either political or other cultural fronts in achieving the objective of establishing the ideal or Islamic state with all its cultural vibrancy and widespread apprehensions within the Islamic intellectual elite or Muslim communities as such call for questioning both the construction of the project of political Islam and its reading of Islamic tradition. One way of clarifying the issue is considering how great thin

There is a pain that can’t be normally articulated, it needs art to do it! We are living in the midst of a war against women’s rights – even today less than 20% girls are really free to choose their partners, and their “choice” is subtly constrained, and sold at the altar of social conventions. We are so unkind to women that I have no doubt, none of us will stand the scrutiny in the other world if our spouses, our sisters, our mothers, our in-laws relationships tell their stories before God. The sad, brutal, heart breaking stories of women’s lives, to which we are all witness but mostly chose to ignore, are eloquently brought to the fore by our versatile Rahim Rahbar who has dozens of works to his credit as documentary maker, serial writer and fiction writer. A life dedicated to art is what sums up his career so far.   Hell is where opinions rule, where social ego dictates our choices, and kills the individual in us. Hell is the home where girls live in exile pining for new home wh

Our new generation is alienated from both traditional culture and religion. It means the idea of Kashmir, of pir waer , of the land of spirit, of the land of (transcendent) knowledge is in the danger of becoming incomprehensible. It has forgotten even names of certain artistic and cultural forms of traditional Kashmir. Now what is it that can help speak of the First Principles, of Divine Things, of wellsprings of culture and spirituality to restore to us faith and confidence in our culture, our tradition. One thing that can be done is to have a better connect with Sufi poetry. In a secular age, art is said to be the alternative to help man find meaning in life. Here poetry and spirituality have been so juxtaposed that perhaps they can’t be separated. Poetry here has been a spiritual activity and it continues to be religiously invoked in Sufi gatherings. So even if we take secular age as given, Sufi poetry is there to stay and we need it for salvation of those who find theological

I discuss today a great book of fiction that has become popular, thanks to brilliant adaptation as a serial. Call her an angel, in sweetness, in grace, in beauty, a saint, who loves unconditionally, a martyr of love and faith, who decimates her life lest God’s name or the Quran be taken lightly, a folk philosopher, gems of wisdom she speaks are distilled from great philosophers or theosophers, Saba Kareem of Umera Ahmed’s Meri Zaat Zarai Baynishaan , must be ranked amongst the finest characters, worth emulating, ever drawn in the history of Urdu fiction. She is one of the most beautiful souls gifted with such grace, such dignity, such nobility, such serenity of spirit that one can easily identify her as heavenly hoor who is not made for this earth to which perfection doesn’t belong. Her story is a classic ordeal of love – almost Heer Ranjha incarnated –that fails to consummate on earth but does transform all the major characters resulting in their rebirth in the Realm of Spirit. N

We don’t and perhaps can’t afford to talk on many issues that are of capital importance. We are deceived and can’t talk about deception. But at least we should be conscious that we are getting deceived and play Mulla Nasrudin’s fools who know that we have to feign being fools, play our little games or roles as fools and move on. Let me illustrate. Our environment is at the brink of a major disaster. Floods can visit us any time. Class divisions are getting sharper. Corruption is incarnating in newer modes. Education is so thoroughly ideological that we don’t even suspect it being so. All kinds of ideological state apparatus including schools, policing institutions, social institutions like marriage functions are operating with everyone’s full consent including their “critics.” Let me analyse how ideology shapes educational discourse. Who doesn’t believe that school going age, nursery, pre and post nursery classes, KGs, are a must? And famous private schools should be preferably s

I think we have a good future for Urdu criticism in Kashmir if we continue our current zeal and keep ourselves updated Literature, understood as criticism of life, and criticism as refusal of any attempt to write off alternative possibilities of meaning are central to the current postmodern project of understanding the world. We need good critical works to document the mess we are passing through and the book we discuss today is an attempt to show that Urdu literature and literary criticism has insights for all of us to consider how we live in a pluralistic, open ended world of texts and contexts.   Postmodernism is many things for scholars and critics of it. We can’t avoid engaging with it as we are living in the postmodern age. I think we can agree that it is among other things, avoidance of extremes of binary polarities that define language based discourse or ideologies, skepticism regarding any claim of finality in interpretation, distrusting all narratives of progress, emancip

It is important to have a serious discussion about religion because on this hinges our life and death, our future, our prospects for better life in this world. Much of the problems at political, social and individual levels that have bedevilled the Muslim world are attributable to our failure to think about religion. Religious fundamentalism is pathology according to the best of thinkers both inside and outside religion. Religion costs us guilt – hell in this world – if it is wrongly understood. I know many people, especially the young struggling to understand the call of religion and live upto its perceived ideals and failure on their part to make sense of certain things and the result is disaster. A life lived under the burden of guilt. Religion helps us to orient life to a noble ideal and if we fail to understand religion our whole life may get disoriented. Religion is a glad tiding and a warning. We mostly fail to read it in former terms. God-servant relationship is perceived mor

Mystics find the world as a Question. This is to be contemplated and not answered. ‘I said to the almond tree, “Friend, speak to me of God,” and the almond tree blossomed.' Nikos Kazanzakis   In Kashmir today we find many people posing as mystics selling spurious things in the name of knowledge of God/Secret/Higher things. So many simple minded get trapped and fooled. One is bombarded by such clichés – leave all the books and get new knowledge. One is, in the name of higher knowledge led in the dark alleys of occult mysteries, jinn control, future prediction, spiritual power politics. Questioning and criticism and intellectual tests and qualifications are scorned. One wonders how come in the golden age of mysticism we had great thinkers and scientists in the camp of mysticism. One needed to complete knowledge of sharia or religious sciences before being allowed to get initiated. Let us read Tagore and some Sufi verses to better appraise any claimant of higher knowledge.   Mysti