Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Choosing the short story writer is like choosing architecture of one’s house Life is a story or has to be lived as a work of art for getting meaning from it. All of us tell stories. The choice – a vital and fateful choice indeed – is what kind of stories we chose to tell ourselves and our children. Great short stories constitute the staple diet  of great education. We do spend a lot of time daily – six hours on average – day dreaming or what amounts to the same – telling ourselves stories with oneself as a hero. Jataka tales, tales in Rumi’s Masnavi and Saadi’s Gulistan, Panchtantra and fables of Aesop have been so central to education across cultures. Even scriptures have to make use of tales and the Quran asserts that the greatest tale – an odyssey of soul searching in fact – is that of Joseph (this tale is retold in many volumes by Thomas Mann in modern times- in fact our challenge is to retell great archetypal stories in a language postmodern man can relate to). In the modern

Itikaaf is especially a time for waiting as is the whole idea of seeking shab-i-qadr We all know that Ramazan has been characterized as “month of patience.” What does it mean? Today we seek to understand how patience, or what we may call waiting, is what essentially characterizes human destiny and how proper waiting constitutes a great wazeefa for proper living. Understanding our destiny as patiently waiting for Darsha n or Deedar , for the Friend or more precisely seeing Deedar in waiting, will answer such questions that are commonly asked during this month such as why God doesn’t come and why our rendezevous with Satan doesn’t seem to end. Itikaaf is especially a time for waiting as is the whole idea of seeking shab-i-qadr (We are subtly told to wait for it as its time isn’t strictly specified). Paul Tillich in one of his sermons,collected under the title The Shaking of the Foundations , has insightfully appropriated the metaphor of waiting in explicating the Semitic religious