Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Thanks to great strides in the discipline of comparative religion, we now know the religious other better. Today religion can be taken seriously only if we can show it is not a divisive force. Seeing the contemporary scenario regarding understanding of religious-other in the Muslim world (and elsewhere as well) it is hard to see how we can assert that religion unites, and doesn’t divide. Isn’t it the case that, as Weinberg, the famous physicist,  puts it: “With or without religion, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion”  or as Pascal, the great religious thinker, says: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” ? The question is how do we prevent fights in the name of God?  One way is that of the West that abolished such wars by becoming secular or showing religion exit. However this secularization isn’t the ideal solution for believers

Fraudulent Practices in Modern Medicine Those who care to think raise some uncomfortable questions and teach us to doubt. With one such doubting doctor who is also called poor man’s doctor, we deconstruct some reigning ideas in modern medical practice. In fact we can easily show that there have been some errors, even scandals, in modern history  that resulted in a dominance of modern allopathic system of medicine.        Dr B M Hegde, despite being criticized for right wing sympathies and some unsupported generalizations and  certain inconsistencies nevertheless emerges as one of the very few scientist-philosophers of modern India who needs to be widely read and debated. Passionate, informed, brilliant, witty, iconoclastic, provocative and lucid, Dr Hegde is a renowned cardiologist trained in allopathic system who has exposed, along with certain lesser known but significant scientists, fraudulent or somehow problematic nature of certain medical practices. In a nutshell he argues –

Yes, converting life into a work of art is the secret. There is a heaven here and a heaven there, and there is some difference between the two. If we fail to cultivate the former, we fail to win the later. How seriously do we take God’s invitation to visit heaven or to create/cultivate a space called heaven? This can be known by the quality of lives we live. Very few people live life as if heaven is its constant horizon and depth dimension and thus “reserve” their seats in otherworldly heaven. All education and religion consist in learning how to experience this world as heaven. Our A grades may mean F grades in life’s examination. Our examination centres are pits of hell thanks to vices of competition and memorization of trivialities or information we hardly need in life. Heaven requires cultivating Imagination and Art that we have exiled. Our fragmented pleasure seeking, greedy, haughty, mean, depressed, complaining, lobbying, cursing – in short alienated lives in hell of our own

Reading Muslim Philosophers on Women Question Granting that the term feminism would be understood rather loosely as struggle to restore women’s legitimate dignity or rights as humans would not be objected, and rescuing it from loaded ideological content given to it in academic discourse by extremist secular and fundamentalist elements alike, one might note that there are Islamist feminists who defend what they see as rights of women given by Islam and interpreted by traditional scholars, especially medieval authorities or fuqaha (such women wear and ideally preach niqab/ hijab and believe in normativity of home or private vs. public binary as far as possible). There are secularist feminists who though may be culturally a Muslim or otherwise or even devout Muslim in their own view  say invoking historical Islam is part of a problem and struggle for women’s rights should be purely secular (they generally resist hijab ) and Muslim feminists who say Islam is part of solution but

One misses so much in life if one doesn’t read books; but read the best books. One could well say that God made man to read books. Man, a Master notes, is asked to pray only for increase in one thing and that is knowledge. The Prophet (SAW) is introduced as a teacher of the Book (and wisdom and self-fashioning – we may note that culture with its literary and philosophical resources is all about these things). To truly understand the Prophet involves culture of literacy. Prophets don’t come with religions but Ad-Deen which is a way of life, a culture so to speak. The Quran itself is a Book, and means a reading, a recitation. The cosmos is called Quran-i-takweeni . The Bible means a book. Veda means knowledge.  And knowledge is what makes man, man. The Prophet prayed to be shown things as they are and to this objective sciences and philosophies contribute. Scriptures take us beyond themselves to the world of nature and self we are required to read. Books are life; they aren’t abstra