Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Every educated Muslim should read at least introductory texts on important facets of Islamic Tradition written by scholars capable of critical thinking.   The tragedy of the Muslim world consists, generally speaking, in refusal to think and reflect and outsourcing these tasks to those who haven’t been trained to review the state of art of different disciplines and master the art of thinking and conceptual apparatus required at the highest level. At certain level and on more general problems, all Muslims are required to know basics and think over them. In the name of Islam it has been the case that on certain issues one could be misled, misinformed and needlessly opinionated and judgmental. Self esteem, relationships/family life, job prospects, respect for reason, authority of conscience, faith in God/Islam all have been negatively impacted due to misconstrued views one has interiorized. Every educated Muslim should read at least introductory texts/review articles on important facet

Reading Muhammad Asad on Respecting Common Man’s Understanding of Islam and Islamic Law. A tradition warns us that zealots – who are all around us, within us – shall die. Timely plea of Muhammad Asad, “the gift of Europe to Islam,” the famous Quran and Bukhari translator, commentator and author, “Islam should be presented without any fanaticism. Without any stress on our having the only possible way and the others are lost”. we today apply on the discourse of fiqh in the context of heated and often politicized debates on Islamic Law (e.g., on triple talaq, apostasy penalty, recent changes in Saudi Arabia)       “The task before the modem Muslim is immense”, wrote Iqbal. He went on: “He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past.’’ With the exception of Muslim feminists and the likes of Muhammad Asad, Fazlur Rahman and Ghamidi and some lesser know scholar-intellectuals Muslims seem to have largely ignored Iqbal on this point. Asad’s response

Exploring Abaqat and Hikmat al-Ishraq on the controversy between Religion and Philosophy, Theology and Esotericism.   Better known as a writer of immensely influential and, for some, controversial classic Taqweat-ul-Iman , Shah Ismail Shaheed should have been better/first approached – and needs to be now read – as a writer of greater classic Abaqat ; book that builds on and explicates Shah Waliullah’s metaphysical and spiritual teachings to make us understand an aspect of the legacy of the sage of Delhi and comprehensive Marifa and Hikmah oriented Islamic tradition.       Abu Yazid was asked about lawful and unlawful and he replied that one should better be in a state where the question doesn’t arise. Polemical issues or theological disputes (say between Shias and Sunnis) are best approached by taking one’s vision to a point where we can see origin of them in God and thus transcend them and this is what esotericism/ irfan does. The dispute concerning authority of Sufis and “

Hayat Aamir succeeds in the great task of saying yes to life despite all the horror it entails. To the question “What do you do?” the poet’s answer is “I praise”, as Rilke phrased it. Why is it so? It is through praise that man rises to the challenge of “the deadly and monstrous… the nameless and the anonymous.” Heschel noted that "There are three ways in which a man expresses his deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the next level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his sorrow into a song."  Jesus  said that “Blessed are they that weep and wail, for they shall be comforted.” One of the greatest contributions of Islamic culture – great poets of marsiya and traditional exponents of Shiite perspective – to the world heritage is teaching how suffering/tragedy may ennoble us and be an instrument of gnosis ( irfan ). Our most blessed task consists in blessing that which made the blessing called life possible and this task is performed

Reading Abraham Joshua Heschel as a sage for our times. There are some people who are irreplaceable and indispensable for proper appreciation of  our collective heritage and flowering of world culture. For instance, Iqbal and Heschel. Today we read Heschel, “a Prophet’s Prophet,” one of the  greatest Jewish philosophers and theologians and revered religious leaders of the twentieth century. As a philosopher, a theologian, a mystic, an interpreter and advocate of the Biblical prophets and their activist mysticism and a passionate critic of secular modernity Heschel’s call for transcendence recalls key themes and arguments in Biblical/Judaic idiom, in Iqbal’s various works especially Asrar-i Khudi, Bal-i Jibril , Zarb-i Kaleem and The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam . The Muslim world especially needs to take note of him to help fight increasingly pervading skepticism and nihilism, clarify certain aspects of Islamic engagement with Israiliyat and Islam’s Judaic contex

Seeing the World as an Image of Paradise An artist sees the world and that is all. And life’s worries are dissolved in this encounter. An artist has no self as a great poet has said. He is only seeing. And that seeing is its own reward. An artist knows the secret that there is no secret or special knowledge vouchsafed to him but life itself has opened up to make prying into special or secret corridors uninteresting. Life is ever too interesting an affair to warrant slip into any distraction. Defamiliarizing the world the artist enchants it. Since the privileging of rational or scientific modes of encountering the world artists had to explain their position and in fact to protest against enormous impoverishment of the world. A world without mystery is a dead world or inhuman mechanical world. It is a world where magic, myth, mystery, miracles, grace, freedom and superabundant joy of creativity are banned or suspect. And man doesn’t live by bread alone. An artist lives in a different

He disarms popular critiques of religion from all kinds of modern Western critics. Chesterton is arguably amongst the most brilliant spokespersons and stylists of Tradition-centric worldview. If we want to see how every view that scoffs at God and religion is an abuse of intelligence, or misreading of their object, or failure hardly worth our consideration, read G.K Chesterton. Chesterton (along with C.S Lewis and Peter Kreeft whom he influenced) disarms popular critiques of  religion from all kinds of modern Western critics. While recognizing the antidolatrous function of certain insightful critiques in modern readings of religion, one may also read Shaykh Abdul Wahid Yahya, Shaykh Isa and Huston Smith to puncture the balloon of secularist critique and dismissal of world religions on scientific or philosophical grounds.       Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is arguably the most forceful, lucid and articulate expression of a host of beliefs mostly shared by major world religions and disputed

Iqbal thought that the West is a development of Islam. Willy nilly, we live in the Eupropeanized world – our political institutions, our education, our economy, our sciences, our technology and our largely secularized post-theological world in which metaphysics as traditionally understood has been displaced from the centre stage – all testify to it. In Heideggerian terms one could say that modern man’s relation to Being is marked by encounter with Europe, its science and technology. In this technologized world, the world seen as a resource, God withdraws. Man is forced to live in a world where faith as it traditionally used to be is not available. In Iqbalian terms it might be rendered as a long night of waiting for God since the world has its own uses for destinies to be shaped( “Kare jehan daraz hae ab mera intizar ker” ).       We are in the world indelibly marked by colonial legacy and are paying for the choices we have made. We have adopted colonizer’s designed development proj

Our religious scholars generally choose not to be well informed on the troubling questions that modernity has raised. How do we engage with “Neo-Salafi”/“Wahabi” Islam, “Sufi” Islam, Revivalist/“Political” Islam and in fact endless debates amongst various juristic and theological schools; and also consequent divisive interpretations of such important issues as Caliphate/State, women’s/minority’ rights, interfaith dialogue? We find fundamentalists on the one hand and aggressive secularists on the other. From antinomian pseudo-Sufis to politically hyperactive class of religionists we find other extremes failing to understand demands of either religion or contemporaneity. Our religious scholars generally choose not to be well informed on the troubling questions that modernity has raised.       It seems Muslims have been divided in their response to modernism, modern science and philosophy. From Mawlana Thanvi’s Answer to Modernism and his translator Hasan Askari’s deadly attack agains