Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Kashmir’s architecture recalled the glory of God and both dignity and humility of man. The question of our attitude towards the Sacred is a question of life and death and if doesn’t figure anywhere with the seriousness it deserves in our dwellings or city planning, it is a choice of which all those who are thereby affected need to be informed about. How little do architects, not to speak of masons and carpenters and people that work for know about the significance of Symbolism and other largely forgotten aspects of traditional art of architecture say colours, directions, dimensions, is known to us all. Architecture is today mostly engineering and hardly art form. Ours is the ugliest age in history and our sense of beauty so impoverished, as those like AKC who are better qualified to talk about our standards of beauty would say. Costs of forgetting God while building houses       Traditionally, houses are to be built at the Centre of the world or should  so fix our orient

The quest for wisdom never ends; every experience, every great artist/philosopher has something to teach us. Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still.  (Eliot) The purpose of life is to seek happiness, declare Chinese and many other sages from the world, including those from the Muslim world. And fortunately, all of us can find happiness: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.” And it depends upon our choice: “No man is happy who does not think himself so.” Tolstoy reported that he found the happiest people among Russian peasants. To master the art and science of happiness one needs to understand a few points noted especially by Stoic philosophers. And one can finish reading the masterpieces of Stoic philosophy – The Art of Living by Epictetus and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in a day or two. And reflecting on gems there is enough insurance for life against all that may make us unhappy. Let us measure ours

Reading Benazir’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West There are some important books that Muslim world should have taken better note of. They have something important to say though certain things might be objected to on both religious and philosophical grounds. Some selections from them deserve serious consideration. Such works include works of almost all the authors approvingly quoted in the last chapter of Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West . The problems that Benazir highlights are indeed noteworthy. She notes, for instance, that “now almost half the world’s Muslims are illiterate. The combined GDP of the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is about the same as that of France, a single European country. More books are translated annually from other languages into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic over the past one hundred years. The 15 million citizens of tiny Greece buy more books annually than do al

Poets master the art of presenting us to ourselves. Poets are the eyes with which we see a world as a semblance of paradise Imagining a world without poets is like imagining the whole world as suddenly gone dumb. Poets master the art of presenting us to ourselves. Poets are the eyes with which we see a world as a semblance of paradise. When prophets leave us, the poets preserve their sacred aura for us. Imagine how poor religious life would be without  hymns and songs of poets. We can live without food for some time, without families, without priests, without scientists but we can’t live without poetry. Poets defend us against demons within and without and if we could heed them we wouldn’t need armies. When the last poet will pass away, the show we know as the world will be wrapped up as we know that it is a poet who preserves the light of faith in a world orphaned by God’s seeming withdrawal or absence. Let us read our own poet Ismail Aashna what are poets for. We shall focus on a

There are enough arguments to convince the best minds regarding the plausibility of immortality from a philosophical and not just religious viewpoint Whitehead has referred to basic insights or initial intuitions or feelings of mankind calling for explanations or justifications. Our desire for immortality is one of these initial intuitions, or persistent dreams, or impulses. If we begin with this fundamental impulse of the human spirit, the question is not disputing their “truth” on this or that so-called scientific ground or explaining it away but how to express it. Believers and non-believers needn’t dispute the matter taking all or none position but may better have a dialogue regarding how far we have succeeded in defining or understanding it correctly.       Taking affairs of life in a playful spirit – but not our assigned or chosen roles in that play – is taking Heaven seriously. Often, believers believe in Heaven but hardly mind it and it is so-called non-believers who take it