Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Making sense of divergent creeds in Islamic legacy and what does it mean to be a Witness. The Prophet (SAW) attempted to wean people away from hell that is basically constituted of false views – false absolutes. People are corrupt because their views are corrupt. Ignorance is the root of evil. Commonly we see people worshipping their egos/beliefs, judging others, full of anger and complaints, envying fate of others, anxious about pseudoproblems, confusing past with timeless Tradition, fighting with themselves, their children and their doubts. That is why right view and right understanding are so important for felicity according to all religions. But how sad to note that it is hard to get access to them as religion is reduced to ideology, faith to belief, Beyond-Being and Being to personal God, God to a Super-being,  Islam (the Religion) to islam (a religion). How come there will be illumination if philosophy vetoed, mysticism suspected and debate largely proscribed? Suspicious of bea

Kashmir Problem is, Primarily, a Failure of Statesmanship Badri Raina’s Kashmir : A Noble Tryst in Tatters is a first book of its kind presenting a Kashmiri Neo-Marxist account of what is wrong with Indian engagement with Kashmir. Awaited eagerly by Kashmiri readership of Indian left, it, true to the Kashmiri poetic genius, combines the poet’s view of the issue with an incisive analysis of what can only be termed as an absence of statesmanship or failure of politics. The author pleads for his essential thesis that Kashmir isn’t to be framed/can’t be understood in identitarian or communal terms or as an unfinished legacy of partition. It is simply failure of a relationship that had nothing inherently problematic about it to begin with, but turned sour due to mishandling or lack of vision and trust. India’s moral claim over Kashmir has largely been lost even though Azadi is not a solution. Vetoing against any kind of proposal of divorce between India and Kashmir, even though noting f

Unless deep thinking is done on the issue we would continue to have much heat and little light in debates on Islamic law. Instead of saying what does Islam say we should ask what do Muslim jurists say on this or that point say Caliphate/Islamic State, rights of religious/sexual minorities/women, freedom of belief/disbelief, triple talaq, qurbani, permissibility of music, compatibility of modern banking with Islam, dress code and grooming/hair code. To claim that Islam says this or that, is, generally speaking, impossible. We can only strive to know (to make best approximations) what Islam says/God really means/intends on questions usually asked – on other questions that are more foundational we usually don’t need to ask and do largely know  what Islam says as we know what our fitrah demands or what aqli saleem requires or  what conscience allows. And jurists differ in their conclusions on almost all these questions. They don’t differ in matters of worship to significant extent and

Imagine a conference on fiqh today in which the likes of Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Shafi, Ghazzali, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Marghinani , Imam Shatibi and Shah Waliullah are invited.   The fundamental orientation of Shariah given to the Prophet (SAW) – “Mercy for the Worlds” – is ease and mercy. If we fail to find this there is something wrong either with particular interpretations supposed to encapsulate the view of Islam or our own understanding of what is our real good or our state of health due to slavery of desire. Let us first explore this almost marginalized aspect of Islamic law stated succinctly by Ibn al-Qayyim: “The Islamic law is all about wisdom and achieving people’s welfare in this life and the afterlife. It is all about justice, mercy, wisdom, and good. Thus, any ruling that replaces justice with injustice, mercy with its opposite, common good with mischief, or wisdom with nonsense, is a ruling that does not belong to the Islamic law, even if it is claimed to be so