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Showing posts from March, 2018

“I am, therefore I pray”: Science and Philosophy of Prayer

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Understanding the Meaning of Prayer and how all prayers are indeed answered. How many of our prayers have been granted? Not even one in ten thousand, to speak in general times. But we are told that every prayer is answered. And it seems that it is no longer, ordinarily, possible to pray for certain things the way our elders prayed – praying for rains tomorrow when weatherman has predicted sunny weather, praying for this or that gender or health status of newborn when tests report otherwise, and hoping that praying for solution to Kashmir will be soon answered. Once upon a time popular prayers for destruction of other communities like Jews or nations like Americans have become unpopular. Doctors rather than Pirs or special prayer sessions/prayer-food culture/khatams are more popular now. Explaining the problems with interpreting different kinds of prayers such as prayer as petition, how prayer distinguishes believer from nonbeliever and what really is prayer is what theologians and ph

Understanding Hawking on Religious and Spiritual Life

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Exploring if Hawking may be read as an ally of genuine religion Should Hawking’s much publicized atheism bother truly religious souls? No, because it leaves the problem that religion basically addresses – the question of suffering/ignorance/alienation or meaning or God understood as the Meaning of Life – untouched. Hawking himself advocate a sort of intellectual/spiritual life that echoes/is parasitic upon the “worldview” of Religion. God talk is ultimately more about life lived here and now than enquiring about past or future dispensation or bothering about some account of what happened at the beginning of time. The most important question for religion is not of boundaries or edges of the universe or who began the show or whether it is self sustaining or what is the precise address of the Creator if there is one (as against none or two or more as if nondual Reality that grounds every inquiry or judgment is numerical question) or the structure of His Mind. It is, instead, how one ta

Reclaiming the legacy of Maulana Thanawi (RA)

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Comprehensiveness, subtlety, psychological perspicuity and courage to chart new paths. Mass Education and Mass Media have been accompanied by certain degeneration, and decadence in the use of language, in the level of scholarly discourse, besides general trivialization and ideological colouring; as such oblivion of, or alienation from, intellectual and spiritual elite that resist this reduction. What strikes us today in popular literature on Islam is, generally speaking, superficiality, polemical spirit, lack of serious engagement with all the facets of tradition as a whole, failure to be respectfully critical of great predecessors, reluctance to exercise ijtihad, and baneful influence of certain politicization of discourse. What equally strikes us, however, in the case of such figures as Maulana Thanawi, is profundity, comprehensiveness, subtlety, psychological perspicuity and courage to chart new paths.       There are some gifts for the century to help countless people progress on

Seeing God Equally in All Things

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Reading Meister Eckhart on Spiritual Life Meister Eckhart was one of the greatest sages of the world who had a troubled relationship with the Christian Church for supposed heresies. When we closely examine his doctrine and try to live his sermons one finds that what distinguished him from most of his contemporaries is commitment to non-dual or Unitarian paradigm that in the Islamic world has been defining feature of great current of Sufism. What is in Eckhart that he influenced some of the most important modern thinkers including Heidegger? What is in him that his writings are compared to Upanisads by none other than AKC? What is in him that it was said about him that God hid nothing from him? What is in him that he has been subject of numerous illuminating comparative studies including the one with such spiritual giants as Sankara and Ibn Arabi (one may see Reza Shah Kazmi’s work on the same). For me Eckhart is, along with certain Muslim metaphysicians and sages, the best antidote t

The Problematic Quest for Meaning

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Reading Bedil in Postmodern Times The most important problem today is how to find meaning in life. Failure is find meaning helps explain reckless addiction to drugs and drinking oneself to death, quiet despair, much of unwarranted violence and bitterness in relationships, irritability of almost everyone you meet, frenzied misadventures such as reckless driving, especially the youth driving bikes and Arab men driving cars too fast for life to enjoy the feast. Since most people live as if God/the Sacred has virtually no place in their lives and they have failed in the task of self creation – a problem that tormented Nietzsche – how will life become a sacrament again is the question. Anxiety to plainly – definitively – interpret, fix and impose meanings of canonical texts by ideologues/fundamentalists is a problematic reaction to the problem. Where is our refuge then?       Postmodern thinkers living under the shadow of Nietzsche generally agree with the statement that we could be resc