Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding Why We Sin and Disbelieve We see people but hardly ever meet them. We talk to them but hardly ever communicate our soul or enter into a genuine dialogue with them. We owe everything to the other and hardly ever realize this and no wonder we are all lonely and are reduced to being islands unto ourselves. To speak “we” word has become a convention. Even God who addresses us in every encounter with the other we fail to notice and no wonder our worship and devotion is mostly sham. Life is such a joy, such an ecstasy, such a communion of spirit for those who know who is the other addressing them or addressed by them. It is virtually God we meet everyday in homes and streets and offices. But few feel the thrill of heavenly vision ( deedar ) in greeting and talking to fellow humans. Martin Buber, arguably the most influential Judaic philosopher-mystic, may help us here. His meditations on what does it mean to say “I” and “Thou” and “we” are an education for life. May

Meditations on A. G. Sheikh’s Reflections on Ladakh, Tibet and Central Asia. Literature is essentially about presenting us a world we have lost or we can reclaim; it creates a world that ought to be or that we can imagine. It has often presented Utopias or imagined heavenly perfection in distant or exotic lands. Fairy tales retain such attraction because they present a world somehow we identify with or feel nostalgic about. What if we are told about something that has been the case and that is, to a significant extent, a case and that can be, in a way, accessed, here and now. Ladakh is one such case. Indeed it is a sanctuary of sprit, a preview of heaven, a moral ideal that puts to shame all ideals of material progress, the last bastion of tradition that can revivify the world or at least remind it of what it has forgotten and could arguably reclaim. Abdul Ghani Sheikh has devoted his life to better comprehension of the mystery, beauty and sacrality of the paradise we all have in

Revisiting Islamism, Hindutva and the Contradictions of Politics of Majoritarian Religious. Nationalism We are encountering  a sharp rise of the right in political or public sphere. The RSS has shown that it can’t be discounted in understanding new India. Islamists have compelled others to recognize them. Islam enters electoral politics in many ways. The Congress with its secularist dismissal of religion has been proved wrong in its estimate of the role of religion in public sphere and constructing a history that othered/marginalized religion.  We are witnessing bitter conflict between Salafis and the Ikhwan in Egypt, Zionists and Hamas, Shi’ite and Sunni political forces, Taliban and its adversaries. Jamaat-e Islami has been in bitter opposition to its internal critics such as Ghamidi, and endorsing secularism as an idea in India and criticizing it in Pakistan.  How do we understand such a bewildering range of responses?       Regardless of religious or scriptural warrant for the

How Tolstoy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein treat the question life asks all of us.  Have we succeeded or failed in our lives? This question remains despite our successful careers or positions or percentage of marks obtained. Let us examine how we fare in the key test of life that poses one question to all and sundry – what is the meaning of our life?  In the words of an influential modern mystical philosopher, the most extraordinarily ordinary people are called mystics. Celebrating the ordinary is what distinguishes not only great mystics but also such modern writers as Joyce. What distinguishes another great modern writer Tolstoy is finding extraordinary grace in lives of common people – in his case Russian peasants. If life’s most important task is to find meaning of life or save one’s soul as Tolstoy would put it, the common folk succeed far better than so-called scholarly or educated elite.  Regarding the question of meaning of life that troubles every thinking person and the a