Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

“Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty, he could no longer live because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here.” (Dostoevsky)  Laotze’s and Kant’s respective remarks about beauty as “the usefulness of the useless,” and “purposiveness without purpose” are recalled in Martha Nasubaum’s choice of the title of her work “ Nor for Profit: Why Democracy Needs Humanities .”       Given the modern penchant for utility and commodification that reserves only a small corner for arts in museums and seeks profit by organising art exhibitions, and impoverished modern souls not ready to live and die for beauty, the twentieth century has been the ugliest as Ananda Coomaraswamy noted. Our standard references to immortal works of art and architecture usually go to ancient or medieval times against traditional cultures that glorified God by cultivating beauty within and witho...

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 ...

Today we discuss how taking art seriously means we are taking life seriously. How do we lesser mortals who are no saints find God in a world where traditional Gurus or Sufi Shaykhs are either hard to come across or there is an instinctive distrust in them? How do those who have fought hard to get back their lost religious faith keep living? How do we, regardless of our religious or philosophical positions, find some convergent point to launch our  boat in turbulent waters? God in his infinite graciousness has made ample arrangements of our return to our homeland, Heaven or Himself. One powerful and universally accessible mechanism is art. Today we discuss how taking art seriously means we are taking life seriously and this helps us in reaching our ultimate destination in the embrace of God.        Art is a form of faith that is available to even a secular man and it is through art that religious impulse survives in the deserts of modernity. Artists...

Have a feast of humour with Mujtuba Hussain, because taking affairs of life too seriously is a disease according to Plato. Despite the traditional recommendation of blessing anyone who laughs – “May God ever keep you laughing”  – there are few zinda dil people (who laugh and make others laugh without hurting the other or compromising truth) around and fewer zinda dil writers (writers often are either found as if weeping or bragging or envying or at least complaining about other writers) and still fewer zinda dil preachers (how many can you name?).       Taking affairs of life too seriously is a disease according to Plato. Laughter is a great wazeefa that  modern Pirs need to suggest to disciples.  For Rumi laughter reaches the deepest depths of Godhead. Mujtuba Hussain is almost perfect example of zinda dil writer. He, better than psychoanalysts, scans his contemporaries with fun and insight leaving no bitterness nor selling any falsehood...

The universe can’t be justified except in aesthetic terms. Nietzsche Religious, artistic, mystical and philosophical traditions are unanimous in asserting that we are here to appreciate, to love, to enjoy, to play, to beautify rather than to worry, to solve the mystery in logical terms. But our tragedy today is we seek explanations, utility, profit. We taunt youth why they spend time in playing or watching sports. We don’t live life. We just vegetate. We bring calculative business mentality to basic question of living. We ask how much does one earn, what work does one do, what new thing has been added. We do not know how much joy is there in the world. What great treasures we lose daily, we don’t notice. Our education doesn’t teach us to live life. “The School of Life” is nowhere to be seen. We are crippled before weal and woe of life; a small event may make us sad or even force us to consider suicide. We don’t learn the art of life in schools, in mosques, in social networking sites o...

Khalil Gibran has a beautiful story: Beauty and ugliness were bathing in a river. After completing the bath, they accidentally exchanged clothes. And from that day on people are mistaking beauty for ugliness and vice versa. There is a story of a saint who refused to assert his innocence and give any explanation when he was accused of adultery. He was evicted from the locality with utter disgrace. Meanwhile the woman who had accused her got some mysterious disease that she failed to cure and this forced her to atone for the sin of false charge against the saint. She sought her wildly and got cured by his blessings. People invited him again to their locality and asked why he didn’t reject the charge initially and suffered all this humiliation, he answers: I choose God to clear me of charges and izzat belongs to God only–our prerogative is to be patient and not judge others. God accomplishes everything. Jesus said: Judge not. Sufi say: complain not. Great tragedies proclaim about re...

Opening up of the first Art Gallery in Kashmir is great news, not just for art lovers but also for all of us who believe art is an important aspect of education and life and none can claim to be literate who is ignorant of art. Many art forms are often assumed to be alien to Islam, a misperception forcefully dispelled by Mualana Abul Kalam Azad in the concluding lines of his great work Gubar-i-Khatir. Islam, like other traditions, has regulated expression of art and not banned it. In fact Islam employs art physics and theology by calling God Beauty or Beautiful and advocating love of beauty whether it is in nature, in souls of prophets and saints or in any object of utility made for consumption or object of art made for contemplation. Islam has cultivated rich tradition of art that is no less important than Fiqh and requires art education for spiritual development of every Muslim by emphasizing the principle of perfection – Ihsan . One can find emphasis on art in traditional calligra...

I think two things explain this: Woeful art illiteracy of the people in general and philosophy of art illiteracy in most of the artists Our artist friends complain that they don’t receive proper recognition, and hardly anyone is interested in visiting art gallery recently opened in Srinagar.  Visitors, or masses, complain that the art works of contemporary artists don’t speak to them, or they fail to comprehend them. Why this disconnect? I think two things explain this: Woeful art illiteracy of people in general and philosophy of art illiteracy in most of artists. People hardly know anything about art (we don’t teach art in schools, generally speaking) and can be classified with colour blind or beauty blind  group. Those artists who think art is a profession and art works need to be exhibited, or sold, or personality of artist be expressed or art needn’t imitate archetypes or communicate well to all who are interested are ignorant of First Principles art exemplifies. They ...

Political stalemate today after fractured mandate and enormous contradictions in our political culture – I wonder if we have any today – are in one sense traceable to loss of culture. And this loss of culture follows disregard or atrophy of indigenous and cultural languages we inherited. Cognitive psychology informs us that we learn in our mother tongue, that our mind needs to translate in mother tongue and then cognizes whatever it is taught in other languages. What a tragedy if our minds are confused in which language to translate as it is through an odd mixture of non-classical Urdu, Hinglish and parts of Kashmiri that we are initiated into the world of culture.   Some of our best na’ats , munajaat , prayers are in Persian and Kashmiri. It means we are evolving into a monstrosity that can’t even pray properly. From both Arabic and Sanskrit – the languages of scriptures – we are already weaned away without even tasting them. It means our linguistic unconscious is quite impoveri...

One may have many reservations regarding the poet but the work of art calls for proper appreciation Rilke, one of the greatest modern poets, has a poem that reads: THE POET SPEAKS OF PRAISING Oh speak, poet. what do you do? I praise. But the monstrosities and the murderous days, how do you endure them, how do you take them? I praise. But the anonymous, the nameless grays, how, poet. do you still invoke them? I praise. What right have you, in all displays, in very mask, to be genuine?  praise. And that the stillness and the turbulent sprays know you like star and storm?    Drawing inspiration from Rilke, I today praise a little known contemporary Kashmiri poet who has struck some deep chords in me, as a token of gratitude for the ordeal that the poet has suffered for conceiving or writing poetry.  A work of art has to be approached first and foremost as a work of art and let us note that some masterpieces of poetry in all trad...