Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

What makes us and sustains us as humans is our need and capacity to dream, to tell stories and live in mythic space and time. One needs certain level of culture literacy to qualify as a human and, in our troubled  times,  it is poets/writers, especially of short story and novel that have been vouchsafed the task of keeping the most important question of any living culture – the question of the Being/Sacred – alive.  What makes us and sustains us as humans is our need and capacity to dream, to  tell stories and live in mythic space and time. As we find in Dostovesky: “But how could you live and have no story to tell?” And what is the key archetypal story – story of stories – that we find in all cultures? It is of Adam and Eve’s exile from and return to paradise, of frantic human effort to be, to mean, to escape the hell that life ordinarily is and be born again through love/gnosis. Dostovesky’s answer to the question “What is hell?” is  that it is “the sufferin...

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...

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...

Reading Muslim Philosophers on Religious Sectarianism and Pluralism Better philosophers don’t ideally seek to convert but illuminate a problem for us to consider. We can take or not take their take on an issue but we can’t afford to be old selves after reading them. Encountering such philosophers is like encountering spiritual Masters who indelibly mark us. They open up our eyes and one begins to see another world. One learns to appreciate the other, the other point of view or other paths to truth. One learns negative capability (the capacity to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without anxiety to foreclose or jump to conclude or exclude other possibilities) that made, as noted by Keats, Shakespeare great.       Amongst contemporary Muslim philosophers, Abdul Karim Soroush is such an amiable and forceful presence that one can’t avoid falling in love with the man or at least his style. He is amongst the very few important intellectuals who has been forma...

Recalling Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter on J & K PSC Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. (Potter Stewart) When I heard some have been accused and counter-accused of moral failure and failure of wits for both appearing and not appearing in the PSC exam on 6th Feb, I recalled Hawtthorne’s great novel The scarlet Letter ’s heroine Hester Prynne, a young woman, who is found guilty of adultery and a crowd gathers to witness punishment. She is sentenced to wear a scarlet "A" ("A" standing for adulteress) on her dress to shame her. She refuses to lose her dignity on the scaffold. When demanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses. “Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”   Here is brewing up a similar story that might grow into a tale of shame and despair for hundreds or thousands of innocent pe...

Beshara Movement: Responding to the Mess in Responses to Religion Today. The West has its own way of engaging with religion and spirituality, and a lot of New Religious Movements find their home there. Neo-Sufism, in its New Age dress, has especially making new converts amongst the intellectual elite. Beshara, a New Age Religious movement, seeking to express the most universal and modern aspects of Sufism, has been a presence to contend with. It has made use of Sufism without Sha’riah or religious framework. It has irritated traditionalists, mainstream Sufis and advocates of those who have been suspicious of Sufism for its vulnerability to such a reading. However, there are other ways of approaching Beshara, learning from it and critically engaging with it. Isn’t it puzzling that people, often speaking, fail – and have failed - to follow Sha’riah, as usually understood? If we go by the sermons in the mosque, over 95% Muslims can be tried in Sha’riah courts or by morality police of a ...

An open letter to the Chief Minister of J & K on Wild Management Plan for Vandalization of Historical Heritage Farm at Dachigam. Dedicated to the dumb sheep and their reportedly deaf shepherds, and the oppressed Hangul. Hon’ble Madam, “As they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so. My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice in this travesty. My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent” sheep farm suffering for a crime it did not commit.  “I defy decent men to read it without a stir of indignation in their hearts and a cry of revulsion, at the thought of the undeserved punishment being meted out.” Compelled by my professional obligations wedded to Hippocratic oath and thanks to my long standing interest in environmental movements and thinking, I, based on close reading of much of communication between sheep husbandry and wild...