Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

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...

Do we have a culture now? What is culture and what is civilization, and the difference between the two? Even our better educated class is conscious of the difference between the two and what this means for quality of life we live. Broadly speaking we have been pursuing a march to civilization at the cost of culture and don’t know the middle point that marries both of them – this is the mandate Islam has proposed for itself. This thesis has been brilliantly argued in a classic work Islam between East and West by former Bosnian President Alija Izatbegovic, one of the really great scholar-intellectual-statesmen of the Muslim world.       Culture signifies everything that relates to man as something more than merely biological or material entity. It is poles apart from what is called civilization and is an expression of religious or spiritual self of man. Everything cultural ultimately has its grounding in man’s yearning for what transcends man as biological cr...

Sufism might have theological critiques but literature provides its strongest support and in a way helps dissolve much of now mostly outdated theological critiques of Sufism. Thanks to Urdu Department CUK and Sahityya Academy we had, after much time, a seminar on Sufism and Urdu Literature. Some points that emerged in the papers and discussions may be summed up in the following propositions: Urdu literature from Khusrow till date is informed by Sufi sensibility. No great name in Urdu literature is anti-Sufi and all are to certain extent indebted to Sufism. The world could be saved by better engagement with the mystical or Sufi and especially what is called Quranic Sufism or Ihsan centric narrative. Sufism should be taken as synonymous with spirituality and that is the essence or core of religions. If Sufism becomes philosophy divested from practice and indulges in anti-social and ideologically complicit actions, it should be resisted. Sufism needs to be purged of ...

“School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn’t worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave. This was a Catholic School in Munich. I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system? From the age of twelve I began to suspect authority and distrust teachers.” The above quote from Einstein (the greatest scientist of the twentieth century whom school system almost killed) reproduced here should be enough to alert those who seek to change educational policy, especially academic session for facilitating examination oriented academic policy. Examinations, as currently held, are not defensible; they are causing gangrene to the sou...

It is a flood that comes annually, destroys generations and cripples minds There is a flood that comes once in a century, destroys properties. But there is a flood that comes annually, destroys generations and cripples minds. And it is on a mass scale. And we are all its victims. And we don’t talk about it. It has claimed innumerable lives, destroyed creative spark in countless students. It costs us money, time, human resource and other resources. I mean Examination System prevailing here which needs examining, a thorough post-mortem. A preliminary post-mortem report follows. Detailed reports from different labs (intellectual, moral, social, psychological, political, religious) will hopefully follow in future. The body is giving offensive smell. One can’t imagine how it functioned in its great days. Once upon a time there was instituted a system for preparing students for mastering crafts and skills they had shown promise by virtue of natural inclination, heredity etc. Students wer...

Why isn’t it easy for our political parties to negotiate to be able to form a stable government in which opposition parties and critics too could largely trust or desist from mudslinging? Even if they do succeed in forming one, isn’t it going to be ever under strain? Aren’t all parties uneasy bedfellows when it comes to sharing power? I am not going to answer these questions – we know them anyway – but  transpose these questions to domestic sphere. Seeing the stalemate in domestic politics of home where only a few family members tied by blood relationships I have no surprises to be shocked by any arrangement that ensues and that have ensued in our history by different permutations and combinations in politics. If we are so divided at family level, if there is difficult to find the undisputed leader or trust in a leader at home level (most of us don’t practically buy the thesis inherited from our tradition that husbands are leaders (qawamoon?), if most mothers-in-law have grudges ...

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...