Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Reading Dostoevsky and Levinas and bringing local testimonies on evidences of our guilt. Imagine we are suddenly summoned for any crime committed anywhere while we have no idea about even our remote involvement and we have no forum or chance to plead our innocence. According to world religions and, as expressly stated by such writers as Dostoevsky, Beckett, Kafka and such philosophers as Levinas, this is indeed the case and we stand accused and are currently facing the trial and it seems that punishment phase has already begun. The task is to awaken to the full implications of this Kafkaseque nightmare. We are not responsible for sins of others but for injustice suffered by others anywhere. The Quran accuses man for choosing to accept the Divine Trust when the earth and the heavens had refused. This trust requires being true to the divine image in which man is created and that in turn means being responsible for the whole creation. This responsibility is back breaking. Unspeakable cri...

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...

Consciously or unconsciously we keep adoring beauty It is told that  once Ananda, the beloved disciple of the Buddha, saluted his master and said: “Half of the holy life, O master, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful”.“Say not so, Ananda, say not so!” the master replied.“It is not half the holy life; it is the whole of the holy life.” (SAMYUTTA NIKAYA) Why is there a universal “weakness” for the most useless thing called beauty? ( Laotze had spoken of beauty as “the usefulness of the useless,”  and Kant as “Purposiveness without purpose.” ) Because beauty is from the otherworld. Plato meant the same when he said “beauty is the splendour of the Truth.” When women saw beautiful Joseph they exclaimed he is an angel. See beautiful girl and one exclaims a houri from heaven. Indeed beauty is from the otherworld and its existence is one of the most powerful proofs for the existence of God. Ghalib’s answer to his ow...

Reading Camus and Dostovesky in Muharram. Albert Camus has presented an influential case for what he called metaphysical rebellion, and cited the reign of injustice, innocent suffering, and failure of reason to comprehend the absurdity of experience and slaughter house that history is as validating such a response. Imam Hussain’s encounter with death and finitude, and all the evil that life has to offer, including misery and death of innocents is exactly opposite. However, in terms of concrete action against injustice or evil, both conclude on the same note. Let us read Camus and then try to ask him, and with him the absurd heroes we find everywhere today loitering in the streets and cafes, the question of meaning of the life of martyrdom.       Camus’ case is lucidly argued in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel . He finds no meaning in life – not to speak of in death – and finds that this universe that includes death and suffering of innocents is indiffe...

They probe life and come up with insights we direly need. Name the best short story or novel in the world literature and one is most likely to answer some writing from Russian literature. By general consensus Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are the greatest novelists. To be the greatest novelist is to be the greatest teacher of life.       We hardly live life; don’t know its beauty, glory and meaning. We are enslaved by what Schopenhauer called Will and live life as if under bondage. We have complaints and grudges against almost everyone; we keep cursing others and even ourselves at times. We come and go without having learnt the meaning of life with all its challenges, guilt, violence, tragedy, horror and countless distractions and games that ego invents to avoid facing reality of nothingness within. The question is “where is life lost in living?” – in vegetating, in complaining, in cursing, in “fret and fever,” in day dreaming, in begging for fame or recognition. ...