Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding Modern Science as a Problem for Religion. Deep down many believers resent our age of science believing that it has undermined faith. But everyone would love to extol rational credentials of religion and avail many gifts of modern science at the same time. There are many who think that science can be an ally of faith. Such towering scientific minds as Darwin, Freud and Hawking, for instance, all have been critical of popular religion. Most scientists today are not believers. Many young people exposed to science turn against religion. This is a complex problem – note, for instance, heavy weights like Wallace and Darwin disagreeing on the question of including or excluding man in evolutionary account, and crucial disagreements between Freud and Jung, Russell and Whitehead, Iqbal and Nasr on the question of religion vis-a-vis modern science – and we propose to treat one aspect of it today.       The first point to be noted is the difference between...

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 ...

He disarms popular critiques of religion from all kinds of modern Western critics. Chesterton is arguably amongst the most brilliant spokespersons and stylists of Tradition-centric worldview. If we want to see how every view that scoffs at God and religion is an abuse of intelligence, or misreading of their object, or failure hardly worth our consideration, read G.K Chesterton. Chesterton (along with C.S Lewis and Peter Kreeft whom he influenced) disarms popular critiques of  religion from all kinds of modern Western critics. While recognizing the antidolatrous function of certain insightful critiques in modern readings of religion, one may also read Shaykh Abdul Wahid Yahya, Shaykh Isa and Huston Smith to puncture the balloon of secularist critique and dismissal of world religions on scientific or philosophical grounds.       Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is arguably the most forceful, lucid and articulate expression of a host of beliefs mostly shared by major...

Why we need to read Moses Maimonides, the Great Jewish Philosopher Is it possible to remain a committed believer and completely rational scientist or philosopher at the same time? Yes, argued Moses Maimonides. This is the answer Muslims seek and if denied it leads to either fanaticism or chilling disbelief. Maimonides’ many writings including The Guide to the Perplexed are indispensable readings for those interested in larger questions of reconciling faith and science, religion and mysticism, religion and philosophy and such issues as defense of Sharia/Divine Law and Ijtihad understood as an endeavour to keep Law relevant for all times.       It has been pointed out that Maimonides symbolizes “a confluence of four cultures: Graeco-Roman, Arab, Jewish, and Western” that he is “first and foremost as an Arab thinker.”  And “if you didn't know he was Jewish, you might easily make the mistake of saying that a Muslim was writing.” A popular Jewish expression o...

Making sense of divergent creeds in Islamic legacy and what does it mean to be a Witness. The Prophet (SAW) attempted to wean people away from hell that is basically constituted of false views – false absolutes. People are corrupt because their views are corrupt. Ignorance is the root of evil. Commonly we see people worshipping their egos/beliefs, judging others, full of anger and complaints, envying fate of others, anxious about pseudoproblems, confusing past with timeless Tradition, fighting with themselves, their children and their doubts. That is why right view and right understanding are so important for felicity according to all religions. But how sad to note that it is hard to get access to them as religion is reduced to ideology, faith to belief, Beyond-Being and Being to personal God, God to a Super-being,  Islam (the Religion) to islam (a religion). How come there will be illumination if philosophy vetoed, mysticism suspected and debate largely proscribed? Suspicious of...

Reading Attar’s The Conference of the Birds If one is troubled by the question/crisis of faith, obsessive ritualism, difficulties in understanding the meaning of destiny and evil, guilt and hell, and if one is struggling with religious and secularist fundamentalisms and scores of questions that reason and modernity have raised regarding religion and meaning of life, consider reading Faridudin Attar. Every word of him if one could. Or at least The Conference of the Birds and its superb appropriation by Moore and Corlett in a slim volume Islamic Space that introduces the meaning of Islamic tradition for modern audience in a lucid captivating and arguably irrefutable style. For Attar, as for mystics in general, the question is not of belief/disbelief in some Beyond/God but of exploring the problem of the ego and its resistance to be dissolved by Love. The only doctrine Sufism “teaches” is detachment from/transcendence of all beliefs or positions including the one (ego/I) who seeks be...

Fraudulent Practices in Modern Medicine Those who care to think raise some uncomfortable questions and teach us to doubt. With one such doubting doctor who is also called poor man’s doctor, we deconstruct some reigning ideas in modern medical practice. In fact we can easily show that there have been some errors, even scandals, in modern history  that resulted in a dominance of modern allopathic system of medicine.        Dr B M Hegde, despite being criticized for right wing sympathies and some unsupported generalizations and  certain inconsistencies nevertheless emerges as one of the very few scientist-philosophers of modern India who needs to be widely read and debated. Passionate, informed, brilliant, witty, iconoclastic, provocative and lucid, Dr Hegde is a renowned cardiologist trained in allopathic system who has exposed, along with certain lesser known but significant scientists, fraudulent or somehow problematic nature of certain medic...

Yes, converting life into a work of art is the secret. There is a heaven here and a heaven there, and there is some difference between the two. If we fail to cultivate the former, we fail to win the later. How seriously do we take God’s invitation to visit heaven or to create/cultivate a space called heaven? This can be known by the quality of lives we live. Very few people live life as if heaven is its constant horizon and depth dimension and thus “reserve” their seats in otherworldly heaven. All education and religion consist in learning how to experience this world as heaven. Our A grades may mean F grades in life’s examination. Our examination centres are pits of hell thanks to vices of competition and memorization of trivialities or information we hardly need in life. Heaven requires cultivating Imagination and Art that we have exiled. Our fragmented pleasure seeking, greedy, haughty, mean, depressed, complaining, lobbying, cursing – in short alienated lives in hell of our own...

It could well be the most important book of the current century in research in Kashmiri literature.   G.N .Gowhar has already done so much for Sheikh-ul-Alam studies that no history of evolution of the discipline could bypass him. As he grows older his power and resolve to touch taboo areas has only increased. His magnum opus – gowhar - in this field was awaited by us from years and, despite his ill health, has come. Though bound to receive mixed and heated response, and generate debate both for and against some of his theses this Mu’taber Kulliyat-i-Shaikh-ul–Alam seems destined to reorient Sheikh ul Alam studies in a decisive way. It could well be the most important book of the current century in research in Kashmiri literature.       So far proper historical criticism hasn’t been applied to Sheikh corpus. Even the laity and not to speak of many important scholars of the Sheikh has been uncomfortable with what goes popularly in his name. It is diff...