Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Revisiting Plato and Al-Farabi today Witnessing calls for violence, God’s Rule, juxtaposition/confounding of political and religious slogans, use of Islam for and against particular ideological thought current, one wonders how to understand and differentiate what is truly divine and what is sold as divine. So much counterfeit currency might be in the market that we need a touchstone to judge. Let us explore if we have this touchstone with the help of Plato, “second Master” Al-Farabi and “modern Plato” Voegelin.       Plato argued for orienting man and his communal institutions toward God/the Good and need for true constitution we can call divine or revealed constitution and dangers of those constitutions in which one part dominates against others and society is no longer an integrated whole governed by Justice that is God, although one can always see its ideal character in the sense that it will only be approximated and never fully the case. as Derrida woul...

The question of time is the vital question of life and death for Muslims, as Iqbal noted. Time is terribly real. So is history. The question of time is the vital question of life and death for Muslims, as Iqbal noted. Semitic traditions have been especially concerned with linearity of time and exigencies of history. On this fateful moment in history when the “clash” of civilizations has been brought up, how do we approach the vital question? What is the meaning of history if we find it a “huge slaughterhouse” of people and find the will to power ruling the roost? How is it possible to say goodbye to another fateful year that precipitated the debate on meaning of Muslim understanding of history and allied conceptions of Islamic State and Khilafah that, self avowedly, seek to redirect history with a value based  paradigm. The problem of evil especially presents itself with all its horror today as we recall groans and sighs and tears from violence and alienation that seems to hav...

Expositions From The Hasidic Tradition   I reproduce a few excerpts from one of the greatest moral and spiritual classics of the Judaic tradition. There is the Quranic dictum for taking note of ancient stories that have lessons for us. The Quran itself narrates some stories. Prophetic traditions also are replete with such references to traditional lore, including the Biblical. One prophetic tradition states that God doesn’t tolerate men who don’t sin and vows to replace them with those who sin and then seek forgiveness. Man’s sojourn on earth is coloured by sin.  Adam’s first conscious act was an act of rebellion, or sin, and that is linked to the birth of self-consciousness, as Iqbal noted. We have been directed not to hate sinners but the sin. But who doesn’t judge or condemn sinners? All gossip, media talk shows, and street talk are full of such condemnation. By meditating on the following Questions and Answers from Martin Buber’s   Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic S...

Let us not be angry, but debate and discuss and apologize for being angry. Let us believe, for one day at least, that no man is willfully bad and that people listen to well formulated and well-meaning arguments. Let us not condemn even the devil, unheard. Let us hope, for an hour at least, that dialogue does help if is not for solving Kashmir problem but when education is an issue. All education is dialogue. Not slogans. No name calling. I am reminded of a movie Twelve Angry Men that demonstrates a key idea from one of the most influential and respected modern philosophers, Jungen Hebermas. The idea is that it is possible to communicate in a democratic set up and resolve violent conflicting opinions. I wish this film were shown in every school and to all ambassadors and politicians who are involved in communication and dialogue. Even seemingly eternally irresolvable hash-nosh conflicts could be greatly helped if we learn how to dialogue. Incidentally it has no action, no acroba...

Public perception, especially perception in educated class regarding animal husbandry is that is not the ideal choice even for a farmer, not to speak for a minister to choose as his profile. Farmers continue to be imagined as poor, ignorant, crude, uncouth. Animals are best when prepared for table but not when it is encountering them live with all the dung and bestiality associated with them. Another presumption is livestock sector is only of marginal importance to our economy. Public perception may well be erroneous but as creatures who do care for reputation or perceived image we may be prone to escape reality. And reality must be faced.  Let us examine the facts. Before I come to the status in our state I need to make an observation about a pathology of modernity called necrophilia – love for corpses which is Erich Fromn’s expression for our love for machine culture. Man has been created in divine image and this requires living with other species, seeing ourselves in them as...

John Derrida is considered one of the chief architects of postmodernist worldview. We are living, willy-nilly, in the postmodern age. And one of the chief characteristics of this is incredulity toward ideologies, especially those ideologies that make big claims. Deconstruction that Derrida advocated consists in taking nothing on face value, in noticing the gaps and absences and contradictions in the terms in which an argument or claim is made. It teaches us valuing difference and suspecting totalitarianism, fundamentalism and all such discourses that speak in the name of God/Truth/Future/Utopia/ Justice. Derrida said that Justice can never be done in absolute terms and all one can do is to approximate it and ruthlessly questions all judgments, all claims of justice from authorities. Deconstruction deconstructs all constructions imposed on people through sheer power or force or propaganda. We need the language, if not the methodology, of deconstruction to present truth to power, to sh...

Perhaps many important questions are missed but a couple of them haunt me and I wonder would they ever be properly discussed. First is a question of building up spaces outside the current political system.  And the second is cashing on spaces opened up by changing dynamics of politics. There is belated recognition that election boycotts have been counterproductive. Even in early 1990s we could have been politically active and exploiting given spaces for helping people move forward. Hurriyats have been increasingly criticized for being almost a spent force. And we can’t avoid an impression that fundamental failures in methodology and conception have been made by it. There is no culture of debate in it, no consultation of latest developments in political theory to help it better understand changing political scenario following major changes in the economic and political order after the end of cold war. One could seriously ask if attention had been given to create certain institutio...

Apropos of Hasseb Drabu-Abir Bazaz debate on sovereignty, a few points need to be made in this regard. I first need to clarify why this debate is so important for all of us as Kashmiris. This is the debate about legitimacy of mainstream politics that takes more or less implicitly or explicitly re-integrationist view that states that our fate is sealed with India, that we must renounce the love for   Houri   called Freedom, that we own India and that alone will ensure our development.  However, more sophisticated versions would put it this way: given a globalized world and gradual irrelevance of concept of sovereignty in post-nation state discourse such notions as freedom that requires more defined notion of sovereignty need to be given up and we learn the language of merger or some kind of federalism. What is ordinarily presumed by disgruntled youth chanting slogans of azadi is idealistic or utopian notion of freedom or sovereignty that are now passee. We also need to ...