Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Recalling Pablo Neruda and Mehmoud Darwish in Khayal’s Kashmir When all appears dark in Kashmir and you have nowhere to look to for light and one stares at immense futility and tragic waste, what remains there to goad us on, to keep hoping and dreaming? It is faith for some but poetry for all including those who don’t know how to pray. Today we ask Mehmoud Darwish and Pablo Neruda about this sacred and prophetic mission of poets and then read few verses from our own G. N. Khayal’s new book of resistance poetry Shabnum Ka Aatesh Qada .       Poets are those saintly alchemists who transmute our saddest thoughts and pains into songs that console, uplift and illuminate. As Neruda says, “give me all the pain of everyone, I'm going to turn it into hope.” Powerless against the sting of death as we earthly creatures are, what do we do when even life seems to sting and one envies dead in their graves? Neruda answers that “at least love should save us from life.” ...

Reading Nayeema Mehjoor’s Lost in Terror It is undeniable that Kashmiri resistance movement has been weakened by its (mis)association with puritanical Islamist ideology, unbearable – and some inadequately documented – human costs, violence against minorities, women and imagined/projected other. It needs rare courage to report from ground zero, to direct gaze to the problematic within, to avoid mincing words and call spade a spade. To attempt to write without imposed or imagined blinkers and threats, to write back to the Empire of oppression and violence, to speak on taboo issues and take strong positions outside the comfort  zone of hypocrisy or neutrality is what a writer-journalist can aim at and to succeed to a significant extent in this endeavour is indeed an achievement.This success story deserves our attention this week.       A Kashmiri woman stranding between tradition and modernity, Kashmir and London, and caught up in transition...

None can claim to frame Kashmir, to understand it in its entirety. Not even India and Pakistan. Much of the current debate on the need to rest the unrest in Burhan’s Kashmir misses many a point that can’t be ignored. These points include: Reasons for what is done or undone are difficult to find – or needless or besides the point – for Kashmiris because Kashmiri genius is more aesthetic than cognitive, more cultural than political and contains multitudes and therefore, in Whitmanian fashion, reserves the right to contradict. A Kashmiri looks at life in more poetic and playful than rational calculative terms. His faith is solid but human, all-too-human and not incompatible with occasional flirting with idols though repentance also follows and of course its breaking as well. Kashmir’s  movement for azadi is not a grand narrative  with a clear set of binaries and both moral and religious frames to buttress its various phases and methodologies don’t unproblematically fit o...

Understanding Mourning, Muharram and Kashmir 2016. Abiding value in Shia approach to culture, politics and religion – that resists sharp critical scrutiny of Sunnis and secular historiography and  anthropology – consists of, among other things: Importance of resistance  against the status quoists of all hues, in every clime, against those who assert that justice has been done and we can complacently wait and see (a thesis brilliantly defended by Hamid Dabashi in Resisting the Empire ). Heroes of resistance are martyrs who are so special people that we can’t even imagine their glory. They don’t die, asserts the Quran. Imagine if special method for defying death by science were discovered and who wouldn’t sell everything for getting it! How could they die as, being consumed in witnessing Truth, they are no longer themselves – egos – whom death could touch.  There is a station that is better than heaven that is available for mortals here on earth. That is the station of ...

Interviewing Sheikh-al-Alam(R.A) on Contemporary Politics! Let us imagine Sheikh-al-Alam visiting Kashmir and people thronging to him for few words in these difficult times.       First of all I am skeptical of the possibility that any political or religious organization will easily allow a visit by Sheikh-al-Alam to Kashmir, the way Christ is not welcome by clergy in Dostovesky’s The Brothers Karamazarov. We have almost wiped out Reshis and surely wiped Reshi values thanks to “sab ka saath for vikaas” or what is called development hoax. There are religious organizations sans that true piety which welcomes the other including religious other, at least on certain plane. There are political parties that don’t know even ABC of the science and art or “religion” of politics as understood by Greek, Muslim and other Masters across traditions. Hosting Sheikh-al-Alam would be an embarrassment except for majzoobs and those we see on roads oblivious of the world of sun...

Camus on the Choice Between Politics and Morality In these testing times as chaos reigns and people talk about conscience in politics one recalls Albert Camus, one of the towering writers of the 20th century and revered as “moral conscience of his age,”  whose hero said in The Plague ( a novel about pestilence in Oran that one especially recalls living in plagued Kashmir and one can perhaps identify some major  elements and characters  in it and the problem it engages with around us without much difficulty) : “I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.” Elsewhere he remarks: “I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.”       Those who truly see God acting in history and our lives agree with Camus’ statement “Do not wait ...

Mainstream leaders are in a strange predicament; they have stakes with both the sides and they clap for both of them. Philosophy, art and religion all have taught us the importance of the metaphor and reality of play or game and all second Shakespearean view of life as a stage and our role as actors. Art is in fact premised on seeing life as play. The world is God’s play ( lila ) and the best answer given by traditions to the question why God created the world is that it is free activity (play) of  the Divine. All things have to be done artistically, with an eye on beauty or perfection ( ihsan ) and that is all we are called for Sports have been our prized activity, akin to artistic and religious activity and its ultimate rationale/end is spiritual or celebrating the glory and freedom of Spirit which has been likened to a child. Worship involving rituals also plays on the elements of repetition, self forgetfulness through rapt attention on activity and attuning wi...

Let us note that he matured as a writer-statesman at a time when Pakistan was split and indigenous political movement had lost hope. The most important question Kashmiris face today, it would appear, is to choose between autonomy and azadi. Mainstream leadership and India could settle for autonomy (or its other versions) but Kashmiri resistance leadership and masses demand azadi . So there appears a deadlock. The solution, it might be argued, is to re-conceive autonomy (or self rule) in a manner that it would be a concrete content of what appears to many an abstraction called azadi . So far mainstream leadership (or “pro-Indian” mind) has failed to do so. So the choice is straightforward: azadi. But the idea of azadi is resisted  by force. Despite all the moral, political and other arguments against India for denying self determinism, the first and the last response is force, brute force. And in this world our arguments amount to little more than a consolation for our suffer...