Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

  It is time to weep for Hussain(AS). If we can’t, we need to ask God for helping us. “Tears are a gift. When we don’t know or don’t remember how to shed them, we can pray for the gift of tears. We don’t know the script. We know the Giver.” It is time to know Hussain(A.S) suffered for each one of us, for all those who are denied justice. It is time to see how suffering is a gift and thank God for it. Let us unfold all these points on the day when the noblest family on earth was massacred for the noblest ideals that ennoble and redeem life.      To be human is to suffer, to grieve and to weep. It is to suffer for the sake of that which is dearer than life, to grieve for that which ideal which humans, our predecessors or we have failed to be loyal to. It is to weep for what overcomes us and undo all resistance on our part to the decimating embrace of God/Spirit.       God made us humans and not angels. Not to weep in the name of some spiritual or my...

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 ...

Khoanaen Nawa is the best to read non-Muslim poets on Karbala Aaj tak roti hae teray gam mei her mahfil Hussain Iss mein koi shak nahi to hae jehan ka dil Hussain ( Maenk ) There are only two categories of people in the world: those who know they love Hussain(a.s) and those who don’t know though they too, deep in their being, stand witness to the glory that Hussain(r.a) is. And one can club all great thinkers, artists, poets, saints with the first camp. (None can claim to be indifferent to the tragedy of Karbala). One can almost set the love of the Prophet (SAW) and, by implication, love of Hussain(R.A), as a criterion of distinguishing believers from disbelievers.     “Ham haen haediri,” “ham haen hussaini” is indeed a universal slogan and Hussain(a.s) as a symbol of protest “against real suffering” and as a “sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” (seeing how Yazids seem to triumph everywhere one recalls Marx’s po...