Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

All states today are both religious and secular and none is purely religious or secular. God has not been dethroned. Today we seek to engage with Shah-i-Hamdan’s socio-political thought considering the fact that if he visited us today he would hardly recognize it, as the world has witnessed several frame shift mutations. He would be compelled to edit not only the sections invoking medieval knowledge of some sciences( that have been corrected thanks to progress of natural sciences) but also, in all probability, partly, some sections treating sociopolitical issues. Today the institution of kings he assumes or addresses is almost gone for good and there have already developed institutions that restrain rulers. He wound find much of his job done thanks to modernity that has made rulers accountable to theoretically independent judiciary. He would find neither slaves nor slave owners, neither feudal lords nor the land in the sense he had seen as primary wealth. He would encounter the mo...

Kashmir has a mystical heritage and identity. And it has politically been transformed by socialistic vision of Marxists and Sheikh Abdullah. However, Marxism and mysticism have been mutually suspicious and that has hampered tackling the questions of both politics and religion. So we ask today why is religion perceived as an enemy of a socialist or communist state? It is replied that because it is “the opium of the peoples.” It lulls workers to sleep. It is thus anti-revolutionary. It is complicit with capitalism. It too exploits in the name of God when it extracts wealth from gullible masses. It creates false substitutes like the goods of the otherworld so that people don’t take the problems of this world very seriously. It encourages detachment that conflicts with the spirit of active involvement needed for changing the order of the world. It reconciles people to present ills by attributing them to fate or karma . It says resist not evil and believes that change of heart in the capi...

Without reading Marx one is illiterate in modern thought Like it or not, Marx tops the list of the most influential thinkers of the modern age. He has helped shape, or influence, not only politics, but economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, liberation theology and almost every important stream of humanities. Nothing makes sense in the capitalist world except in light of Marx. Without reading Marx one is illiterate in modern thought. Name any philosopher or writer or political personality with whom one day (Ist May), every year, is identified across the world?  Reading Marx helps explain the world we live in and partly help fighting injustice in it. All those who curse money power or rat race for competition and hanker for guaranteed employment, free education and healthcare, more leisure, holidays, pensions, social welfare schemes,  all kinds of insurances against exigencies, and have reasons to complain about banks and other capitalist institutions, and k...