Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Unlike Holderlin and Rilke, Iqbal is still awaiting his Heidegger, who could appropriate and present him for the post-Nietzschean world audience. Unlike Heidegger, he has received little attention from great philosophers and theologians of the world. Even the Muslim world has been largely ignoring him or just packaging his complex and enormously fecund and subtle mystical and metaphysical insights into some neat and clear formulations. Due attention to his existential and metaphysical thought has been overshadowed by overemphasis on his political thought. He has so far been written off by major histories of philosophy into margins of modern Muslim thought through his vast output was addressed to modern man as such and not to the Muslims only.       Under his unique literary genius and combining all traditionally-recognized approaches to the Ultimate – poetry, philosophy, religion and mysticism – has immense power to speak to an age marred by various crises that fundam...

Meditations on A. G. Sheikh’s Reflections on Ladakh, Tibet and Central Asia. Literature is essentially about presenting us a world we have lost or we can reclaim; it creates a world that ought to be or that we can imagine. It has often presented Utopias or imagined heavenly perfection in distant or exotic lands. Fairy tales retain such attraction because they present a world somehow we identify with or feel nostalgic about. What if we are told about something that has been the case and that is, to a significant extent, a case and that can be, in a way, accessed, here and now. Ladakh is one such case. Indeed it is a sanctuary of sprit, a preview of heaven, a moral ideal that puts to shame all ideals of material progress, the last bastion of tradition that can revivify the world or at least remind it of what it has forgotten and could arguably reclaim. Abdul Ghani Sheikh has devoted his life to better comprehension of the mystery, beauty and sacrality of the paradise we all have in...

Reading Eric Voegelin on Sacred Oriented Politics. We live in a world where Syed Maududi remains a presence to contend with. One is either for him or against him – there is no option of ignoring him. There remains certain ambivalence with regard to his central ideas amongst mainstream Ulema, and some intellectuals. Ambivalence may be underlined by noting sharply divided estimates of him by Hasan Askari, and his student Saleem Ahmed, two great traditionalist critics of Pakistan. Askari was quite critical of Syed Maududi and a fan of Bhutto, while for Saleem Ahmed converse was true. (Muslim religious/intellectual communities similarly remain divided in their views of revivalist theology and politics). It appears that Maududi would be better understood in relation to the thoughts of the best of his contemporaries in political philosophy and religion. One such illustrious contemporary was Eric Voegelin who shared Maududi’s commitment to the Sacred infused life and public sphere, distrust...

Do we have a culture now? What is culture and what is civilization, and the difference between the two? Even our better educated class is conscious of the difference between the two and what this means for quality of life we live. Broadly speaking we have been pursuing a march to civilization at the cost of culture and don’t know the middle point that marries both of them – this is the mandate Islam has proposed for itself. This thesis has been brilliantly argued in a classic work Islam between East and West by former Bosnian President Alija Izatbegovic, one of the really great scholar-intellectual-statesmen of the Muslim world.       Culture signifies everything that relates to man as something more than merely biological or material entity. It is poles apart from what is called civilization and is an expression of religious or spiritual self of man. Everything cultural ultimately has its grounding in man’s yearning for what transcends man as biological cr...

Trying to Understand Shah-i-Hamdan (RA) in the Liberal Democratic World. “Political Islam” and Muslim religious nationalism have been with us for quite some time achieving very little in political terms but continuing to be seen as an aspiration of majority of Muslims. Although these are essentially modern phenomena and ideologically complicit with otherwise tabo modernist ideological notions, influential medieval scholars are roped in to buttress the cases. How convincing are the arguments and how effective or relevant today needs to be seen. Mir Syed Ali Hamdani, also called Amir-i-Kabir, is one of the great but neglected Muslim political theologians who needs to be better known and carefully studied to help us develop contemporary Muslim political theology. A perusal of his writings, especially his Zakhiratul Malook and Letters that constitute key sources for exploring his political theology, today in the post-secular (and for many post-theological) world while taking note of...

Here systematic explication of postmodernism is not possible so a few points will be made though I risk certain oversimplification. It must be borne in mind that there are divergent interpretations of and approaches to understand postmodernism. Muslims are required to appreciate the spirit of the times and recognize the signs of the Lord in change, in history, in new unfolding events.  A   Mujaddid   or reviver of religion is born after every 100 years to help cope up with the new challenges. Today we try to appreciate the challenge from postmodern thought currents are posing and opportunities they are providing for exploitation on our part. First it is to be noted that ours is, willy-nilly, the postmodern age. Living in a globalised world, a multicultural world we might suffer cultural shock or pathologically reaction to the cultural or religious other. Salafi-Sufi polarisation or Shia Sunni skirmishes that have intensified recently for reasons we know can be better un...