Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Reading Kierkegaard, Buber, and Heschel on prayer as listening and seeing why God can’t refuse to grant prayers of sages. It is often suspected or believed that the stars are silent and man encounters a deaf sky. Man’s attempt to talk to the stars has, however, been the most indefatigable. Beyond the stars, man has been more desperate about news from the other side of grave while newer philosophies and exoteric theologies have claimed that man is imprisoned in the world while the other world is far off and we need to die before we can enjoy colours or smells of Paradise. Man’s attempt has been to seek freedom against the iron walls of life of bondage. This attempt to talk to the stars and beyond and to the other side of grave and break free from the prison of self/world/mechanism is called prayer. Prayer is an adventure to the most distant or hidden or most sublime heights we can imagine and it achieves the deepest longing of all of us for union, for meeting, for talking to the Belo...

The booklet we have today with us is a compilation of prayers beginning with Rabbana (O! Lord) taught by God in the Quran. The very fact of our existence is a prayer and compels us to pray. I am: therefore I pray; sum ergo oro.   (Frithjof Schuon in Understanding Islam ) Certain people do something remarkable and deserve the gratitude of whole people. One amongst them, in Kashmir, is Abdur Rahman Kondu who: Compiled Al-Anwar at a time when little was published about Kashmir’s greatest son, Imam Anwar Shah Kashmiri – arguably recent history’s greatest Muhaddith, one of the greatest teachers in the Madrasa framework and one of the first rate Sufi metaphysicians. Has built a remarkable library that distinguishes itself from other big personal/institutional libraries in the State in many respects and is worth visiting by every lover of Islamic intellectual tradition. Lives by and off books. He can write or compile best sellers such as Rabbana (so far sold thousands of cop...

All life is prayer for those who really know the secret of prayer One of the greatest tragedies of modernity is that we have forgotten how to live because we have forgotten how to pray.  We don’t know how to understand seemingly disproportional sawab vs. gunah calculus mentioned in traditions regarding offering or missing a prayer.  So much is our ignorance of what prayer is or how it defines human state ( the argument so forcefully put forth in Prayer Fashions Man: Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life)  that we know only the binary of farz vs. qarz  while discoursing on prayer. Post-flood there were reports that azan was given at 12 p.m and  more people began to offer nimaz out of fear of God. If people knew how to go to mosques they would forget the need to gossip in market place or cafes or intoxication of taverns.   With Ghalib’s “Maloom hae sawaabi taaet-o-zuhd/Per tabiiyet idhr nahi jati” and the sentiment “Ham mawwahid haen hamara kaesh h...