Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Reading Helene Cixous’ case against writers to understand writing as martyrdom. Often one feels a sense of choking while writing, editing and editing. One doesn’t want to risk one’s reputation or interests, to be more candid. One doesn’t want to cry Emperor is naked or confess one’s own nakedness. One adds layers upon layers of ambiguity to escape censure. But we can’t escape the censure from our own conscience. Sometimes one edits out certain things to please the editor and sometimes to please the establishment or the institution one is dependent upon. Regardless of reason, the result is truth is a casualty. And we then lament why aren’t we considered really great and why today writers are no longer respected the way they once were. Writers in general are no longer playing the role of conscience of people. Often they want to be read, to be popular, to come down to the level of popular taste and readership and they don’t have courage to write on so many important things. The best id...

Whom one reads indicates what one is. We are born with a love for perfection and it is against human dignity to settle for mediocrity and not to pursue the best – the most beautiful. Ihsan – doing everything in a style – is the universally acknowledged human prerogative. Let us ask today how we apply this  in approaching religion and literature. Thanks to modern education there are now many people who want to understand and create the best to satisfy their intellectual and creative yearnings but few are ready to pass through the ordeal of mastering the required sciences. This doesn’t necessarily mean  formal learning but requires what the Quran calls tafakkur – thinking. And what is called thinking? It is philosophers like Ibn Sina and Heidegger who are needed to explain it. The Quran's charge against most humans is they don’t think. Do we care to know what is called thinking? Who can claim access to required disciplining of attention?       Whom ...

Reading Rashid Nazki’s Siriyyat Religions have had a bad press for some reasons for last few centuries. It is perceived by critics of religions that they intimidate, they require belief without or even against evidence, build their case on fear or hope while despising intelligence, are ever on war with healthy instincts, side with the oppressors, make people sleep or daydream, require following so many laws that most fail to observe and cause unnecessary guilt, censure freedom of thought in the name of blasphemy laws, tell incredible stories if taken only literally, are vulnerable to violent, misogynist, fundamentalist readings and divide people. There is a famous essay “Why I am not a Christian?” by Russell and less famous (notorious) book Why I am not a Muslim? by Ibn Warraq (both to be read along with rejoinders from Warren Rachele and Pervez Manzoor respectively). A few other equivalents against other religious positions have also been published. We find on internet proliferating...

Reading Jamal Khawja on Islam in the Liberal World Long back, Ulema in India including Kashmir had been approached to articulate and defend their understanding of Islam in philosophical idiom in order to facilitate dialogue between religions and with academicians. The questions asked included: what constituted reality  for them and how one knows it. It is another matter that the tersely formulated questionnaire was greeted with silence in Kashmir.  The idea was spearheaded, among others, by Prof. Jamal Khawja as Director of a project Philosophical Dialogue between Ulema and Modern Scholars sponsored  by Indian Council for Philosophical Research, New Delhi. Khwaja is one of the very few significant living Muslim philosophers India has produced. His Quest for Islam , Authenticity and Islamic Liberalism , Islam and Modernity and Living the Quran in Our Times constitute sustained meditations on the hard problem of being an authentic human being and authentic Muslim in ...

Reading Benazir’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West There are some important books that Muslim world should have taken better note of. They have something important to say though certain things might be objected to on both religious and philosophical grounds. Some selections from them deserve serious consideration. Such works include works of almost all the authors approvingly quoted in the last chapter of Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West . The problems that Benazir highlights are indeed noteworthy. She notes, for instance, that “now almost half the world’s Muslims are illiterate. The combined GDP of the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is about the same as that of France, a single European country. More books are translated annually from other languages into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic over the past one hundred years. The 15 million citizens of tiny Greece buy more books annually than do al...

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.” ...

Beshara Movement: Responding to the Mess in Responses to Religion Today. The West has its own way of engaging with religion and spirituality, and a lot of New Religious Movements find their home there. Neo-Sufism, in its New Age dress, has especially making new converts amongst the intellectual elite. Beshara, a New Age Religious movement, seeking to express the most universal and modern aspects of Sufism, has been a presence to contend with. It has made use of Sufism without Sha’riah or religious framework. It has irritated traditionalists, mainstream Sufis and advocates of those who have been suspicious of Sufism for its vulnerability to such a reading. However, there are other ways of approaching Beshara, learning from it and critically engaging with it. Isn’t it puzzling that people, often speaking, fail – and have failed - to follow Sha’riah, as usually understood? If we go by the sermons in the mosque, over 95% Muslims can be tried in Sha’riah courts or by morality police of a ...

Most of us have travelled far from our houses or towns but who can claim that he or she has journeyed within? I once imagined an angel in charge of Heart’s Embassy complaining God that he be retired as he has no or only very occasional applicants to attend to. The answer from God  was “Don’t be impatient; every person is your client. I have directed another angel to make them restless for visiting the farthest though nearest placeless spaces through trackless paths.” And that has indeed been the case. We are all restless, hankering after love or love’s celestial mansions that are innumerable. Cupid has struck us all and fortunate are those who have been struck so hard that they have dropped dead like moths. All education that the school of life offers us unasked is variation on the theme of perfecting the art and science of love. Learning to love unconditionally, love everything as the Friend in disguise, transcend the lust that wants to possess and not give away everything one h...

We need to read these thinkers first in historical context and proper perspective, and then judge. The question of our attitude to Sufism has divided modern Muslims. ISIS, and even some revivalists who don't share ISIS politics, share significant part of their theology, premised on certain negative reading of Sufism. Should we side with Ibn Taymiyyah perceived as staunch opponent of Unitarian Sufism or Ibn Arabi who is perceived to be its greatest exponent? For some analysts Salafis are playing into hands of Imperialists and dividing Ummah.       So how do we tackle these accusations and counter-accusations? I propose to say a few words on Ibn Arabi to clarify the issue and ask if Ibn Taymiyyah can be considered his real opponent notwithstanding his takfeer of him. (Against Ibn Taymiyyah, some great Ahle-Hadees scholars, from the Indian subcontinent especially,  have been highly praising Ibn Arabi.) I don’t claim to understand Ibn Arabi better than his...