Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding the Perennialist view of plurality of salvation Will Gandhi/Mother Teresa go to heaven? This question is often asked in Muslim circles. Counterpart of this question asked in Christian circles is regarding some Muslim saints/devout believers who didn’t recognize death and resurrection of Christ. A great number of followers of some religions believe that salvation is restricted to their religion only, sometimes to their sects within religion only. Unless one knows Christ (A.S) or Muhammad (S.A.W) salvation can’t be granted, they assert. Mystics have generally resisted this belief and it is perennialists who have most comprehensively questioned it and provided alternative view of plurality of salvation. Many Muslim scholars have the following misgiving about perennialist approach to religion/ Islam:  Perennialists think all traditional religions are true and can lead to salvation. And this claim contradicts the thesis that the Quran asserts that the only acceptable relig...

Angels greet all of us though we are often absent to return the same. The best or most influential minds happen to transcend simplistic construction and politicized framing of the tussle between the two. Key mutual misgivings need to be addressed.       If religions seem to divide mankind, mythologies, artistic/mystical/wisdom traditions and metaphysics underlying them that secular thinking better engage unite. Famous new atheists like Dawkins and Harris don’t fail to register their love for certain images of the Sacred. In fact Harris proposed something like Unitarian advaitic spirituality for secular worshippers. Worship we must anyway. Russell’s “Free Man’s Worship” or Spinoza’s intellectual love of God or Heidegger’s paean to Being or Derrida’s commitment to Justice and Levinas’s to the Other all succeed to preserve an essential aspect of spiritual life. It was Whitehead who noted that “the essence of education is it be religious.” Buddha didn’t propos...

Dialogue between Religious and Secular Sensibilities and Questioning Religionist-Liberal Divide From India to Turkey to Egypt religion has helped political parties win power. Religion is one of the key factors influencing outcome of elections in many officially secular states. Religion is driving number of big industries and priests/religious leaders continue to be king makers or influence much of power relations. Despite all this ours is characterized as a secular age and we have no choice of travelling backwards in time or imaging an isolated place in future where secularism hasn’t encroached. Let us note extent of secularization one has to engage with to remain. Influence of Secular Critiques of Religion We are all, willy nilly, secular in certain sense, in certain areas. Design of our cities, homes, roads, certain profanation of sacred spaces, worldwide domination of secularism in political constitutions, text books, academia, certain secularization of dress etc. are all with ...

Understanding World Religions non-ideologically with special reference to Islam and Buddhism. One of the central problems in politically inflected religious revivalist movements including Islamist ones is inadequate theorization or understanding of the object and subject of religion due to marginalization or suspicion of/veto against philosophy, mysticism, art and advances in number of sciences including mythology, comparative religion and certain natural/social sciences. In general they have a) simplistic b) homogenizing c) literalist d) exclusivist e) ideologically framed reductionist understanding that can’t withstand questioning from sciences while being vulnerable to many pathological deformations. Their standard reaction (as distinguished from response) to their critics which include mainstream traditional scholars, mystics, scientists, philosophers and artists is accusation of inauthenticity/Westoxication. They are more likely to judge, speak to, accuse, dismiss the religious/...

Revisiting Islamism, Hindutva and the Contradictions of Politics of Majoritarian Religious. Nationalism We are encountering  a sharp rise of the right in political or public sphere. The RSS has shown that it can’t be discounted in understanding new India. Islamists have compelled others to recognize them. Islam enters electoral politics in many ways. The Congress with its secularist dismissal of religion has been proved wrong in its estimate of the role of religion in public sphere and constructing a history that othered/marginalized religion.  We are witnessing bitter conflict between Salafis and the Ikhwan in Egypt, Zionists and Hamas, Shi’ite and Sunni political forces, Taliban and its adversaries. Jamaat-e Islami has been in bitter opposition to its internal critics such as Ghamidi, and endorsing secularism as an idea in India and criticizing it in Pakistan.  How do we understand such a bewildering range of responses?       Regardless of r...

Understanding Modern Science as a Problem for Religion. Deep down many believers resent our age of science believing that it has undermined faith. But everyone would love to extol rational credentials of religion and avail many gifts of modern science at the same time. There are many who think that science can be an ally of faith. Such towering scientific minds as Darwin, Freud and Hawking, for instance, all have been critical of popular religion. Most scientists today are not believers. Many young people exposed to science turn against religion. This is a complex problem – note, for instance, heavy weights like Wallace and Darwin disagreeing on the question of including or excluding man in evolutionary account, and crucial disagreements between Freud and Jung, Russell and Whitehead, Iqbal and Nasr on the question of religion vis-a-vis modern science – and we propose to treat one aspect of it today.       The first point to be noted is the difference between...

Attempting to formulate what unites and grounds world religions and allow genuine inter-religious dialogue. Isn’t it sad and embarrassing to note that while political states, “though different in culture and competing with one another,” maintain diplomatic relations and strive for coexistence. Only religions are not on speaking terms.” The core problem that hurts their relationship is the blasphemy expressed thus: “I alone have all the truth and the grace, and all those who differ live in darkness, and are abandoned by the grace of God.”       Despite the enduring perception that religions “disagree profoundly and are in opposition to one another on matters of doctrine” it seems possible that we can express the common statement of all delegates to an imagined international conference in the idiom of every major religion. All we need is to take the best interpreters of world religions who understand language of all or at least some religions and seek to express...

Exploring if Hawking may be read as an ally of genuine religion Should Hawking’s much publicized atheism bother truly religious souls? No, because it leaves the problem that religion basically addresses – the question of suffering/ignorance/alienation or meaning or God understood as the Meaning of Life – untouched. Hawking himself advocate a sort of intellectual/spiritual life that echoes/is parasitic upon the “worldview” of Religion. God talk is ultimately more about life lived here and now than enquiring about past or future dispensation or bothering about some account of what happened at the beginning of time. The most important question for religion is not of boundaries or edges of the universe or who began the show or whether it is self sustaining or what is the precise address of the Creator if there is one (as against none or two or more as if nondual Reality that grounds every inquiry or judgment is numerical question) or the structure of His Mind. It is, instead, how one ta...