Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Schuon offered a devastating criticism of modern priests of science such as Freud, Dawkins, Hawking on a very different plane . Few are aware that the science that claimed to oust God, to explain everything in principle without reference to the First Principle/Absolute, to dissolve mystery and to usher in an age of universal happiness has been discredited not only by postmodern philosophers and certain developments at the edge of modern science itself but also by our great metaphysicians such as Coomaraswamy and Guenon who were also trained as scientists. Lyotard famously pointed out that modern science as a grand narrative (grand overarching explanatory paradigm) is no longer credible in our age. Feyerbend and others have reiterated the thesis that modern science has been dogmatic and power-inflected and thus can’t arbitrate or monopolize truth. However, criticizing science’s big ideological claims alone doesn’t suffice; what we need is arguing for an alternative epistemology and me...

"Whenever I hear the Quran chanted, it is as though I am listening to Music, underneath the flowing melody there is sounding… insistent beat of a drum, it is like the beating of my heart. " _________Arberry Today we begin our new series on books by attempting to read the First Book, the Mother of Books, the Book of our Souls or Self (what Ahad Zargar calls   manich sipar ) .       Scriptures constitute the First Books mankind knows because it is God who taught speech, and the knowledge of names of things – their archetypes, their essence, their face facing God, their meaning – ultimately required for salvation. The first man was also a prophet to whom God spoke. Culture, especially in the traditional sense of the term as understood in all great cultures we know of across ages and regions, is ultimately linked to Revelation, to Metaphysics. Its symbols, its rituals, its art, its deepest connotations can’t be comprehended in absence of reference to the Sacr...