Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding, with Simone Weil, the pathology of being somebody and invitation to martyrdom as an offering of “I”  Arguably nine tenths of problems we face at personal, familial and social levels are due to wrong view of oneself and one’s vocation. We have not been taught or haven’t interiorized first shahadah/kalima that teaches us to give up the notion of ordinary self/ego for transpersonal Self. The passion for fame or for self aggrandizement or power or position or bossing in administrative career, awards, rewards and recognition are all aspects of the pathology of self-knowledge. Check again your deepest motivation when you choose your career. If it is for certain glamour for getting a name or becoming somebody instead of discovering nobody we truly are, one is doomed to pursue an illusion. If one is an ambitious man of career, gets readily irritated, maintains a distance from fellow people one meets in the street every day, is ever thinking about promotions, not nice to one...

First book of its kind from Kashmir on a difficult but vital topic by self-taught mystic scholar that any 8th grader can grasp.   A treat, already selling like sanitizer in the times of Corona, sanitizes the pathological environment created by puffed up ego holding consciousness in siege. The first book of its kind from Kashmir on a difficult but vital topic by self-taught mystic scholar that any 8th grader can grasp.      “In the beginning was consciousness.” Chit or Consciousness is, so to speak, the ultimate ground and end of all that is. The study or enquiry concerning consciousness is the first and the last enquiry concerning first and last ends of man. It is the science of consciousness that explains all the weird, mysterious, miraculous things that rationalism often dismisses without hearing. The sum and substance or objective of great art and poetry is development/universalization of consciousness. Man is, so to speak, consciousness. And God ...

  It is time to weep for Hussain(AS). If we can’t, we need to ask God for helping us. “Tears are a gift. When we don’t know or don’t remember how to shed them, we can pray for the gift of tears. We don’t know the script. We know the Giver.” It is time to know Hussain(A.S) suffered for each one of us, for all those who are denied justice. It is time to see how suffering is a gift and thank God for it. Let us unfold all these points on the day when the noblest family on earth was massacred for the noblest ideals that ennoble and redeem life.      To be human is to suffer, to grieve and to weep. It is to suffer for the sake of that which is dearer than life, to grieve for that which ideal which humans, our predecessors or we have failed to be loyal to. It is to weep for what overcomes us and undo all resistance on our part to the decimating embrace of God/Spirit.       God made us humans and not angels. Not to weep in the name of some spiritual or my...

Here is where thinking is needed as against unthinking ideology of development that has brought irredeemable evils along with it. Do we ever ask why God-chosen-Mecca happens to be such a “desolate” hilly landscape and why stay in Arafat and Mina under the naked sky is such a challenging and liberating one? Why should one of the greatest scenes – the storm scene – in arguably the greatest play King Lear that unfolds Lear’s redemption be about encounter with nothingness and disowning civilization’s artificialities?  Why is that mountains are treasured symbols of spirit and mountaineering a mantra/ wazeefa and pastoralism/sheep-goat rearing in mountains treasured spiritual experiment/experience? Why do religious and spiritual traditions propose periodical retreats for their adherents? Why we should opt for culture over civilization is we are forced to choose only one? Art and religion – the manifestations of what is called culture – are treasured means of giving meaning to lives...

Understanding Some Forgotten Lessons in Relationship with Animals in Traditional Cultures in general and Kashmiri Culture in particular. Why is it that children get ecstatic on seeing or contacting or playing with animals? Why is it that our dream imagery involves animals? Why is it that human history in general and sacred history in particular is also a history of our relationship to animals? What a misfortune that as we grow old our encounter with animals is often reduced to museum space only.       Animals humanize and sanctify. Our salvation is linked with them in many ways. If we fail to comprehend how and why of our fellowship with animals that we enjoyed as children or all normal children exposed to contact with animals enjoy due to our sharper perception of higher world, don’t be surprised. We have almost lost sense of a vital treasure of symbolism. Our Symbolism Illiteracy and Kashmir We fail to be humans invited for deciphering symbols. By being...

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 Ionesco on the Meaning of Life. Once we approached the elders, priests, pirs/gurus and theologians to illuminate dark or difficult questions. Now people turn to writers/poets. Although it is the case that our most trusted guides – the fraternity of prophets and sages – are united in espousing the only Tradition we have as far as the ethics and metaphysics grounding saving truths are concerned – writers are sought to explicate essential saving truths by modern man amidst confusion of tongues. Amongst such writers certain especially stand out by virtue of their influence and remarkable presentation of certain saving truths that many have found helpful in illuminating difficult questions including that of our ultimate destiny.       Although there are many who have not heard the anguish and pleas of major modern and postmodern prophets, the disturbing ground report is that we are living in difficult, dark and complex times where weather continues to be f...

Exploring contributions of Nasr to Islamic Studies and Need to Improve Curriculum in Universities. Islamic Studies as a discipline and Islam as a Tradition in the integral sense of the term that includes proper engagement with the whole legacy of Islam – aesthetics, metaphysics, ontology, art and architecture, esoterism, a host of traditional sciences and much more – are absent in much of the Muslim world and its institutions. There are very few students formally trained by Islamic Studies/Comparative Religion Departments/Madrassas who are interested in or have resources for proper comprehension of works written by Muslim scholars in most of the disciplines, religious or “secular.” All we see in most students is certain atomistic approach and recourse to some verses and traditions to buttress their understanding of Islam they often cofound with/reduce to ideology or some imagined system or book of answers or juristic-legal manuals. Absence of deeper understanding of philosophical, a...