Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Every educated Muslim should read at least introductory texts on important facets of Islamic Tradition written by scholars capable of critical thinking.   The tragedy of the Muslim world consists, generally speaking, in refusal to think and reflect and outsourcing these tasks to those who haven’t been trained to review the state of art of different disciplines and master the art of thinking and conceptual apparatus required at the highest level. At certain level and on more general problems, all Muslims are required to know basics and think over them. In the name of Islam it has been the case that on certain issues one could be misled, misinformed and needlessly opinionated and judgmental. Self esteem, relationships/family life, job prospects, respect for reason, authority of conscience, faith in God/Islam all have been negatively impacted due to misconstrued views one has interiorized. Every educated Muslim should read at least introductory texts/review articles on important f...

Making sense of divergent creeds in Islamic legacy and what does it mean to be a Witness. The Prophet (SAW) attempted to wean people away from hell that is basically constituted of false views – false absolutes. People are corrupt because their views are corrupt. Ignorance is the root of evil. Commonly we see people worshipping their egos/beliefs, judging others, full of anger and complaints, envying fate of others, anxious about pseudoproblems, confusing past with timeless Tradition, fighting with themselves, their children and their doubts. That is why right view and right understanding are so important for felicity according to all religions. But how sad to note that it is hard to get access to them as religion is reduced to ideology, faith to belief, Beyond-Being and Being to personal God, God to a Super-being,  Islam (the Religion) to islam (a religion). How come there will be illumination if philosophy vetoed, mysticism suspected and debate largely proscribed? Suspicious of...

Unless deep thinking is done on the issue we would continue to have much heat and little light in debates on Islamic law. Instead of saying what does Islam say we should ask what do Muslim jurists say on this or that point say Caliphate/Islamic State, rights of religious/sexual minorities/women, freedom of belief/disbelief, triple talaq, qurbani, permissibility of music, compatibility of modern banking with Islam, dress code and grooming/hair code. To claim that Islam says this or that, is, generally speaking, impossible. We can only strive to know (to make best approximations) what Islam says/God really means/intends on questions usually asked – on other questions that are more foundational we usually don’t need to ask and do largely know  what Islam says as we know what our fitrah demands or what aqli saleem requires or  what conscience allows. And jurists differ in their conclusions on almost all these questions. They don’t differ in matters of worship to significant ex...

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 ...

Do we have a culture now? What is culture and what is civilization, and the difference between the two? Even our better educated class is conscious of the difference between the two and what this means for quality of life we live. Broadly speaking we have been pursuing a march to civilization at the cost of culture and don’t know the middle point that marries both of them – this is the mandate Islam has proposed for itself. This thesis has been brilliantly argued in a classic work Islam between East and West by former Bosnian President Alija Izatbegovic, one of the really great scholar-intellectual-statesmen of the Muslim world.       Culture signifies everything that relates to man as something more than merely biological or material entity. It is poles apart from what is called civilization and is an expression of religious or spiritual self of man. Everything cultural ultimately has its grounding in man’s yearning for what transcends man as biological cr...

Man has been made a slave instead of true worshipper and he has lost self confidence. There is something terribly wrong with religions as ordinarily understood and practiced, and appropriated for political ends. There is a truckload of guilt associated with non-issues, a fear psychosis promoted in the name of God understood as cosmic policeman, exploitation and oppression against women, minorities and religious other in their name. Many an unfounded superstition and distrust of reason and science has also been associated with religions. Man has been made a slave instead of true worshipper and he has lost self confidence. People have been divided, hated, killed is its name. It is no wonder that modern man who is deeply religious has found it difficult to concede what has been sold in the name of religion. Failing to find deeply fulfilling rational, moral and spiritual theory and practice of religion, he seems to have chosen agnosticism or atheism or some sort of heresy. The choice now...

None can claim to frame Kashmir, to understand it in its entirety. Not even India and Pakistan. Much of the current debate on the need to rest the unrest in Burhan’s Kashmir misses many a point that can’t be ignored. These points include: Reasons for what is done or undone are difficult to find – or needless or besides the point – for Kashmiris because Kashmiri genius is more aesthetic than cognitive, more cultural than political and contains multitudes and therefore, in Whitmanian fashion, reserves the right to contradict. A Kashmiri looks at life in more poetic and playful than rational calculative terms. His faith is solid but human, all-too-human and not incompatible with occasional flirting with idols though repentance also follows and of course its breaking as well. Kashmir’s  movement for azadi is not a grand narrative  with a clear set of binaries and both moral and religious frames to buttress its various phases and methodologies don’t unproblematically fit o...

Ideal and Reality of Kashmir’s Azadi Love is more otherworldly than this worldly phenomenon. It is a currency recognized by poets, thinkers, saints and  lovers, especially youth. Worldly wise people, politicians, traders etc. hardly count it. To live under its sacred ambience calls for nothing short of metanoai of which only few individuals are capable and not larger communities. Man lives for it and by it but more as a vision, as a noble dream, as a distant horizon of his imagination and an object of contemplation  that pulls one higher and higher. It owes its terrible beauty to the freedom it evokes. It postulates a Republic that is not necessarily this worldly state. With Eric Voegelin who has been described as modern Plato, we need to note that Plato’s Republic was written as “a dramatic dialogue about human existence in society and  history and not a policy paper for reform or an ideological tract calling for apocalyptic revolution.” Its heart is the vision o...

Clues from Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? “The most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age is that we are still not thinking,”______ Martin “The wasteland grows and woe to him who hides the wasteland within.” ______Friedrich Nietzsche While both Nietzsche and Heidegger said the words quoted in the beginning in somewhat different though not quite unrelated context, one recalls them readily when trying to “think” Kashmir in the context of proliferating debate on Kashmir (I don’t presume to apply Heidegger on thinking to Kashmir – this I leave to Heidegger scholars and thinkers – but only to underscore the difficulty of the task of engaging with Kashmir in the manner talk shows, conferences, political parties, gossip parties seek to do). Heidegger’s problem or objective is not to provide a map for resolving political issues but to help us attend to the deeper issues that underlie political issues. The tragedy is that one is only asked to give opinion o...