Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding the Meaning of Prayer and how all prayers are indeed answered. How many of our prayers have been granted? Not even one in ten thousand, to speak in general times. But we are told that every prayer is answered. And it seems that it is no longer, ordinarily, possible to pray for certain things the way our elders prayed – praying for rains tomorrow when weatherman has predicted sunny weather, praying for this or that gender or health status of newborn when tests report otherwise, and hoping that praying for solution to Kashmir will be soon answered. Once upon a time popular prayers for destruction of other communities like Jews or nations like Americans have become unpopular. Doctors rather than Pirs or special prayer sessions/prayer-food culture/khatams are more popular now. Explaining the problems with interpreting different kinds of prayers such as prayer as petition, how prayer distinguishes believer from nonbeliever and what really is prayer is what theologians and ph...

Seeing the World as an Image of Paradise An artist sees the world and that is all. And life’s worries are dissolved in this encounter. An artist has no self as a great poet has said. He is only seeing. And that seeing is its own reward. An artist knows the secret that there is no secret or special knowledge vouchsafed to him but life itself has opened up to make prying into special or secret corridors uninteresting. Life is ever too interesting an affair to warrant slip into any distraction. Defamiliarizing the world the artist enchants it. Since the privileging of rational or scientific modes of encountering the world artists had to explain their position and in fact to protest against enormous impoverishment of the world. A world without mystery is a dead world or inhuman mechanical world. It is a world where magic, myth, mystery, miracles, grace, freedom and superabundant joy of creativity are banned or suspect. And man doesn’t live by bread alone. An artist lives in a different ...

The quest for wisdom never ends; every experience, every great artist/philosopher has something to teach us. Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still.  (Eliot) The purpose of life is to seek happiness, declare Chinese and many other sages from the world, including those from the Muslim world. And fortunately, all of us can find happiness: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.” And it depends upon our choice: “No man is happy who does not think himself so.” Tolstoy reported that he found the happiest people among Russian peasants. To master the art and science of happiness one needs to understand a few points noted especially by Stoic philosophers. And one can finish reading the masterpieces of Stoic philosophy – The Art of Living by Epictetus and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in a day or two. And reflecting on gems there is enough insurance for life against all that may make us unhappy. Let us measure ...

There are enough arguments to convince the best minds regarding the plausibility of immortality from a philosophical and not just religious viewpoint Whitehead has referred to basic insights or initial intuitions or feelings of mankind calling for explanations or justifications. Our desire for immortality is one of these initial intuitions, or persistent dreams, or impulses. If we begin with this fundamental impulse of the human spirit, the question is not disputing their “truth” on this or that so-called scientific ground or explaining it away but how to express it. Believers and non-believers needn’t dispute the matter taking all or none position but may better have a dialogue regarding how far we have succeeded in defining or understanding it correctly.       Taking affairs of life in a playful spirit – but not our assigned or chosen roles in that play – is taking Heaven seriously. Often, believers believe in Heaven but hardly mind it and it is so-called n...

Mainstream leaders are in a strange predicament; they have stakes with both the sides and they clap for both of them. Philosophy, art and religion all have taught us the importance of the metaphor and reality of play or game and all second Shakespearean view of life as a stage and our role as actors. Art is in fact premised on seeing life as play. The world is God’s play ( lila ) and the best answer given by traditions to the question why God created the world is that it is free activity (play) of  the Divine. All things have to be done artistically, with an eye on beauty or perfection ( ihsan ) and that is all we are called for Sports have been our prized activity, akin to artistic and religious activity and its ultimate rationale/end is spiritual or celebrating the glory and freedom of Spirit which has been likened to a child. Worship involving rituals also plays on the elements of repetition, self forgetfulness through rapt attention on activity and attuning wi...

Peep deep into the heart of Kashmiris and see the image of the beloved being worshipped. No guesses.     Lovers choose to die and don’t listen to pleas for abandoning “infatuation” or juvenile romantic fantasies. Death dance they indulge is a perceived by them – and by many great tragedians – as a ritual of healing. Souls are healed and what happens to the bodies and other this-worldly businesses is not important in their view. And there are at least bouts of such “infatuation”  if not fully involved love affair in almost every Kashmiri. And occasionally this passion asserts and burns everything on its way. And that is precisely what is happening post-Burhan. Peep deep into the heart of Kashmiris and see the image of the beloved being worshipped. No guesses. All these unmistakably point to a diagnosis of affliction of love. And it doesn’t matter what the object of love is or how rational it is or what possibility of consummation of such a relationship is. For them Tols...

And politicians are not trained to consider the affairs of the heart, the logic of the impossible. The heart of Kashmir problem is incurable and apparently inconsolable, and thus tragic – but gracefully redemptively tragic –  love affair with Azadi. This is like the love of the impossible in the sense loving God is impossible for John Caputo. And politicians are not trained to consider the affairs of the heart, the logic of the impossible. Many great political battles in history had some association with love affairs or pursuit of great beauty all of which are parasitic on the idea of transcendence which grounds the notion of freedom. Kashmir issue is better understood in this light. Let  me  explain.       Since Kashmir’s heart yearns for a home/beloved that it feels isn’t in sight in present dispensation though its head might advise it to resign to status quo or opt for this or that particular ideological or pragmatic solution for fulfilling...

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...

To seek or not to Seek Pir Do we need to seek a Master? Shah Waliullah, one of the greatest Sufis of the subcontinent, in his last testament, surprisingly and shockingly, advised against seeking Shaykhs and advised to read Awariful Maarif  by Suharwardi as that is a safer guide. He grants the possibility that one may get to meet some Shaykh and says that we shouldn’t worry as God arranges for it. Anyway it is working an implication of the logic of grace. Grace comes – “The Spirit bloweth where it listeh.”   We can’t invite grace by our effort; Grace finds us and drops us in the lap of God. Even against our will which would otherwise resist baptism by fire – the gift of suffering. Who doesn’t suffer in some way? And that could well be, unknown to us, gift from the Master. The best wazeefa could well be the “curse” – “Khoda tchinney doad” (May God send you some problem, some pain, some calamity).  How thankful we should be to those who send us such curses. Perhaps ...

Today we discuss how taking art seriously means we are taking life seriously. How do we lesser mortals who are no saints find God in a world where traditional Gurus or Sufi Shaykhs are either hard to come across or there is an instinctive distrust in them? How do those who have fought hard to get back their lost religious faith keep living? How do we, regardless of our religious or philosophical positions, find some convergent point to launch our  boat in turbulent waters? God in his infinite graciousness has made ample arrangements of our return to our homeland, Heaven or Himself. One powerful and universally accessible mechanism is art. Today we discuss how taking art seriously means we are taking life seriously and this helps us in reaching our ultimate destination in the embrace of God.        Art is a form of faith that is available to even a secular man and it is through art that religious impulse survives in the deserts of modernity. Artists...