Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

The Master on Life and Afterlife. Ghalib is a sad angel, Who from the intoxication of nearness Has brought divine revelation In the form of his ghazals. (Yusuf Hussain’s translation. Other translations here are from the same work Persian Ghazals of Ghalib )       Indeed Ghalib has bought a “revelation” that has been such a healing and joy and a fount of beauty. One must be thankful for the privilege of being born in a land and with a language of Ghalib. Ghalib’s Islam as an “Answer” to Difficult Questions Every Muslim in the subcontinent who can read poetry but is disturbed over routine disharmonies or complains about this or that issue in life would be required to answer one question on the Day of Judgment: Have you read Ghalib? Ghalib “answers” all our complaints we might conceive or imagine against Fate or providence or people or God. Since God created Ghalib, He has been largely relieved of entertaining many a question on wonder, love, beauty, betrayal...

Zargar masterfully handled language and sounds too profane at places and deconstructs romantic-mystic, revelation-intuition or scriptural-experiential binaries. All great poets and mystics and philosophers have one thing in common: rejection of Mullaism identifiable with dry, empty, legalistic, judgmental dualistic mode of thought and action. One might loosely identify it with zahir parasti (worship of form/letter) that has been associated with a class of jurists and those scholars who don’t pay attention to esoteric or mystical/symbolist dimension of scripture. In the Muslim world Mullaism has donned political guise. The term Mulla has lost its honorific connotations from quite some time though this degeneration in its traditional status has been especially exacerbated in modern age. Newer movements and trends in philosophical, theological, and socio-economic spheres have all contributed to delegitimizing Mullaism as an ideology that once had a significant say in public spaces. Ne...

Modern Contributions to Kashmiri Na’t Tradition All great poetry is a species of na’t defined as poetry in praise of the Prophet who in turn is understood, by the greatest na’t writers who happen to be inspired by Sufism, as the Principle of Manifestation, Logos, the Pole of Existence, the Perfect Man, Wisdom personified, drive for  perfection of ethics and love of beauty. One may better appreciate the thesis if one notes the function of poetry as provision for discovering the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds one (Coleridge), “truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet,” reconciliation with the world/celebration of love/women – one may recall Wallace Stevens’ remark “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman,” and Holderlin’s point that the duty of the poet is “to stand/Bare-headed under the storms of God,/Grasping with our own hand/The Father's beam itself, And to offer the gift of...

Reflections on Rahi as a Poet of Silence. In Kashmir we have enough pain and beauty for one million documentaries. But we have chosen, generally speaking, not to speak on almost everything Kashmiri. There is very little of Kashmir, especially its glorious empire of Mind and Spirit – on the YouTube. There is no Kashmiri cinema for reasons we know. Silence is sometimes imposed and often chosen. It is no wonder that our best known living poet Rahman Rahi would also be a victim of this chosen silence. Our talented film makers have largely ignored Rahi and Rahi in turn has cared little to break his silence and till date there is much of him and about him that is either obscure or silenced. Bilal Jan’s recently released documentary "The Poet of Silence" scripted by Shafi Shoaq (arguably best qualified encyclopaedic scholar who could write on Rahi and an institution in himself who has gifted us Dictionary of Kashmiri language, standard work on Kashmiri Grammar and co-authored most...

Reading Bedil in Postmodern Times The most important problem today is how to find meaning in life. Failure is find meaning helps explain reckless addiction to drugs and drinking oneself to death, quiet despair, much of unwarranted violence and bitterness in relationships, irritability of almost everyone you meet, frenzied misadventures such as reckless driving, especially the youth driving bikes and Arab men driving cars too fast for life to enjoy the feast. Since most people live as if God/the Sacred has virtually no place in their lives and they have failed in the task of self creation – a problem that tormented Nietzsche – how will life become a sacrament again is the question. Anxiety to plainly – definitively – interpret, fix and impose meanings of canonical texts by ideologues/fundamentalists is a problematic reaction to the problem. Where is our refuge then?       Postmodern thinkers living under the shadow of Nietzsche generally agree with the stateme...

Hayat Aamir succeeds in the great task of saying yes to life despite all the horror it entails. To the question “What do you do?” the poet’s answer is “I praise”, as Rilke phrased it. Why is it so? It is through praise that man rises to the challenge of “the deadly and monstrous… the nameless and the anonymous.” Heschel noted that "There are three ways in which a man expresses his deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the next level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his sorrow into a song."  Jesus  said that “Blessed are they that weep and wail, for they shall be comforted.” One of the greatest contributions of Islamic culture – great poets of marsiya and traditional exponents of Shiite perspective – to the world heritage is teaching how suffering/tragedy may ennoble us and be an instrument of gnosis ( irfan ). Our most blessed task consists in blessing that which made the blessing called life possible and this task is performed...

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 ...