Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Khalil Gibran has a beautiful story: Beauty and ugliness were bathing in a river. After completing the bath, they accidentally exchanged clothes. And from that day on people are mistaking beauty for ugliness and vice versa. There is a story of a saint who refused to assert his innocence and give any explanation when he was accused of adultery. He was evicted from the locality with utter disgrace. Meanwhile the woman who had accused her got some mysterious disease that she failed to cure and this forced her to atone for the sin of false charge against the saint. She sought her wildly and got cured by his blessings. People invited him again to their locality and asked why he didn’t reject the charge initially and suffered all this humiliation, he answers: I choose God to clear me of charges and izzat belongs to God only–our prerogative is to be patient and not judge others. God accomplishes everything. Jesus said: Judge not. Sufi say: complain not. Great tragedies proclaim about re...

“School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn’t worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave. This was a Catholic School in Munich. I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system? From the age of twelve I began to suspect authority and distrust teachers.” The above quote from Einstein (the greatest scientist of the twentieth century whom school system almost killed) reproduced here should be enough to alert those who seek to change educational policy, especially academic session for facilitating examination oriented academic policy. Examinations, as currently held, are not defensible; they are causing gangrene to the sou...

Why is today so much confusion about religion? Why anxiety to prove one’s sect or school the best? Why declare others somehow inferior, misguided? What is misguidance, anyway? Why use this as a whip to beat whatever we don’t like? Let me assert that the essence of religion, which saves, is simple to comprehend and universally known and agreed upon by the best minds of every tradition that what we need is to start action or following the well-known Way. No books, no complicated commentaries, no elaborate polemical theses are needed to be consulted before one convinces oneself regarding this essential point. What is this essence of religion, mysticism, traditional philosophies? The following famous passage of Ibn Arabi is particularly detailed and important expression of this essential point. In this passage is summed up essential Ibn Arabî (I would claim, essential Rumi, essential Ghazzali, essential Ibn Taymiyyah, essential Sheikh-ul-Alam, essential Iqbal) and the central message o...

Public perception, especially perception in educated class regarding animal husbandry is that is not the ideal choice even for a farmer, not to speak for a minister to choose as his profile. Farmers continue to be imagined as poor, ignorant, crude, uncouth. Animals are best when prepared for table but not when it is encountering them live with all the dung and bestiality associated with them. Another presumption is livestock sector is only of marginal importance to our economy. Public perception may well be erroneous but as creatures who do care for reputation or perceived image we may be prone to escape reality. And reality must be faced.  Let us examine the facts. Before I come to the status in our state I need to make an observation about a pathology of modernity called necrophilia – love for corpses which is Erich Fromn’s expression for our love for machine culture. Man has been created in divine image and this requires living with other species, seeing ourselves in them as...

It is a flood that comes annually, destroys generations and cripples minds There is a flood that comes once in a century, destroys properties. But there is a flood that comes annually, destroys generations and cripples minds. And it is on a mass scale. And we are all its victims. And we don’t talk about it. It has claimed innumerable lives, destroyed creative spark in countless students. It costs us money, time, human resource and other resources. I mean Examination System prevailing here which needs examining, a thorough post-mortem. A preliminary post-mortem report follows. Detailed reports from different labs (intellectual, moral, social, psychological, political, religious) will hopefully follow in future. The body is giving offensive smell. One can’t imagine how it functioned in its great days. Once upon a time there was instituted a system for preparing students for mastering crafts and skills they had shown promise by virtue of natural inclination, heredity etc. Students wer...

Faith is the most important treasure of life, religions unanimously assert. Why? Because it helps us achieve our full potential or perfection as humans and makes us participate in all the joys, beauties, peace, blessings that life has to offer. Faith, as the opening verse of the Quran makes clear, opens up access to the God of Mercy. Faith is good news that we are somehow cared, that all things march toward perfection, that nothing is ultimately jarring. All is a symphony. It is a great festival of lights that the world is, to which faith invites us. There is no greater wine than the Wine of Love that God is for the faithful. Faith is an insurance against all despair, all anxieties, all disheartening things, all disasters that life could have in store for us. Faith and gnosis are the greatest goods we really crave for. But the question is why is faith, genuine faith so rare today and thus we are bombarded by all kinds of existential, psychological, social and other problems. One reaso...

Let Muslim scholars write more universal histories, like Ibn Khaldun attempted, without anxiety to show Islam in the background or foreground. Many spots on the moon are named after Muslim scientists. Over 500 stars have names originally Arabic as have Algebra, Chemistry and many instruments we routinely use. Muslims made homes for old and abandoned animals and used money from Awqaf to treat and feed them. Even cats whom we often despise had separate buildings. Muslim pioneered bird hatcheries. Muslims wrote over hundred books on horses alone. Muslims invented gunpowder, compass, many techniques in bee keeping, modern floriculture and made countless discoveries in sciences from gravitation to mechanism of vision. Discussing hundreds of such interesting things that most of us don’t know, and succeeding in further convincing (if someone doubted) us about our current decay and past glory, but only tangentially touching on deeper reasons, metaphysical or philosophical that made such gl...