Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

For Islam that requires affirming all revealed traditions/scriptures, known and unknown, as a condition for being a Muslim and has nurtured a civilization that assimilated/engaged with diverse religious/cultural forms and has, relatively, better record of peaceful coexistence with other traditions and great textual and other resources for building impressive non-exclusivist approaches as in Sufis, poets and Muslim sages, certain pluralistic ideas in the air today present an opportunity and not an embarrassment. The following is a selection from certain influential pluralists that echo Islamic tradition’s respect for difference without degenerating into groundless relativism that leaves no room for the Absolute and the emphasis on uniqueness and special access to truth of diverse traditions.  (It is ironic that exclusivist fundamentalism should have grown in Islamic lands in last two centuries and it is noteworthy that we can trace it to certain pathologies in colonial politics and ...

Syed Moududi, despite his differences with Sufism, especially its philosophical framing and the perception of divergence of its popular form from sharia , succeeded in translating the core moral and spiritual content of Sufism understood as struggle with the lower self and perfection of virtues in the pages of his work that exudes the perfume of discovery of God by a self consumed by obedience to the Divine Will. Reading Syed Moududi one finds that one is led to take God seriously and in that light see everything else. History and our odyssey get a new meaning with fellowship of God. Sufism, according to its acclaimed Masters, is not the science of states but stations and one can take his critique of world wary intoxicating bliss pursuing indulgent Sufism in positive light. Great Masters of Sufism would thank Syed Moududi for feedback on dangers of abnegating reason, eschewing self criticism and cultistic servile following of so called spiritual guides and pleading for non-attachment t...

Sufism for the Religious and the Secular in the Postmodern World It is mainly because of Tasawwuf that Islam became a world religion and nurtured a vivifying culture and enviable civilization. The world has been conquered for good by the Sufi poets and thinkers. Sufi argument for religion and God involves the attractive power of the Truth called beauty that everyone finds irresistible as Plato would note. In fact Arabs were caught in the net of the beauty of form and meaning of the eloquent Quran and the aesthetically oriented Persians found in Sufi metaphysics their heart’s voice.      None of the great world religions finds it difficult to engage with Tasawwuf . In fact they stand for certain variant of it as esoteric dimension is everywhere. No great philosopher or poet or historian or culture critic, Western or Eastern, could afford not to appreciate it. No secular mind and no religious genius could fail to be attracted to some aspect of it. The Sufis have been rulin...

Is there an atheist in the sense that he denies not a particular model of the divine but the Sacred as such? No. No sane and intelligent man has ever been one.  An atheist denies God as the Ground of Being or Power to be, as Creativity and as Beauty. Let us try to understand one of the aspects of the Sacred as Beauty that no atheist can afford to deny.  There are degrees of tawhid and the atheist may well be in a lower rung but a degree he does possess. This is what easily follows from comprehending the traditional metaphysical doctrine of God as Reality. Ibn Arabi argued for it. Let us explore less abstruse ways of appreciating impossibility of being an atheist in the sense of denial of Sacred embodied in the Mystery, Wonder and Beauty and especially focus on the last mentioned.       Mircea Eliade, one of the most distinguished scholars of religion, has explained how man is a worshipping animal or Homo sapiens is Homo religiosus: …“sacred” is an element ...

God is, according to a great medieval sage, What is. It would converge with what Ibn Arabi would call the Real and Wittgenstein would phrase as what is the case and from another angle, Simone Weil would call as “attention without distraction,” and another mystic as “choiceless awareness.” The Quranic claim that there can’t be entertained any doubt regarding Allah ( afillahi shakkun ) is echoed in an old Asante proverb stating that “No one needs to show God to a child”–the point is that some things are quite obvious. Stace has identified God with the Mystery that wells up everywhere and in everything – the depth of anything that fails to be penetrated in conceptual terms. Pannikar has identified the divine with the “dimension of more and better” of being or “the infinite inexhaustibility of any real being, its ever-open character, its mystery . . . its freedom.” For him God is a symbol for the whole reality and approvingly quotes a definition stating that “God is a circle whose centre i...

If Islam is submission to Truth/Reality who is against it? If this Reality is known or manifest by what is the Praised One, the Embodiment of all perfections that human nature aspires for, who can dare to oppose it? If the beauty of Muhammad known to select saints and sung by such poets as Jami and Iqbal is known by any human, it is impossible to oppose it or ignore it. If we note the distinction between Muhammad as known by Muslims in history and Muhammad as known by Homo religiosus as its own aspiration for transcendence/ideality or the image of perfection one adores, as the Messenger sent not only to all humans but all creation, as the Mercy of the worlds known and unknown, as the Envoy of the Absolute as such and not a person so and so, it needs to be understood if it is possible or feasible to deny Muhammad. If blasphemy against the Sun is impossible or vacuous that is best ignored, doesn’t it call for revisiting the current debate on blasphemy on theological and other grounds? ...

Transposing a famous maxim about God to the Devil one could say that if there were no Devil, it would have been necessary to invent one. To the credit of the Devil goes much adventure in the odyssey of life including the first one of leaving the Garden of Eden for earth, sharpening of our faculties and capabilities and unfolding of good as he is the principle of resistance, variety and colour in the drama of life and universal drive or march for excellence or assertion of individual talent  and ten thousand uses of the ego in the struggle and enrichment of life. It is not only the poet-philosophers such as Goethe and Iqbal who have paid rich tributes to it but  great saints and sages of various traditions. In fact the key functions attributed to the Devil such as leading people astray and inflicting loss are in the Muslim Tradition functions of Divine Names ( Al-Mudill, Az-Zar ). Jung in his Answer to Job was not too off the mark in identifying the Devil as the left hand of G...