Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Recalling Pablo Neruda and Mehmoud Darwish in Khayal’s Kashmir When all appears dark in Kashmir and you have nowhere to look to for light and one stares at immense futility and tragic waste, what remains there to goad us on, to keep hoping and dreaming? It is faith for some but poetry for all including those who don’t know how to pray. Today we ask Mehmoud Darwish and Pablo Neruda about this sacred and prophetic mission of poets and then read few verses from our own G. N. Khayal’s new book of resistance poetry Shabnum Ka Aatesh Qada .       Poets are those saintly alchemists who transmute our saddest thoughts and pains into songs that console, uplift and illuminate. As Neruda says, “give me all the pain of everyone, I'm going to turn it into hope.” Powerless against the sting of death as we earthly creatures are, what do we do when even life seems to sting and one envies dead in their graves? Neruda answers that “at least love should save us from life.”   We know that poetry is

Recalling Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter on J & K PSC Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. (Potter Stewart) When I heard some have been accused and counter-accused of moral failure and failure of wits for both appearing and not appearing in the PSC exam on 6th Feb, I recalled Hawtthorne’s great novel The scarlet Letter ’s heroine Hester Prynne, a young woman, who is found guilty of adultery and a crowd gathers to witness punishment. She is sentenced to wear a scarlet "A" ("A" standing for adulteress) on her dress to shame her. She refuses to lose her dignity on the scaffold. When demanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses. “Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”   Here is brewing up a similar story that might grow into a tale of shame and despair for hundreds or thousands of innocent pe

Schuon offered a devastating criticism of modern priests of science such as Freud, Dawkins, Hawking on a very different plane . Few are aware that the science that claimed to oust God, to explain everything in principle without reference to the First Principle/Absolute, to dissolve mystery and to usher in an age of universal happiness has been discredited not only by postmodern philosophers and certain developments at the edge of modern science itself but also by our great metaphysicians such as Coomaraswamy and Guenon who were also trained as scientists. Lyotard famously pointed out that modern science as a grand narrative (grand overarching explanatory paradigm) is no longer credible in our age. Feyerbend and others have reiterated the thesis that modern science has been dogmatic and power-inflected and thus can’t arbitrate or monopolize truth. However, criticizing science’s big ideological claims alone doesn’t suffice; what we need is arguing for an alternative epistemology and me

Religionists may lack intellectuality and scientists may lack, and abuse intelligence. It is said that once an atheist and a theist debated the question of belief in God and after they finished, the atheist became a theist and the theist an atheist – showing pointlessness of usual debates on God. Buddha when asked about God responded by silence and is also by making seemingly opposite statements depending upon the questioner’s obsession with theism or atheism. To an atheist he said that only God meaning non-self/Absolute/pure Being really is and you are nothing and to the other one that there is no God as he imagined. The Bible says that only a fool denies God and the Quran implies  that there is no possibility of entertaining doubt regarding God. How are we to understand heated debate on God between atheistic/agnostic scientists and believers of world religions including Islam? How come we can assert people like Russell, Hawking, Dawkins are fools if they deny God? How come we can c