Counter Narrative | The Velvet Knife: A Civilizational Critique of the Sentimental Modernist Discourse on Marriage and Parenting in Kashmir

I

A certain article, recently circulated in public discourse, presents itself as a compassionate diagnosis of the ailments afflicting Kashmiri marriages, parenting, and youth. It laments the emotional emptiness within households, the disconnection between generations, the burdens of ritual and custom, and the disillusionment of young men and women adrift in a sea of anxiety, ambition, and virtual overstimulation. Yet beneath its gentle tone and emotionally disarming language lies a devastating philosophical sleight of hand. Its deepest betrayal is not that it critiques the state of our society—indeed, critique is welcome and needed—but that it prescribes as cure the very poison that caused the sickness. It offers the language of healing while handing us the instruments of further disintegration. And so, it becomes imperative to speak plainly: this article is not a voice of tradition reforming itself; it is the soft voice of modernity undoing tradition through the velvet knife of sentimentalism.

Its initial concern, that marriage in Kashmiri society has become a burden rather than a blessing, is not entirely untrue (though labelling it untrue would be more accurate). But the reasons it offers are steeped in a kind of epistemic amnesia. The author lays blame upon lavish weddings, dowry expectations, and rigid customs—as if these alone explain the breakdown of marital harmony. Yet what she fails to see is that these are not causes of decay but corpses of a spirit that has already fled. The Wazwan, the multi-day feast, the ritual offerings and gifts, once flowed from a place of sacred generosity, familial pride, and divine presence (after all invitation to Islam itself is ‘dawat’). They were not economic burdens but signs of barakah, embodying a metaphysics of community. Today, they are indeed grotesque, but not because they are traditional—rather, because they have been severed from the religious and spiritual grammar that gave them meaning. In confusing cultural distortion with cultural essence, the article does what many modern reformists do—it tears down a sacred architecture for its ruined façade, unaware that the problem lies not in the building but in the abandonment of its foundations.

The medieval mind—unlike the modern moralist disguised as a reformer—possessed an acute capacity for distinguishing between feast and gluttony, between ritual abundance and vulgar excess. A feast was never merely about the food; it was a gesture of hospitality before God, a reenactment of divine generosity, bound by codes of humility, gratitude, and communal inclusion. Gluttony, on the other hand, was a spiritual disorder—a severing of appetite from purpose, a dislocation of the body from the soul’s horizon. In the sacred order, form and spirit were never at war; excess was not measured by quantity but by disposition. To serve seventeen dishes in a Wazwan was not a sin if it was done in niyyah of honoring the guest and invoking blessing—but to demand it as status performance was a moral obscenity. The author fails to make this distinction, collapsing all visible form into the crime of excess, when in truth, it is not form that corrupts, but the soul that forgets its telos. Modernity sees culture as weight, tradition as guilt, and restraint as repression; but the traditional Kashmiri saw in ritual not burden but beauty—so long as it flowed from fitrah aligned with tawheed. The tragedy is not that the feast became large, but that it became hollow. And yet the reformer, blind to this nuance, proposes tearing down the table instead of restoring the prayer that once preceded it.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the article’s treatment of emotional compatibility in marriage. It speaks in the language of modern psychology: couples before marriage are romantic and emotionally connected; after marriage, they are weighed down by duties and expectations that erode their bond. This diagnosis assumes, wrongly, that marriage is founded on emotional fulfillment, and that duties are antithetical to love. But neither Islamic tradition nor serious marital psychology supports this view. Studies in relationship science confirm that successful marriages are built not on emotional highs but on shared meaning, moral commitment, conflict management and the ability to navigate suffering together. Islam, too, does not prioritize feelings but deen and akhlaq—religion and character—as the basis for marital union. In our tradition, romance is not the foundation of marriage, it is its fruit. It grows in the shade of patience, modesty, loyalty, and prayer. To demand love before responsibility is to place the tree upon its fruit and wonder why it collapses. The article seeks to reverse the established order—it wants romance to be the foundation of marriage, when Islamic tradition has always seen romance as the fruit: something that blossoms over time in soil enriched by duty, gratitude, and spiritual striving. This inversion is not merely a psychological error—it is a civilizational betrayal, for it sets the heart adrift from divine purpose and the self as its own judge of worthiness in love. Worse still, such thinking quietly renders countless marriages unviable from the start. Those who enter marriage after having experienced prior relationships—particularly emotionally intense or physically intimate ones—are haunted by a ghost. The memory of romantic past becomes the standard against which all future bonds are measured. The new marriage, grounded in duty and perhaps initially devoid of infatuation, appears dull by contrast—bereft of the emotional intoxication once known in college corridors or under digital moonlight. And so, one begins to long not for a spouse but for a ghost, and when the ghost offers more thrill than the real, marriage dies before it lives. The anchoring vision must change: not romance before responsibility, but responsibility as the fertile ground from which authentic love may grow. Shared values, the fulfillment of rights, mutual forbearance, and a God-centered vision of life—these are the anchors strong enough to carry two souls across time. Romance, if it comes, will come as mercy—not as entitlement. And even if it does not, the bond remains sacred, because it is worship, not whim.

What further escapes the article’s view is that much of what is today called “romance” is not a natural emotional language between two people, but a synthetic product of hyperreality—fabricated by screens, curated by algorithms, and inflated by cultural narratives detached from any transcendent truth. The contemporary mind is saturated with scenes, soundtracks, and scripted emotions not born of real experience but borrowed from a spectacle-driven world. Romance in such a context is no longer a virtue but a simulation, a simulation of Bollywood fantasy by day, pornographic scripts by night, where gestures of affection and intimacy mimic the screen as a pornographic act shot at home. It is not rooted in akhlaaq, nor grounded in tarbiyyah, nor nurtured by shared spiritual striving. It thrives only in the space of fantasy, where responsibility has not yet cast its refining shadow. But once marriage steps into the realm of the real—with its unchosen duties, unglamorous labor, and ethical demands—the fantasy collapses. And in the absence of a deeper moral and metaphysical foundation, the bond disintegrates, not because it was strained by hardship, but because it was never meant to endure beyond indulgence, the couples separate like Johnny Sins and Mia Khalifa do after the act. Indeed, psychological studies confirm that pornography and scripted media fantasies create unreal expectations and ultimately sabotage genuine intimacy.

The article, further lost in this mirage, offers “education about communication” as remedy—a necessary but painfully inadequate gesture. For without a restated purpose of marriage, without a reaffirmation that marriage is not a contract for emotional convenience but a journey of companionship toward God, all tools of communication will eventually be employed to negotiate exit, not permanence. What is needed is the restoration of the prophetic model—Rasulullah ﷺ and Sayyidah Khadija (RA)—whose love was not fragile or fleeting, but a reward of sabr, iman, and the labor of truth shared in private and in public. To speak of marriage without re-centering that vision is to offer a house without a qiblah. This model is inseparable from the concept of ḥayā’—that deep, inward modesty which Islam places at the heart of love, long before touch or desire. Hayā’ is not repression; it is the veil that preserves the sanctity of affection, ensuring that desire grows in the shade of reverence, not in the heat of lust. Islamic ethics of love emphasize chastity, gradual affection, and a deep inward refinement that prepares the soul to love with niyyah, not with nafs. Our scholars knew well what modern man has forgotten: that lust untethered from moral structure is never satisfied. As our tradition reminds us, even if the entire world were handed to such a heart, it would not fill the emptiness left by the absence of love for God. This is why romance, when pursued as an end in itself, becomes a hunger that devours rather than nourishes. It is not love we are chasing, but anesthesia. And so, if we do not restore marriage as a sacred companionship directed toward God, we will keep expecting it to offer what only the Divine can give—meaning, peace, and the home our hearts are truly made for.

The article descends further into contradiction in its treatment of female education and the MBBS obsession. On the one hand, it rightly critiques the social pressure to push women into medicine, among other lines to higher education, as a passport to marriage eligibility, regardless of their interests or talents. On the other hand, it frames overseas education as an avenue for women’s empowerment, without grappling with the deep dissonance this creates within the traditional family structure. It wants to liberate women into individual autonomy while still retaining the collective harmony of traditional marriage. But it cannot have both. The modern subject shaped by liberal education, years abroad, and internalized Western conceptions of gender, cannot be expected to seamlessly re-enter an institution rooted in complementarity, duty, and, what some would argue are, divinely-ordained roles. She cannot be socialized for self-definition and then asked to conform to a role that requires submission to a higher order. This contradiction is not incidental. It is the inevitable fruit of a society that valorizes autonomy and then weeps at its consequences. Political scientist Patrick Deneen, for instance, argues that “liberalism encourages loose connections” and teaches people “to hedge commitments and adopt flexible bonds”, leaving ties to family and religion fragile. A culture of liberalism ‘sees all relationships — to place, to family, to religion, to neighbourhood, to nation — as fungible’. How then can the liberal-educated self suddenly pivot to uphold the thick obligations of marriage and kin? The article’s fantasy of the Westernized, self-authoring individual who still dutifully bows to family expectations is exposed as just that: a fantasy.

This double-mindedness permeates the article’s parenting section as well. We are told that the solution to broken homes is “smart parenting”: reduced screen time, open communication, life skills, emotional validation. These are not false in themselves, but they are offered as a cure without addressing the ontological rupture that makes them futile. The problem is not a lack of information—it is the loss of meaning. Parents no longer transmit tawheed, sabr, or akhirah; they offer options, opinions, and “safe spaces.” They do not shape—they manage. They do not guide—they negotiate. A parent who has lost belief in the metaphysical authority of tradition cannot hope to raise children rooted in it. No home can nurture the soul when the language of dhikr has been replaced with the vocabulary of therapeutic self-esteem. What the article offers is not parenting—but customer service. Dr. Lisa Miller’s pioneering work on the psychology of spirituality in children “The Spiritual Child” (Columbia University Press, 2015) compiles extensive research showing that “children who are raised with a robust and well-developed spiritual life are happier, more resilient… and better equipped to deal with life’s traumas than those who are not.” In fact, “in the entire realm of human experience, there is no single factor that will protect your adolescent like a personal sense of spirituality.”  Secular research confirms the truth the tradition has been stating all along, in other words, what our ancestors gave their kids – God – is precisely what modern parents have withheld, to everyone’s peril.

Moreover, what the article fundamentally fails to grasp is that you cannot fix parenting without first fixing the parents’ own idea of life. The crisis in the home is not merely a result of digital distraction or outdated disciplinary styles—it is the collapse of metaphysical vision in the hearts of those raising the next generation. The parent who does not know why he exists, who has no anchoring in the divine purpose of life, who no longer believes in the authority of revelation or the finality of truth, cannot possibly raise a child who seeks these things. The revival of parental authority cannot be engineered through techniques or psychological hacks; it must follow the revival of fitrah, of purpose, and of the correct conception of man as a moral and spiritual being, not just a psychological organism. When the parent becomes once again a servant of God before he is a manager of behavior, when his words are backed by sincerity rooted in submission, and when his home is structured around remembrance rather than reaction, only then can parenting be called guidance. Otherwise, we are simply watching one generation of orphans raising another, each more technologically fluent and spiritually lost than the last.

This blindness to metaphysical reality is again evident in the article’s treatment of the drug epidemic. It gestures toward stress, peer pressure, and lack of parental guidance as causes—but in doing so, it remains tragically on the surface, mistaking symptoms for causes. A traditionally rooted lens sees drug abuse not merely as a socio-economic tragedy or a psychological escape, but as a profoundly spiritual symptom. It is what happens when a soul no longer knows why it exists. When tawheed is forgotten, pleasure becomes the only god. In a world emptied of sacred purpose, where pain cannot be sanctified and struggle has no transcendent frame, narcotics become not just a temptation but a theology—a false sacrament in the religion of despair. The hedonism we see spreading among the youth is not an accident; it is the final fruit of nihilism, ripened in a world where every metaphysical anchor has been severed. The article, like much of secular reformism, misreads this crisis as a behavioral problem requiring awareness campaigns and youth programs. But what it misses—like it so often does—is that such interventions cannot breathe life into a corpse. What is needed is not harm-reduction but purpose-restoration: a return to a worldview in which struggle has meaning, accountability is real, and the soul is called not to numbness, but to awakening. And indeed, study after study confirms that when a human being truly knows why he exists, he is far less likely to destroy himself with drink or drugs. But strip away that purpose – convince him life is but an accidental journey of self – and he will seek oblivion in chemicals. No ‘awareness campaign’ will ever match the protective power of īmān. A study by sociologist Dr. Brian Grim of Baylor University and published in the Journal of Religion and Health looks at the role of religious and spiritual faith in preventing and recovering from substance use disorder concludes that nearly 90 percent of studies find that faith reduces alcohol abuse risk and 84 percent of studies show faith reduces drug abuse risk. It is clear that religion and spirituality —which the study refers to collectively as faith — are exceptionally powerful, integral, and indispensable resources in substance abuse prevention and recovery, the research argues. Religious beliefs, practices, and ministries not only provide succour and solace to those in need; they provide tangible, valuable resources that can help prevent and address substance abuse, show the studies. Yet the essay is completely oblivious of this fact.

What is most damning, however, is not the recommendations themselves, but the unspoken assumptions beneath them. The article presents a thoroughly secular humanist worldview in Islamic language. It judges all of life—marriage, education, parenting—by the metric of emotional fulfillment, mental readiness, and self-realization. There is no mention of Allah, no invocation of deen, no reference to akhirah, no fear of sin, no hope of divine reward. The self is centered as sacred, and all relationships orbit around its satisfaction. This is not Islam. This is the theology of the therapeutic age, wrapped in culturally acceptable terms. What we are witnessing is not reform—it is a paradigmatic replacement. It is not that religion is rejected, but that it is gutted and worn like a mask.

Even the author’s well-meaning emphasis on “simplifying marriage” and “reducing dowry expectations” conceals a subtle attack on tradition. While the practice of dowry (jahez) has indeed become burdensome and un-Islamic, the article makes no distinction between other cultural symbols and such abominations, between extravagance and ritual, between culture and its distortion. It fails to understand that rituals—when animated by faith—are not oppressive obligations, but structures of collective meaning. To reduce them to economic problems is to miss their symbolic and metaphysical function. Anthropologists have long noted that rituals mark transitions, bind communities, and reaffirm shared values. Stripped of their sacred grammar, they become vacuous performances—but the answer is not to discard them, but to return to their original spirit. The author offers no such return. Only reduction. Sociologists from Durkheim onward have observed that religious rituals ‘bind people together’ and reaffirm shared values and moral order. Durkheim has shown that religion is fundamentally about community and solidarity, which means that our cultural rituals—if re-sacralized-are a social glue, not “just waste.”

The contradictions continue. Social media is both the cause of youth detachment and a tool for reformation. Traditional elders are declared out of touch, yet are tasked with providing moral grounding. Prolonged education is seen as empowering, but its consequences—disorientation, alienation, and incompatibility—are framed as unfortunate byproducts rather than natural ends of the chosen means. The article demands emotional intelligence in marriage while questioning the very role structures within which emotions are made meaningful. It wants virtue but rejects hierarchy. It wants fruit without soil. All of this would be regrettable, but not dangerous, if it were merely an exercise in cultural confusion. What makes it dangerous is that it speaks with the tone of reform while advocating a philosophical capitulation. It grieves for the loss of meaning while sharpening the knife that severs it. It names the sickness but recommends its own cause as medicine. It is a betrayal in the clothing of compassion.

II

Beneath the surface of the article’s heartfelt concern lies a web of deep philosophical contradictions that unravel the coherence of its proposed solutions. One of the most glaring is its unexamined synthesis of liberal individualism and communitarian ethics, two paradigms rooted in fundamentally different conceptions of the self. On the one hand, the article champions liberal ideals: it celebrates personal choice, exalts education as empowerment, and encourages liberation from traditional gender roles. It urges individuals—especially women—to prioritize emotional compatibility, autonomy, and professional self-actualization. These are all pillars of the modern liberal worldview, where the self is conceived as autonomous, self-authoring, and entitled to define its own meaning.

Yet, in the same breath, the article mourns the decline of stable families, the erosion of emotional availability in spouses, the generational disconnect, and the loss of moral grounding passed from parent to child. These are not liberal concerns—they are communitarian expectations, born from a worldview in which the self is understood not as autonomous, but embedded, relational, and morally shaped by inherited duties. The contradiction is acute: you cannot form a self in the image of liberal individualism—free from constraints, tradition, and hierarchy—and then demand from that same self the commitments, sacrifices, and rootedness of the communitarian ideal. The liberal self is not psychologically equipped to sustain a family, nor metaphysically disposed to serve a generational lineage. What you build in freedom cannot be expected to endure in duty. This, more than anything, is why the article fails: it wants a child of modernity to behave like a steward of tradition.

This confusion plays out just as clearly in its parenting prescriptions. The article calls for “smart parenting”—emphasizing digital discipline, life skills, emotional intelligence, and techniques to raise well-adjusted, emotionally balanced children. This is a utilitarian framework, where the child is a project, and the parent is a technician. The aim is measurable outcomes: psychological stability, avoidance of addiction, social productivity. Yet the article simultaneously invokes the language of virtue: it calls for self-discipline, gratitude, and real-life skills—suggesting a desire to shape morally upright souls. But these two modes of parenting are not only distinct—they are philosophically incompatible. The utilitarian parent aims at function, while the moral parent aims at formation. One is preoccupied with performance; the other with piety. The former asks, “How do I produce a child who copes well?” The latter asks, “How do I raise a servant of God?”

In conflating these paradigms, the article once again offers a contradiction as cure. It tries to raise the child as a therapeutic subject, while secretly hoping to inherit the kind of moral strength that only emerges from God-centered, character-first upbringing. But you cannot sow autonomy and harvest obedience. You cannot build children in a secular frame and expect them to live in a sacred order. This is not just an intellectual mistake—it is a civilizational impasse. And until that impasse is confronted—until the philosophical scaffolding of the article is dismantled and replaced with one rooted in fitrah, revelation, and moral purpose—all its proposals, however sincere, will remain not just insufficient but counterproductive. The house it wants to repair is not falling apart because the roof leaked. It is falling apart because it was built on sand.

A traditional Kashmiri would find the article’s tone not just misguided but offensive. Wazwaan is not waste—it is grace. Marriage is not an economic negotiation—it is a covenant before Allah. Parenting is not a skill—it is a sacred trust. Emotional compatibility, career empowerment, and digital detoxes are no replacement for tawheed, adab, and sabr. The problem is not that tradition failed—but that it was abandoned, mocked, diluted, and replaced. The remedy lies not in secular workshops and therapeutic language, but in resacralization. We must return to the epistemic roots of our tradition, revive the religious sciences, and restate the purpose of life as it was given to us: “I did not create jinn and men except to worship Me.” Our families must not just learn parenting—they must learn ‘ubudiyyah. Our marriages must not just seek compatibility—they must seek God. Our youth must not just seek validation—they must seek truth.

The Quranic worldview cannot be preserved through liberal tools. Sentimental language cannot save civilizational structures. Emotional intelligence cannot replace divine guidance. And tradition will not survive if it is continuously pathologized while modernity is offered as salvation. This article is not a solution. It is a symptom of the very disease it claims to heal. It weeps at the grave of tradition while hiding the chisel that carved its tombstone. If we are to restore our homes, our children, our society, we must begin not with feelings, but with foundations. Not with opinions, but with revelation. Not with compromise, but with conviction. Until then, our tears will water nothing but ashes.

III

And yet, despite all this, there is still hope—abundant and near. The beauty of our tradition is that it does not require reinvention, only remembrance. What has decayed can be revived, not by mimicry of Western models, but by returning to the wellspring of our own civilization, to that point where life and revelation once walked hand in hand. We must begin again by rebuilding the idea of man: not as a consumer of experiences or an autonomous chooser, but as a servant of God, created with meaning, accountability, and inherent dignity. From this conception flows a different kind of parenting—not one obsessed with techniques, but with presence, barakah, and moral formation. A mother who teaches her child to say Bismillah before eating has done more for their emotional stability than a thousand psychological seminars; a father who rises for Fajr and prays with his son transmits a code of being that no YouTube influencer can rival.

The crises rightly identified in the article—marriages collapsing under pressure, children lost to addiction, young women torn between selfhood and belonging—are not denied. But they are not solved by workshops in “emotional communication” or “career-compatibility audits.” They are solved by reweaving the fabric that once held our people together: a home where God is mentioned, a culture where elders are heeded, a marriage where duty precedes desire, and a society where truth has weight. Imagine a marriage where love is not expected to arrive fully formed but is cultivated through shared prayer and sabr. Imagine a daughter not pressured into MBBS for social status, but guided toward a path her soul inclines to, supported by family not as investors in prestige, but as guardians of her fitrah. Imagine a teenager taught not just the dangers of drugs, but the beauty of tawbah, the strength of shukr, the majesty of La ilaha illallah.

The vision I offer is not utopia. It is simply our own forgotten home—one we can return to if we have the courage to choose revelation over reformism, depth over noise, and meaning over motion. It is not through rupture, but through resacralization, that we will be healed. And healed we shall be—not by fixing culture as data, but by reviving it as a breathing echo of God’s mercy in time. What must be done, then, is neither elusive nor abstract. The first task is the revival of the religious sciences—not as a professional class of clergy but as the reintroduction of a worldview, where law, ethics, metaphysics, and beauty speak again with one voice. This means returning to the study and teaching of Qur’an, Hadith, fiqh, akhlaaq, tarbiyyah, usul—in language intelligible to the modern soul but loyal to eternal truths. We must reestablish local scholars and elders as moral authorities—not by force but by restoring their intellectual legitimacy. From this renewed authority flows guidance in marriage, child-rearing, and community life. A young couple preparing for marriage does not need imported theories of compatibility—they need to sit with those who can teach the meaning of sakoon and rahmah, who can explain the emotional and spiritual companionship of Sayyidah Khadija and Rasulullah ﷺ not as myth but as method.

Second, we must begin to rebuild culture in the spirit of religion. Not all customs must be discarded; many must be redeemed. The Wazwan, the rituals of nikah, the role of elders, even the aesthetics of dress and gathering—when restored to their proper place within the moral order—become vehicles of barakah, not burdens. This realignment also allows for practical reforms: simplifying weddings not by stripping them of beauty, but by restoring their intentionality; honoring career diversity not by deconstructing family, but by affirming that dignity lies in halal, not in title. In such a society, a daughter is not forced into MBBS because it is the only door to a good marriage; rather, she is raised to understand that her worth is her God-consciousness, her sincerity, her character—and the community is likewise taught to see her through those lenses.

Finally, we must build institutions that embody these principles. Not merely schools and mosques, but living centers of wisdom—circles where youth are mentored by people of spiritual weight; mother-daughter spaces where virtue is taught with gentleness; fathers’ gatherings where honesty, leadership, and prayer replace banter and shame. The article rightly identified emotional detachment, digital addiction, and the collapse of intergenerational bonds—but these are healed not by “smart parenting” apps or social campaigns, but by real human presence shaped by a metaphysical vision of man. In a world where children are taught that they are not random accidents but bearers of amanah, even the wounded child begins to heal.

This is what must be done: revival of purpose, realignment of practice, and reconstruction of presence. This is not a dream—it is memory waiting to be awakened. And the first step toward it is not outrage, nor despair, but the calm and courageous act of saying: We do not need to be invented. We need only to be remembered.