Counter-Narrative | Response to “Empty Houses, Aging Parents: Kashmir’s Wealth Illusion”
The lament of empty houses in Kashmir, while deeply evocative, is not just a social observation – it is a cultural indictment, a misdiagnosed ailment offered with the wrong medicine. What masquerades in this piece as financial wisdom is, in fact, the latest iteration of Western secular epistemology dressed up as parental care and economic prudence. The article’s message – “live for yourself, not your children; invest in savings, not structures; be financially independent, not emotionally entangled” – is a eulogy for the death of a civilization’s metaphysical backbone: the family.
The core ideological assumption of the article is secular liberalism, wrapped in the soft cloak of economic rationality. The suggestion that parental sacrifice must be tempered with “self-first” thinking stems not from Islamic ethics, but from neoliberal individualism, which views relationships through the lens of risk and utility. This “financial independence” mantra reflects materialist utilitarianism, a worldview that reduces love to capital allocation and children to uncertain investments. Embedded in the text is also a latent skepticism, skepticism not just of traditional financial planning, but of the wisdom of elders, of the very cultural scaffolding that once made Kashmiri society coherent.
This is the classic move of what I have elsewhere called the revenge of the Westernised Muslim: a rebellion against cultural norms mistaken as religious baggage, leading eventually to a rebellion against religion itself. The article gives voice to the ghost of modernity, which whispers: you are alone, your children owe you nothing, love is risky, and on and on and on.
The article valorizes parental independence while lamenting loneliness. It critiques houses as empty shells and yet upholds capital investments and savings – things just as impersonal. It critiques the futility of grand homes that no longer host iftar, yet prescribes solutions that erode the very familial structures that iftar once revolved around. There’s a yearning for warmth, but the only prescription offered is more coldness. The contradiction here is stark: it mourns the cultural consequences of liberalism while advocating its financial logic.
Mainstream sociological research consistently points to the psychological and health benefits of intergenerational living, especially for elderly parents. Studies in the field show that co-residence with adult children increases elders’ life satisfaction, mental health, and decreases mortality risk. Moreover, research in behavioral economics indicates that money spent on relational experiences (like shared homes or community rituals) gives far more long-term happiness than investments in abstract “security funds.” Furthermore, anthropologists like Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner have long argued that the nuclearization of the family, an offshoot of capitalist urbanism, is directly correlated with the rise of social alienation and the erosion of cultural transmission. The article’s economic solution, therefore, contradicts both empirical data and civilizational history.
The illusion of wealth is not in homes but in what has replaced them: the atomized life of young professionals disconnected from family, culture, and metaphysical grounding. Children are to some extent ungrateful; the bigger problem though is that they are spiritually orphaned by the very forces of global capital and liberal education which the modern culture has enforced upon them. The emptiness of houses is not due to misplaced investment but due to the systematic hollowing out of family and cultural consciousness, a process that began when culture was stripped from religion, and religion stripped of its societal function.
From the standpoint of Islamic metaphysics and the teachings of our sacred tradition, the house is not just a structure – it is a dar, a sanctuary, a space where fitrah finds its footing. It is the site of memory, prayer, transmission. Parents building for children is not foolish – it is sadaqah jariyah. The problem is not the house; it is the estrangement of the children, produced not by over-giving but by under-teaching. If anything needs to be invested in, it is in tarbiyah, not term insurance; in family culture, not financial planning.
Islamic law makes the preservation of the family one of the five maqasid (objectives of the Shariah). Financial autonomy for the elderly is not achieved by rejecting interdependence, but by reinvigorating the social structures that made families work: respect for parents, moral education of children, and the embeddedness of family within community. Rather than teaching our youth to become rational economic agents, we must teach them to become righteous caretakers of their lineage. The inheritance they need is not land or liquidity but noble character, communal memory, and religious literacy.
The legacy of the Muslim parent is not an apartment in Dubai or a rental income in Srinagar, it is a child who prays for them when they are gone. We must restore the house as a site of barakah, not just investment. Let the marble remain if it echoes Qur’anic recitation. Let the gates stand if they open to collective prayer. Let the silence be replaced not by loneliness but dhikr, not by independence but mutual reliance in the path of Allah. True wealth lies not in the ability to die with savings, but in dying as a part of a living tradition. And that is one investment which never yields empty returns.
