Ark-e-Gulab
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Our Culture – Part 3 – End of Religion
The argument thus far has tracked how imported curricula, global market logics, and minuscule cultural drips re-engineer the very drawers through which a Muslim perceives reality. Yet cognition does not stop at street etiquette or economic choice; it also governs how we read the Qurʾān, weigh ḥadīth, and adjudicate fiqh. If culture is the loom that pre-sets what counts as evidence, coherence, or beauty, then any shift in that loom necessarily recasts the enterprise of Islamic hermeneutics itself. Part III therefore turns the lens inward: we will examine how the same cognitive realignments that trivialise traditional practices also reshape the methodologies by which revelation is approached, interpreted, and sometimes unwittingly…
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Our Culture – Part 2 – Forces of Displacement
In Part I, we unraveled culture as the unseen loom silently weaving our identities, judgments, and reflexes. We observed how seemingly personal convictions, like a café owner’s choice to retain or abandon nun-chai, the transformation of Friday bazaars into selfie-spots, or even how we interpret friendship through digital responsiveness, are not independent acts of rational reasoning. Instead, these convictions spring from cognitive templates quietly installed by culture. This cultural loom predetermines not only what we notice and value but also how we interpret the very meaning of words such as “presence,” “honour,” and “woman.” We discovered that identity is not static; rather, it is dynamically constructed through a braided relationship…
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Our Culture – Part 1 – What is Culture?
What persuades a Srinagar café owner to keep, or drop, nun-chai from the menu, and what kind of eatery now owns that cup? What turns the once-sacred Friday bazaar into a selfie-strip of fried snacks where the khutbah fades to background hum? What recasts the neighbourly rite of carrying a bride’s trousseau on foot into a ribboned convoy of rented SUVs built for Instagram? What turns azaan into noise for many? What alchemy makes a blue tick and a quick reply pass for friendship, while silence feels like betrayal? What force lets the same Qurʾānic ayah set one heart ablaze and leave another untouched? And, above all, what chance has…
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Problem Narrative is Problematic
I In a world increasingly obsessed with diagnosis, the proliferation of problems has become its own self-sustaining industry, a vast machinery of concern that thrives not on the resolution of ailments, but on their perpetual redefinition and reproduction. Every domain of modern discourse, from activist circles to academic departments, from NGO funding proposals to political manifestos, from mental health apps to global development goals, functions by constantly generating new categories of disorder, disadvantage, and dysfunction. We are no longer allowed to simply be; we must now be diagnosed. One must have a trauma, a disorder, an oppression, a crisis of identity to be taken seriously. Entire vocabularies, terms like microaggressions,…
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Culture Bashing Cannot go Unabated
Have you ever considered why birds, those little sages of the sky, lurch their heads in abrupt, start-stop spasms rather than simply gliding their gaze? Unlike us, they cannot swivel their eyes—they must halt their whole world, however briefly, to see anything clearly. Now, modern man, with all his digital twitchiness, has inherited the exact opposite malady: a ceaseless, unreflective motion, a scrolling of mind and soul that sees nothing at all. And so, in the marketplace of ideas—Twitter, op-eds, and pseudo-academic squawking—culture is endlessly flogged, never understood. If you wish to actually see where we are, pause! Stand still, if only for the length of a thought. Cease your…
