Kashmiri Traditions

  • Ark-e-Gulab,  Kashmiri Traditions,  Social Issues

    Our Culture – Part 6 – The Road to Medina

    Blueprints inspire, but blueprints alone do not pour concrete, assemble councils, or season the first vat of shūrba. Having envisioned the khanqāh’s spine, its architecture, governance, curriculum, economy, and digital nervous system, we must now pivot from the aerial view to ground-level logistics. How does a handful of families, graduates, or concerned professionals move from rented prayer-room to self-sustaining waqf compound? What sequence of legal filings, funding milestones, pilot programmes, and talent recruitment keeps vision ahead of bureaucracy yet prevents zeal from outrunning capacity? The following roadmap charts that incremental journey, mapping each stage to the very drawers we seek to replant, service before spectacle, transparency before scale, and shared…

  • Ark-e-Gulab,  Kashmiri Traditions,  Social Issues

    Our Culture – Part 5 – A Reform that Works

    Our diagnosis has cut from surface symptom to civilisational marrow, tracing how borrowed curricula, market logics, and algorithmic moods have rewired the very drawers that once made Qurʾān, fiqh, and lived mercy click into place. The catalogue of fashionable reforms, liberal, literalist, technocratic, commodified, statist, showed that none rebuilds the habitat where revelation breathes as self-evident guidance. We therefore turn, at last, from critique to construction. Part V sketches a contemporary khanqāh: not a museum of bygone piety but a purposeful ecosystem calibrated for the twenty-first-century city, where worship, craft, learning, and service intertwine to re-seed the cognitive, moral, and economic soil of Muslim life. First we outline its architectural…

  • Ark-e-Gulab,  Kashmiri Traditions,  Social Issues

    Our Culture – Part 4 – Towards a Reform Movement

    Part I exposed the loom: culture installs the hidden drawers that govern what a mind can notice, affirm, or reject. Part II traced how colonial curricula, global market logics, and minuscule media drips quietly relabelled those drawers, making traditional practices appear archaic and importing a new Overton window framed by autonomy, utility, and spectacle. Part III showed the deeper consequence: once the drawers shift, the very act of reading revelation is recoded. Legal proof-texts are historicised, spiritual vocabulary is psychologised, and entire movements, literalist or liberal, emerge as reflexes of an alien grammar rather than recoveries of Prophetic intent. The result is a civilisation suspended between nostalgia it can no…

  • Ark-e-Gulab,  Kashmiri Traditions,  Social Issues

    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…

  • Ark-e-Gulab,  Kashmiri Traditions,  Social Issues

    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…