Kashmiri Traditions
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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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Tolerance as Treason: How Liberal Muslims Betray Truth
I – The Burial of Truth When a civilisation buries Truth, its ‘tolerance’ is a polite nihilism. Allah declares, ‘Truth has arrived and falsehood has vanished; surely falsehood is ever bound to perish’ (17:81). The modern call for tolerance is not rooted in truth, but in exhaustion from conflict. It is not a principled virtue but a negotiated peace imposed by secular elites in a world where meaning has decayed. Yet true tolerance, in the Qur’anic and Prophetic tradition, is not born of relativism, it is born of reverence, reverence for truth, and thus for the human capacity to seek it. Without such a shared metaphysical ground, the language of…
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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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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…
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Afraid of Commitment | Sull Diyan Gallan
A moral decline, particularly the failure to uphold commitments, initiates a cascade of other societal and civilizational issues. Character—embodied in traits such as honesty, integrity, and reliability—is foundational to the health and sustainability of a society. When individuals fail to keep their commitments, it reflects a deeper erosion of these core values, leading to various forms of moral and social decay. Individual virtues play. a very important role in maintaining the social fabric and moral compass of civilizations, and rectifying such declines in character is essential for addressing broader societal challenges.