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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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The Catastrophe of One Generation: A Cultural Holocaust in the Making
The generation born in the 1980s and 1990s stands as a fragile bridge between a world lost and a world looming – a generation that did not merely encounter modernity, but was engulfed by it. They are now raising children without being raised themselves by a living tradition. These men and women, now parents, were the first to be shaped not by awraad fatiha, but by Shahrukh Khan, Honey Singh, Enrique Iglesias, and the algorithmic chaos of social media feeds. The names of their childhood are not those of saints or scholars, but of actors, influencers, and unanchored ideologues. Raised in nuclear homes away from the hearths of grandmothers whispering…
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Counter Narrative | A Culture that Silences Men or Men with a Culture Silenced?
An article, appearing in Kashmir Observer, laments Kashmiri men’s silence as a cultural flaw, failing to realize that this very critique is shaped by Western therapeutic individualism. It sees emotional restraint not as a form of self-discipline (a classical virtue) but as repressive pathology. This betrays its underlying ideological commitments—secular humanism, psychologism, and gender-neutral egalitarianism—which define the human being as a bundle of expressive needs rather than a moral actor bound by higher purpose. But traditional Kashmiri culture, steeped in religion and spirituality, never denied emotional reality. It simply ordered emotions hierarchically: grief in prayer, pain in sabr, joy in shukr. The Prophet Muhammad (saw) wept, yes—but in balance, in…
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Sull Kaak’s Podcast – Season 3 – Schools Have Failed
In this series we delve into abject failure of schools in being able to deliver any fruitful results of any value. This series is a commentary on two essays published in The Atlantic, 1. The Defeat of the Schools and 2. The Reform of the Schools, written by by James L. Mursell. Trailer: Episodes: The Purpose of Schools | Sull Kaak’s Podcast | S03E01 Embark on a thought-provoking journey in the inaugural episode, ‘The Purpose of Schools.’ Delve into the dichotomy between perceived and actual objectives in education, where the conventional apparatus often prioritises curriculum mastery over genuine understanding. Uncover the subtle yet profound implications of this paradigm shift, challenging…
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Sull Kaak’s Podcast – Season 1 – The Fall and Revival of Muslim Civilization
This is a commentary on Hamza Yusuf’s “Is the Matter of Metaphysics Immaterial? Yes and No” with a portion of discussion taken from Abdurrahman Mihrij’s “The Myth of Intellectual Decline – A Response to Shaykh Hamza Yusuf”. The topic has been covered in 6 parts. Click the titles below the trailer to visit the individual pages. Episode 1: First Things First – Explore the profound questions of existence and the revival of metaphysics in the first episode of our enlightening podcast series on “The Fall and Revival of Muslim Civilization”. Episode 2: The Defence of Faith and Religion – Metaphysics as the universal science: Imam al-Ghazali’s view on theology, its…
Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment