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The Dignity of the Drowned: On the Sacred Weight of Loneliness
Sometimes life does not strike like a thunderclap but like a slow erosion. You wake to an ordinary morning, but somewhere between the first sip of tea and the last conversation of the previous day, the ground beneath you has shifted. A word spoken, a gesture withheld, a summon received, a door closed, a call not returned, and suddenly you find yourself standing in a corridor of silence, wondering when the world decided to move on without you. Other times it arrives violently. A letter bearing an unfamiliar seal, a voice on the other end of the phone, a confrontation in the open street, a harsh knock on the door…
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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…
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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…
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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 | The Velvet Knife: A Civilizational Critique of the Sentimental Modernist Discourse on Marriage and Parenting in Kashmir
I A certain article, recently circulated in public discourse, presents itself as a compassionate diagnosis of the ailments afflicting Kashmiri marriages, parenting, and youth. It laments the emotional emptiness within households, the disconnection between generations, the burdens of ritual and custom, and the disillusionment of young men and women adrift in a sea of anxiety, ambition, and virtual overstimulation. Yet beneath its gentle tone and emotionally disarming language lies a devastating philosophical sleight of hand. Its deepest betrayal is not that it critiques the state of our society—indeed, critique is welcome and needed—but that it prescribes as cure the very poison that caused the sickness. It offers the language of…
Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment
