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 culture-bashing frenzy, your modernist autopilot, and stare into the abyss you’re busy creating. For clarity is the child of stillness. And if we do not halt this headlong rush to demolish our own house, soon enough, neither culture nor clarity will remain.

Open a newspaper, scroll your feed, or eavesdrop on a café discussion, and you’ll witness a relentless parade of self-appointed critics pounding away at the “ills” of our culture like clockwork. Marriages delayed? Blame “culture.” Costs too high? “Culture.” Casteism, backwardness, oppression, delayed modernity, a supposed epidemic of mental illness, even the duties within marriage—somehow, all roads lead back to this nefarious, formless beast called “culture.” Rubbish! Rubbish cubed! This ritual scapegoating is less critique than it is intellectual laziness masquerading as progress. What passes for “analysis” is little more than a game of ideological whack-a-mole—one day attacking tradition, the next attacking religion, then circling back to culture, never pausing to provide a shred of empirical evidence or context. This is not scholarship; this is therapy for the frustrated modern ego, displacing every personal and societal malaise onto a strawman conveniently labeled “culture.” In reality, this form of culture-bashing is not only shallow, it’s a confession of defeat—a refusal to confront the real complexities that, as any serious sociologist or anthropologist will tell you, cannot be reduced to a single villain, least of all the living tapestry of tradition itself.

Let us be honest: refuting every recycled half-truth and pop-psychological platitude peddled in op-eds, WhatsApp statuses, and tea-stall tirades would require not an essay but a lifetime subscription to futility. The cacophony comes not just from the “journalists” and “activists”—that clerical class of Twitter muftis and armchair sociologists—but also from the “lab rats” of academia, forever clutching jargon yet never having sniffed real culture outside their peer-reviewed cages. “One owl is enough to ruin a garden, but when every branch is crowded with them, what hope for the garden?” And here we are, each social branch drooping under the weight of its own self-anointed expert, all rehearsing imported dogmas and Western anxieties as if they were revealed truths. It is a spectacle of borrowed wisdom, of intellectual parroting gone wild, where everyone is a pundit and no one a witness. It is no longer a discourse but a circus of vanity, with the stakes being nothing less than the soul of the gulistan itself.

Consider the spectacle: a local orator, Mushtaq Veeri, delivers his verdict, mixing kitchen and creed, declaring that until we have purged our “wazwaan” appetites and shed our cultural feasts, we have not yet entered into Islam “completely.” Apparently, the only thing standing between us and divine proximity is a well-marbled rista! With impeccable irony, all our sects—Ahl-e-Hadith, Hanafi, Jamaat, Tableeghi—unite in this newfound jihad: the war on culture via the medium of mutton. Forget the nuanced legal debates, the centuries-old hermeneutics; the problem is your plate, not your principles. How convenient! Here, the logic is simple: critique fashion, and the gender police will flay you; critique liquor shops, and the progressives will burn your effigy; critique religion, and the clergy will unsheath their rhetorical swords. But attack “culture”—the rista, the wazwan, the very marrow of our conviviality—and there is no one left to protest. Culture, defenseless and delicious, becomes the enemy du jour. The modern reformer, unable to confront real power structures, picks a fight with a kofta. It is a culinary scapegoat for societal malaise, a proxy war fought in the kitchen, while the true ailments—spiritual, intellectual, and communal—remain unaddressed and, worse, unmentionable. Welcome to the era where “entering Islam completely” is a diet plan, not a metaphysical commitment.

Here’s a revelation for the culture-bashers: “Custom has the force of law” (al-‘ada muhakkama) is not some dusty footnote in Islamic jurisprudence—it’s one of its five cardinal maxims, enshrined as foundational. Yes, custom—urf, that perennial scapegoat—actually stands as a pillar of the shariah itself, binding unless Scripture decisively says otherwise. This isn’t a loophole; it’s a deliberate safeguard, built by the fuqaha to protect society from the myopia of zealots who would substitute imported anxieties for inherited wisdom. Consider: the Quran repeatedly deploys “urf” and its derivatives—not just as cultural garnish, but as a touchstone for what is right (ma’roof) and a compass for identity (ta’aruf). Even knowledge itself, irfan, shares this etymological root. You recognize right and wrong, not by descending from philosophical Olympus with abstract principles, but by attending to what has organically evolved within your people, your soil, your history.

As Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, in his “Islam and the Cultural Imperative” shows, the Prophet (saw) was no destroyer of local color; he blessed the varied conventions of his milieu, intervening only where necessity demanded. This is why Abu Yusuf—the intellectual heir of Abu Hanifa—considered Islam’s embrace of diverse cultures a Prophetic signature, not a deviation. And when Al-Tusuli, that Maliki heavyweight, thundered against imposing foreign norms upon a people, he called it not just poor judgment but tyranny. What greater irony, then, than modern reformers using the language of “Islamic purity” to bulldoze every vestige of the very urf the shariah protects? If only they read the books they so readily quote.

When a people lose real knowledge of their deen, custom—“second nature” (al-ada tab’iyya thaniyya)—becomes the first sacrificial lamb on the altar of ignorance. The destroyers imagine they are merely pruning deadwood—“it’s just culture, not Quran, not Hadith”—as if they’re snipping harmless branches, not hacking at the very roots that shelter the tree of faith. And so, with culture gone, it is only a matter of time before religion itself lies exposed—naked, defenseless, and ripe for the gluttony of modern desire. Any removal of cultural practice, even when justified, is not a job for zealots with Twitter megaphones or op-ed quills, but for the learned: those elders, scholars, and true sociologists who grasp the full architecture of tradition and law. The wise act with surgical precision, not sledgehammers. Reform is not a hobby for bored activists, but a grave matter, demanding knowledge, caution, and reverence for the universal principles of the shariah. Otherwise, our self-righteous “critique” is nothing but vandalism in sacred clothing.

With the protection of culture taken off it, with the clothing of culture torn off its virgin body, religion lies naked and out in the open to be devoured by the glutton – the modern man deprived of his “natural and legitimate” needs! Now, religion dances to the tunes of the unsatisfied modern man. He bends it to his whims and fancies and where he can’t bend it, he escapes it. The daily escape from parts of it, one day at a time, ends up in complete freedom from it one day. This newfound “freedom” instills fear, the fear of old chains and shackles of religion. Fear of reverting back to the old life of conformity under social pressure raises the need and urge, in the “freed” soul, to propagate the newfound love – calling it reform! The reform follows the same path which the individual had followed, first the removal of culture as a determining factor of any social act, marriage and divorce for example, and then religion itself.

“Marriages are delayed because they’re getting too expensive!”—a slogan so frequently chanted in Kashmiri circles that one could be forgiven for thinking it had descended from Sinai, rather than Twitter. Yet, for all its echo, where is the evidence? Where is the data? The modern Kashmiri, it seems, has traded his critical faculties for a taste of easy outrage: repeat the lie, repeat it loudly, and soon enough it becomes the unchallenged wisdom of the street. But peer into the numbers—yes, actual research, that endangered species—and you’ll find something less dramatic and far more telling. Bashir Ahmad Dabla, that rare sociologist who actually bothers to look at facts, points not to extravagant wedding feasts but to the slow march of modernization, education, and the scramble for ever-elusive jobs as the real culprits behind delayed marriages. In other words, the obsession with credentials and career—the very hallmarks of “progress”—are what’s pushing marriage down the queue, not the price of wazwan or wedding tents. This is not just a Kashmiri problem; it’s a universal symptom of modernity’s bait-and-switch: chase success, then wonder where all the families have gone.

Dowry, that perennial villain trotted out by every hack with a grievance, is now conveniently blamed for everything short of bad weather. Even Dabla, otherwise sensible, nods at it, though one wonders if anyone ever asks what people actually mean by “dowry” these days—definitions are as slippery as politicians’ promises. But let’s play scientist for a moment. How is causality established? The bar is higher than mere hearsay. You need time sequence, correlation, and the elimination of alternate explanations. To argue that A caused or led to B, three broader principles must be considered, a) A must come before B in time, b) It has to be seen that the correlation between A and B isn’t just a chance happening, c) Alternated causes need to be eliminated, it has to be seen that there are no other factors that could be responsible for the relationship between A and B. The numbers? A World Bank study on rural India finds dowry payments have stayed “remarkably stable” over decades, while effective dowry burdens are falling as incomes rise. Dowry deaths, that favorite talking point of moral panickers, are declining too (National Crime Records Bureau). Meanwhile, marriage ages keep rising. If dowry is neither increasing nor causing more death, but marriages are still being postponed, what exactly is the causal link? None. The villain survives on repetition, not reason. To blame dowry for delayed marriages without hard data is not just lazy—it is malpractice, a refusal to engage in basic social science. In a world that prizes convenience over truth, the myth persists, but evidence, as always, is a stubborn thing.

But wait, the chorus interjects: “What about the extravagant wazwan, the tented pandalas, and all the new wedding ‘formalities’? Surely, these must be the culprits!” To which I reply: is it only the wazwan that’s grown fat, or is it our entire lifestyle? Look around—where once a Kashmiri might own two pairs of shoes, now the average closet looks like a Bata warehouse. Wedding “lavishness” has increased, yes, but so has every other index of consumption, from mobile phones to mehnga lehngas. This isn’t cultural decadence; it’s the logic of economic uplift and rising aspiration. Social scientists from Veblen to Bourdieu have charted this universal law: as incomes rise, so do the visible markers of status and taste—dressing, dining, even the décor. To argue that marriages are suddenly unaffordable is to ignore the denominator: incomes have grown alongside costs. Proportionally, the financial burden of marriage may be lighter than ever; we just notice the glitter more. If the elders grumble about new “formalities,” they forget that in their day, a simpler feast reflected simpler means. It’s not the wazwan that’s devouring us—it’s the inability to distinguish between affluence and excess, between economic reality and nostalgic myth.

Let us apply a touch of arithmetic: if incomes have surged ahead of wazwan inflation, the percentage of income spent on marriage has likely shrunk, not ballooned. The real escalation isn’t in the wazwan menu—those same classic dishes, century after century—but in the Delhi-shopping, imported lehengas, hair transplants, and cosmetic dental work that now adorn the bride and groom. These are not “cultural evils”; they are badges of upward mobility, the tell-tale signs of a society with more disposable income. Do I champion consumerism? Hardly. But sociologists and economists alike recognize that societies, as they prosper, naturally signal it through greater visible consumption—whether protein-rich diets or protein-rich guest lists. What is truly criminal is to draw a link between marriage delays and rising wedding costs without a shred of empirical evidence. And let us not be fooled by the law of social magnification: one showy wedding in Raj Bagh does not define all of Kashmir. Do not let urban spectacle pass for societal norm. To mistake outliers for essence is to build your worldview on gossip, not fact.

Once upon a slow news day, a journalist declares: “Caste discrimination ruins lives in Kashmir!” But the real tragedy here is not “caste” itself, but the mutation of journalists into ersatz scholars—a phenomenon as dangerous as it is predictable in the age of click-bait and “hot takes.” The more airtime and Twitter followers a journalist amasses, the more brazenly they dispense half-baked sociological diagnoses, setting the tone for national hysteria and moral panic. Recall how the very same species of commentator fueled the “war on terror” and global Islamophobia with sweeping generalizations; now, in our local context, this translates into culture-bashing and a self-flagellation that verges on culture-phobia. The result? A picture so relentlessly grim that both reader and outsider are left believing that to merely exist as Kashmiri is to breathe in poison. Journalism, once the scribe of fact, is now a factory of ready-made narratives—each headline another nail in the coffin of cultural confidence.

“Ruining Lives”—and always in the plural, as if we’re still trapped in some feudal dystopia where the Syeds pull the strings and everyone else toils in darkness. This is the classic script of blame-culture: manufacture an “other,” a convenient minority, and assign them supernatural powers over your misfortunes. Such narratives thrive wherever people forget that life is inherently hard, and personal setbacks have more to do with fate, effort, and the laws of economics than with secret cabals. Psychologists call this the externalization of blame, a universal human failing; it is same as the Biblical story where Eve says “The serpent deceived me, so I ate”, and then Adam says “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate”; our own tradition simply calls it ibleesi—“You led me astray,” said Iblees, refusing to confront his own choices. In the world of op-eds and TV debates, this ancient habit is dressed up as social justice but is, at its core, an abdication of responsibility and a recipe for resentment. If you want a society to eat itself from within, just keep feeding it stories of perpetual victimhood.

Let’s not be naive: this kind of scapegoating, though dressed up in the soft language of “raising awareness,” is just the opening act in a much darker play. In some alternate, dystopian Kashmir, imagine a demagogue rising—call him the local Hitler—who convinces the majority that all their woes trace back to a small, conspiring Syed elite (which, incidentally, doesn’t even exist as they imagine). No gas chambers, no jackboots; just a slow drip of resentment and manufactured grievance, repeated until the mob believes it. That’s how every tale of social rot begins—not with grand evil, but with the quiet normalization of blaming a powerless “other.” History is littered with such experiments, from Europe’s darkest hours to the genocides of the twentieth century, all starting with “harmless” talk about ruined lives and secret hegemons. Beware the “innocent” narrative that preps the ground for tyranny; this Kashmiri Hitler of the alternate universe would not begin his career with “final solutions” or “concentration camps”, it has to be much more subtle, it would begin with a statement like “we take it lightly, but caste discrimination ruins lives in Kashmir”.

Journalistic ethics, once a sturdy pillar of public trust, are now in freefall—a nosedive so spectacular it’s almost become performance art. Once, reporters were expected to present facts with a semblance of neutrality, to let both sides breathe in the open air of inquiry. Today, neutrality is an endangered species. Instead, we get a barrage of loaded adjectives and melodrama – “stares into the nothingness”, “impasse”, “how brutally his hopes”, “laments”, “agony”, “more brutality in store”, “the so-called world”, “a monster lurking”, “ugly monster”  – carefully designed to short-circuit your ability to think for yourself. This is not reporting, it’s narrative engineering, a subtle brain-hack: rather than inform, it implants a ready-made conclusion. Like an old cassette player, the reader is handed a tape, presses play, and dutifully recites the approved emotion on cue. Meanwhile, the journalist, far from being a witness, is reduced to a vendor of prefabricated outrage. We are not so much informed as choreographed.

Let’s clear the academic fog: “caste” in the Indian imagination is a nuclear term, freighted with centuries of oppression, untouchability, and rigid exclusion. But to slap this label onto Kashmiri zaat is both intellectually lazy and morally reckless. Zaat, in our context, is more about social identity—lineage, origin, a sense of “who’s who”—not some fossilized hierarchy of cruelty. Identities, whether we like it or not, are the raw material of human society; take away lineage, and you’ll find some other, equally artificial way to draw boundaries—fashion, address, accent, football club. Every grouping brings its attitudes, preferences, and yes, its limitations. Consider marriage: Kashmiris are endogamous, preferring matches within the community. This isn’t some grand conspiracy of caste tyranny; it’s the universal instinct to marry one’s own, found from Tokyo to Timbuktu. If anything, our real dividing line is not Syed vs. non-Syed, but rural vs. urban—and, often enough, rupee vs. rupee. These are economic facts, not caste fiction. If sociology teaches us anything, it is that identity markers shift, but the need for identity remains stubbornly human.

Even Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the undisputed grandmaster of anti-caste activism, concedes that “caste” among Muslims—or Christians, or Sikhs—is a fundamentally different creature than the Hindu version. But here’s the real punchline: Ambedkar’s core insight is not just about the nuances of caste, but about the universality of social grouping itself. In his “Annihilation of Caste,” he bluntly observes that human society is never a homogenous mass; it is always, inevitably, plural. Between the poles of individual and society, there lie endless associations—families, clubs, political parties, even gangs of robbers—each with their own codes, boundaries, and, yes, degrees of exclusion. This is not a flaw unique to Kashmir or to Muslims; it is the operating system of human community itself, from Paris to Pampore. So the real sociological question isn’t, “Are there groups?”—of course there are. The question is, “How do those groups interact, overlap, and integrate?” Only then can you separate healthy social identity from pathological exclusion.

How, then, do we judge whether a society’s social groupings are healthy or pathological? Ambedkar, ever the methodical analyst, gives us real criteria: Are the shared interests of these groups broad and overlapping? Is there real movement and exchange between them? Do the bonds of unity outnumber the forces of separation? And what, finally, is the social meaning of these boundaries—are they practical and customary, or rigid and theological? By these metrics, the “caste” question in Kashmir melts into irrelevance. What we find isn’t a Hindu-style system of ritual exclusion, but a spectrum of overlapping identities shaped by geography, economics, and history. The anti-Syed hysteria is less a cry for justice and more a symptom: a society that has lost its reverence for tradition, for the sanctity of cultural institutions, for the prophetic family—and above all, a society haunted by bugz: petty envy. As Ambedkar himself insists, what Muslims (and others) have are social distinctions, not the deep metaphysical chasm of Hindu caste. The distinction is not academic; it is civilizational.

The hallmarks of a caste-ridden society are obvious: social groups are isolated, interaction is rare, and the lines of separation are policed with near-religious fervor. In such a system, what unites is weak, and what divides is sacred. Ambedkar, with clarity, points out that among Muslims—even where distinctions exist—there remain “organic filaments” binding people together; no Muslim is ever cast out entirely for crossing social lines. To call the Kashmiri system “casteist” is not just a category error, but a grave injustice—trivializing the trauma suffered by millions under actual caste apartheid. Arthur Buehler, in his study of South Asian Muslim society, delivers the final academic blow: to equate Muslim social hierarchies with “caste” is to confuse surface with substance, form with function. In his “Trends of ashrāfization in India” Buehler says, “It is a conceptual error to equate Muslim social stratification with caste just because the outer form looks similar”, he concludes elsewhere, “the larger historical and religious context points to “caste” as an inappropriate term to use for South Asian Muslim social stratification outside of extremely limited local contexts”. The history, theology, and lived reality simply do not map onto the Indian caste template, except in the wildest imaginations of activists and their imported vocabularies.

So, what of “liberty” in marriage—this sacred cow of modern discourse? Let’s be honest: absolute freedom in marriage is possible only in societies where “freedom” means the normalization of promiscuity, where marriage is reduced to a revolving door of temporary attachments. In any civilization grounded in self-restraint—and here even Gandhi nods in assent—there must be boundaries against chaos, formlessness, and the trivialization of sacred unions. Islam’s legal philosophy is not bashful about this: one of its five supreme objectives (al-maqasid al-khamsa al-kubra) is the preservation of nasl—not just lineage, but the integrity of family itself. This isn’t narrow genealogy, but the protection of children, family structure, and generational health. Every legal system, to achieve its aims, builds in essentials, complements, and mere ornamentation—and so does culture, which becomes the vessel through which law lives and breathes. Even when the masses are illiterate in fiqh, urf—the lived custom of the people—serves as an unconscious guardian of the sacred order. Dismantle it, and you don’t get liberation, but the collapse of meaning itself.

Marriage in Islam is not a recreational contract to be rearranged at the whims of mood or fashion; it is a sanctuary, a social and spiritual covenant whose primary charge is not fleeting romance but the building of stable homes, secure children, and healthy societies. Love is precious, yes, but it is not the sole currency—values, those stubborn bedrocks, are what keep a marriage alive when the sweetness of new affection has worn thin. This is why Islam insists on kafā’ah—compatibility not just of hearts, but of virtues, aims, and worldviews. And for those who only trust the secular gospel: psychologists echo the same refrain, noting that mismatched values, not lack of “knowing each other,” are the silent undertow dragging families apart. Cultures obsessed with endless dating and free mixing of genders and “testing the waters” inevitably end up with an ocean of broken unions; every new attempt to “know” ends with a fresh incompatibility, a new exit. The result is a culture of impermanence, promiscuity, and disposability, where the incentive to build and struggle within a marriage is replaced by the urge to flee at the first sign of discomfort. The logic of commitment has been exiled; what remains is a tyranny of options and a poverty of fulfillment.

Islamic civilization stands or falls on the strength of its families—hence, the meticulous attention to marriage, children, and lineage. But how is “compatibility” ensured? Enter kafā’ah: the Shariah’s insistence on matching spouses not just in passing whims, but in faith, virtue, lineage, and practical circumstance. Scholars may debate the specifics, but the principle is universal—every society builds checks, conscious or unconscious, into its marriage customs. In Kashmir, compatibility is triangulated through geography (south vs. north, downtown vs. gaam), education (doctor searches for doctor), religious adherence (Hanafi, Ahl-e-Hadith), age, lineage—each a proxy for shared values and life trajectories. The Prophet ﷺ, in countless narrations, makes it plain: “Choose carefully for your seed—marry the compatible, and marry off to them.” This is not medieval snobbery; it is intergenerational wisdom. The real tragedy is not that people seek such alignment, but that modern minds, dazzled by slogans of “choice,” sneer at the hard-earned mechanisms that keep families—and by extension, civilizations—intact.

Yes, scholars debate the criteria of kafā’ah—should wealth trump lineage, or is piety the gold standard? But such debate is not a flaw; it is a sign of intellectual vitality within the Islamic tradition. The core principle stands uncontested: compatibility matters, and societies build their own checklists accordingly. As Louise Marlow notes in her study of Islamic legal thought, a strong sense of social differentiation pervades even the most egalitarian circles; descent, wealth, and profession remain live criteria not because Muslims are snobs, but because even the most “progressive” societies instinctively bristle at the idea of completely random unions for their daughters. This isn’t some feudal relic; it is a universal law of social stability, hiding in plain sight beneath our progressive posturing. Uniformity of detail is not required—only a shared recognition that not all matches are equal, and some care in selection is a mark of wisdom, not prejudice. Louise Marlow, in “Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islam Thought” says, “the various hadith generated by the issue of marriage equality suggest the prevalence in most legal circles of a strong sense of social differences. The range of criteria for marriage equality, and the difference of opinion even among scholars of the same school regarding their relative importance, suggest a diversity and perhaps a degree of informality in actual social practice, but this lack of uniformity does not negate the impression given by the sources of a profound consciousness of social rank among scholars in many environments. The attention given to descent, wealth and profession among the criteria for marriage equality in a legal tradition that largely emphasises the equality of free Muslim males should not necessarily surprise us; even the most convinced egalitarian might baulk at the prospect of his womenfolk marrying in a socially random fashion.”

The greatest intellectual pandemic of our age is the belief that culture stands in splendid isolation from Islam—as if the two are parallel universes, never touching. This delusion has metastasized in the age of social media, where every Twitter “lab rat” and caffeinated journalist plays mufti, despite the Prophet’s ﷺ stern warning against pontificating on every matter under the sun. The truth is far less dramatic: classical fiqh texts—like Umdat as-Salik—have long enshrined kafā’ah as a composite of lineage, piety, profession, and the absence of disqualifying defects. In the Hanafi tradition dominant in Kashmir, lineage (sharaf) and honor (hasab) are explicitly recognized. The list—lineage, duration since embracing Islam, freedom, religious uprightness, honor, livelihood, wealth—is not arbitrary, but the result of generations of collective reasoning. Culture, then, is not a wild weed; it is the trellis upon which the vine of religion is trained, bearing fruit for society across centuries.

The Prophet ﷺ laid it out plainly: “A woman is married for four things—her wealth, lineage, beauty, and religion. Choose the one with religion.” This isn’t a footnote; it is the spine of Islamic marital ethics. And yet, even in the classical era, exceptions abound—piety could trump pedigree, if only the right eyes were looking. The decline comes when compatibility is reduced to mere status markers, as lamented by Ibn Abidin, a 19^th century jurist, who watched with sorrow as the search for virtue gave way to the chase for worldly credentials. Today’s anti-Syed campaigners will never advocate for the poor but pious, they wouldn’t encourage marriage for piety, they wouldn’t for example ask men and women to get married to poor but religious people, – they would rather invent caste conspiracies than preach piety-first marriages. Their outrage is less about justice, more about a frustration fertilized by alien, imported ideas—products of an intellectual colonialism that empties both tradition and reform of meaning.

This is not a call to pick sides on every social issue, but to expose the epidemic disregard for scholarly rigor and depth. Beneath the surface, culture and religion are not distant cousins but often two faces of the same coin—each sustaining, protecting, and interpreting the other. The real rot comes from the slow drip of Western ideologies—materialism, skepticism, modernism, feminism, agnosticism—smuggled into our discourse through a thousand “minuscule injections.” Every time a Kashmiri chooses atomized autonomy over inherited wisdom, it is not progress but a slow-motion heresy against our fitrah. What passes for “fresh perspective” is often just the echo of the last social science class, the latest viral thread, or an op-ed from Delhi. Our current crisis is not a shortage of opinions but a plague of borrowed voices—university miseducation, Islamist sloganeering, Twitter “wokeness,” media propaganda, pseudo-feminist and pseudo-modernist confusion, capitalist-communist crossfire, and good old-fashioned urban mimicry. All these combine to churn our narrative into a soup of ideological confusion, against which the untrained mind has no defenses.

The roots of our cultural bewilderment are tangled, but two stand tall above the rest. First, materialism now rules as our hidden creed – even people of faith are quick to recast spiritual mysteries in the bland vocabulary of neuroscience, economics, or “self-care.” So subtle is this drift that we rarely notice: even our khutbahs end with promises of “well-being” and “success,” as if salvation were a business metric. Every institution, from media to university, is now a preacher of this secular gospel: material comfort and “development” as the highest, sometimes only, purpose of life. The overwhelming discourse driven by news channels and newspapers – driven by the overwhelming majority of movies and art industry, driven by countless public figures and more so the journalists and celebrities masquerading as academicians, driven by various schools in our colleges and universities teaching us Engineering, Medicine, Economics, Sociology, Biology, Psychology and all the other sciences and social sciences – is that of the betterment of material life calling it with the beautiful name of “development”; insinuating development, material development, to be the Purpose of Life.

Second, even religion is not spared the scalpel of the modern academic. Our sacred traditions, once approached with awe and humility, are now dissected like corpses in the laboratories of sociology and psychology. The “modern educated mind” cheers each experiment that renders the supernatural unnecessary – liberating us, apparently, from “medieval vulgarity.” But this is no liberation. After two decades of being spoon-fed this worldview, first in school, then in lecture hall, finally on Twitter and in NGOs, the Kashmiri comes home fluent only in the language of material power. The will to transcendence is replaced by a will to consumption. Meaning collapses into utility; the world, once enchanted, becomes a marketplace of appetites and anxieties. The Purpose of Life becomes the assertion of material truths, material well-being, comfort, exerting his Will to Power.

Recently, a learned man let loose his inner social media critic on a scene from the 90s classic, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. “Yeh kabootar meray apne hain, wahan ke kabootar paraye”—Amrish Puri opines. Shah Rukh, with a shrug, retorts, “I mean, bro, what the non sense. You are giving a weird analogy and the audience/public receives that extremely well, as usual. Sub continental masses live imaginary & delusional lives. One who tells beautifully worded emotional lies becomes the hero. Living real has not touched the ground yet. We might have had civilization in the past but our present is still undefined. We are stuck. Stoic and unmoved. We still live in our past resisting every change to move ahead in the present.”

But observe the sleight of hand: the contempt for tradition masquerading as realism, the presumption that emotional resonance is naïve, and only hard, secular cynicism is “real.” For every poetic metaphor dismissed as delusion, the modern mind smuggles in its own dogmas—progress, rupture, “forward motion”—without ever pausing to ask: forward to what, and at what cost? The kabootar is not just a pigeon, but a cultural signifier; what the critic calls a delusion is, for the people, an affirmation of identity, memory, and continuity. In sneering at the language of the heart, he exposes not our naivety, but his own cultural malnutrition.

At first glance, our commentator’s verdict on “delusional, tradition-bound society” sounds like a throwaway line, until you realize it’s a confession of his entire worldview. He’s not critiquing DDLJ; he’s issuing an indictment against our collective memory, our habits of heart, our refusal to “move ahead” by the only metric modernity knows: amnesia. And while it feels like a spontaneous outburst, it’s really the voice of two decades of “rational” training, reciting slogans learned from a thousand classrooms, feeds, and TED Talks. Every “why are we so stuck?” is the echo of an education that has taught us to sneer at roots, treat memory as pathology, and see continuity as failure. So, yes, it’s a reaction, but also a deeply conditioned one – shaped not by independent inquiry, but by the slow-drip reprogramming of a culture that has mistaken forgetting for progress and rootlessness for wisdom. Did we not say, “Drunken with a material conception of life, fed to him goblet after goblet, from kindergarten to his doctorate, in a life span of more than two decades, he arrives home via Twitter, Facebook, NGOs, and what not to protect his newfound love”. It is an outpouring of what has been internalized over decades.

The iron law of social media: it takes a second to scoff, a lifetime to answer. A tweet declares, “You’re all delusional!” and suddenly those rooted in tradition must write essays to defend reality itself. Why is it always easier to label others than to diagnose oneself? Perhaps it is the modern man, with his faith in “cold logic” and reductionist “aql,” who has lost his grip on reality, filtering every cultural sign through the shredder of reason, then mistaking the shreds for wisdom. Human beings are not pure calculators; cognition is only one facet. There is also will and feeling – the heart’s reasons, the soul’s memory. The true delusion is believing that all meaning can be derived from data and deduction, that the “ought” can be engineered from the “is.” In the end, everyone is “delusional”, but only the traditional man is honest enough to recognize that reason, will, and love must work together if anything of value is to last. The modern skeptic, for all his logic, cannot see what he himself is missing.

Man is not a mere calculator, and the will does not march in lockstep with the intellect’s supply chains. We are creatures of desire, memory, and intuition, what Pascal called “the heart’s reasons which reason does not know.” He continues, “We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?” The modern mind forgets that love, loyalty, even faith itself are never products of deduction, but of an instinctive recognition of truth, goodness, and beauty. Even our most sophisticated skeptics lean, at bottom, on premises they feel rather than prove. As Pascal noted, it is absurd for reason to demand proofs from the heart for its first principles, just as it is absurd for the skeptic to ridicule the kabootar’s symbolism while blindly trusting his own emotional investments. It is the recognition of these layered faculties, reason, will, heart, that makes us fully human and makes tradition’s analogies not only permissible, but necessary. In short: all real knowledge begins in the soil of the heart; the mind is merely its careful gardener.

It is the modern man—deluded by the fantasy that “mind knows all”—who dismisses the kabootar analogy because, “a pigeon can’t possibly fly that far!” In doing so, he misses what ordinary people living “real lives” instinctively grasp: that reality is not captured by data alone but by the resonance of meaning in the heart. As Helen Keller reminds us, “the best and most beautiful things cannot be seen—they must be felt.” Yet the modern heart, starved of tradition, sees only kitsch where ancestors found beauty, and sees only dead ritual where there is, in fact, a deep love for the Prophet ﷺ and his family and the one’s of the lineage existing among us today. Who, then, is truly out of touch? Is it the stoic who is rooted, or the modern who, like a plastic bag, is blown hither and thither by every passing intellectual breeze? Vision only emerges in stillness: eyes cannot see when always in motion; one must pause, root, and receive.

No, the scene in DDLJ is not a work of flawless art, but it is a time-capsule, perfectly attuned to the sensibilities of the 1990s, woven into the film’s own logic and social context. The kabootar dialogue is not a random metaphor, but the punchline to a series of scenes about longing, displacement, and memory: Puri’s nostalgia for India, Shah Rukh’s attempt to bridge the foreign and the familiar, and the wider tension of the post-liberalization era. The “modern” critic, lost in literalism, misses what a whole generation instinctively recognized—that a person can look outwardly Western but remain Indian at heart; that memory and belonging are not so easily erased by flights across borders. In that moment, the kabootar became a vessel for a society anxiously negotiating its relationship to the past and the diaspora, a truth more potent than any sociological lecture. Those who lived through it felt it in their bones; those who judge it by surface “logic” remain forever outsiders to their own history.

Consider even the wisdom-laden parables of scripture: “The sheep know the shepherd’s voice… he calls them by name, and they follow.” Here, the Bible is not teaching animal husbandry but something profound about identity, memory, and belonging. Yet the modern literalist, allergic to metaphor, can only sneer: “Sheep are dumb!” The very symbolism meant to teach us about trust and recognition is dismissed as naïve, all because modern ears have lost their music and modern hearts have lost their tune. The lesson: where tradition speaks in the language of metaphor, the modern mind hears only noise.

Muhammad Naquib al-Attas captures the malady of our age with surgical precision: the crisis is not technology, not even “modernity” per se, but the loss of adab, the cultivated discipline of knowing one’s place, one’s limits, and the rightful order of things. Adab is the foundation of justice because it orders the self, the family, and society around hierarchy, not the tyranny of the strong, but the harmonious structure willed by the Creator. When adab is lost, confusion reigns: boundaries blur, knowledge is democratized into banality, and reverence is replaced by entitlement. Knowledge in Islam is not a cheap commodity, but a sacred trust, its proper reception demands humility, discipline, and the willingness to recognize authority, culminating in the Prophet ﷺ himself. Without this hierarchy, every opinion shouts as loudly as the next; every “truth” becomes as disposable as the latest tweet. When reverence dies, justice follows, and a world without justice is a world with no knowledge left worth having.

Al-Attas writes, “….the dilemma in which we find ourselves, the basic problems can….be reduced to a single evident crisis which I would simply call the loss of adab……the loss of discipline – the discipline of body, mind, and soul; the discipline that assures the recognition and acknowledgement of one’s proper place in relation to ones self, society and Community; the recognition and acknowledgement of one’s proper place in relation to one’s physical, intellectual, and spiritual capacities and potentials; the recognition and acknowledgement of the fact that knowledge and being are ordered hierarchically. Since adab refers to recognition and acknowledgement of the right and proper place, station and condition in life and to self discipline in positive and willing participation in enacting one’s role in accordance with that recognition and acknowledgement, its occurrence in one and in society as a whole reflects the condition of justice. Loss of adab implies loss of justice, which in turns betrays confusion in knowledge…………………………. Knowledge must be approached reverently and in humility, and it cannot be possessed simply as if it were they available to everyone irrespective of intention and capacity. Where knowledge of Islam and the Islamic world view is concerned, it is based on authority……..and legitimate authority recognizes and acknowledges a hierarchy of authorities culminating in the Holy Prophet, upon whom be Peace! It is incumbent upon us to have a proper attitude towards legitimate authority, and that is reverence, love, respect, humility and intelligent trust in the veracity of knowledge interpreted and clarified by such authority. Reverence, love, respect, humility and intelligent trust can only be realized in one when one recognizes and acknowledges the fact that there is a hierarchy in the human order and in authority within that hierarchy in point of intelligence, spiritual knowledge and virtue”.

Wittgenstein’s austere dictum, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, is but an echo of the Prophetic truth: “In silence lies salvation.” Culture, after all, is not the enemy of religion; it is its living garment, translating principles into daily rules. If we have lost touch with the spirit of the Qur’an and Sunnah, then it is the scaffolding of tradition that keeps us from total collapse. Kashmiri customs, derided by intellectuals and ignored by reformists, are not mere relics, they are the unconscious shield around our religious life, a set of rules that keep us closer to the ideal even when explicit knowledge has faded. It is a scandal that such traditions now stand orphaned, with none to defend them but the few who remember their value. No, I do not claim infallibility or universal expertise, but neither will I stay silent while our shared legacy is dismantled by ignorance masquerading as enlightenment. Sometimes, the most radical act is to pause, to speak the forbidden word in defense of what is most ours, and to ask, before rushing to “reform”: what hidden wisdom are we about to destroy?