Philosopher's Search For God On Kashmir Campus

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
File photo of IUST

By Dr. Javid Ahmad Mallah

The air on campus carried the scent of pine and earth, sharpened by late autumn. From where I stood, the buildings of the Islamic University of Science and Technology rose with clean lines, deliberate and modest. Behind them, the mountains stood ancient and aloof: tall, weathered, and disinterested in human architecture. I had thirty minutes before my next lecture, enough time to let a question settle in my chest: How do we find God?

A student had asked it that morning.“How do we know God exists?” she said, quietly but without hesitation. Not a rhetorical challenge. More like a hand reaching. I offered her what I had: names-Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna-and their arguments, arranged like chess moves. But she wasn't asking for logic. She was asking for something deeper. Maybe I was, too.

I looked again at the buildings around me. Everything in them-bricks, beams, proportions-was the result of thought. They reflected a design, a mind, a will. But then I looked at the mountains and saw something else: not design in the human sense, but intention. Their shapes weren't calculated, but they weren't accidental either. They belonged to something larger, older. And standing before them, I couldn't help but feel they were telling me something.

As a philosophy teacher, I'm supposed to guide students through questions like this. Questions that feel too big for answers. God is the biggest of them all. Some students come armed with belief. Others carry doubt like a second skin. But the ones who ask sincerely-who want to know not just what to think, but how to feel the truth-those are the ones who linger in my mind.

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Kashmir complicates everything. It's hard to live here and not feel the world is speaking. The Qur'an calls mountains“pegs,” stabilizing the earth, anchoring chaos. I think of that often when I look at them. They hold still while everything else trembles. Faith here is not abstract. It's ambient. It drifts in the call to prayer, in the way elders speak of the land, in the silence between sentences. Still, questioning is alive. It breathes alongside devotion.

The teleological argument, design implies a designer, is too neat on paper. But out here, it hums beneath the surface. The heart, the fingerprint, the balance of the tides-these things feel choreographed. Not perfect, but tuned. I'm not convinced by the idea that such precision is coincidence. Not when I see how the moon holds the ocean in its rhythm, how trees know when to bloom, how children arrive in the world already reaching.

Skeptics ask: where is God? Why can't we see Him? I understand that. But we don't see love either. We don't see time. Yet both shape our lives. We sense them in their effects. We build entire systems around them. Perhaps the divine is similar: not visible, but deeply felt. Not a figure on a throne, but something written into the grammar of being.

The student who asked the question might not have realized she was echoing centuries of inquiry. Or maybe she did. But her voice pulled something loose in me. I've taught for years, argued through every position, challenged every assumption. But there are moments when the world says more than words ever can. That afternoon, the mountains didn't offer me proof. They offered presence.

I watched the light shift on their ridges. Shadows moved like time made visible. I thought of my students-brilliant, restless, burdened with questions that won't be settled by footnotes or citations. They want to touch the idea of God, not just diagram it. I understand that hunger. It's the same hunger that brought me to philosophy in the first place.

The call to prayer echoed across campus, soft but insistent. It reminded me that there are rituals for returning-when language fails, when reason falters. In Kashmir, the earth itself feels like part of that ritual. The valleys curve like verses. The silence holds space for belief.

When I turned back toward the lecture hall, the question hadn't been answered. But maybe it didn't need to be. Maybe it was enough to ask it while surrounded by things that endure-mountains, curiosity, and the stubborn beauty of a world that refuses to be random.

I walked back to class. Another hour of trying to say what can't quite be said. But I carried something with me: not certainty, but the comfort of mystery. And in that mystery, perhaps, a kind of knowing.

• Dr. Javid Ahmad Mallah is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Islamic University of Science and Technology in Kashmir. His work explores the intersection of metaphysics, faith, and place.

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