Ziauddin Sardar (Urdu: ضیاء الدین سردار; born 31 October 1951) is a British-Pakistani scholar, award-winning writer, cultural critic and public intellectual who specialises in Muslim thought, the future of Islam, futurology and science and cultural relations. He wrote or edited more than 50 books[1]Prospect magazine named him as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals and The Independent newspaper called him: 'Britain's own Muslim polymath'.[2]
Ziauddin Sardar was born in Dipalpur, Punjab, Pakistan. However, he was both educated and brought up in Britain.[3] His family belonged to the Durrani warrior clan that founded the state that ultimately became Afghanistan after the break-up of Persia following the assassination of Nader Shah in 1747.[4] Under the Raj, it was official policy to recruit the so-called "martial races" from what is now modern northern India, Pakistan and Nepal into the military. His grandfather served in the Indian Army under the Raj, was decorated for bravery during the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the family's surname was changed from Durrani to Sardar, Urdu for Leader, in recognition of his courage in leading men under fire.[5] Sardar's grandfather also served under William Birdwood when he was a junior officer in the Indian Army, and when his son immigrated to Britain, he sought out the company of Birdwood's son, Christopher and his daughter-in-law, Lady Birdwood.[6]
Ziauddin Sardar, when growing up in 1960s London, was lectured by Lady Birdwood on his English.[7] In 1968, she tried to recruit him into her anti-immigration crusade, arguing that having a Muslim Pakistani immigrant writing for her magazine, New Times, would dispel the charges of racism being made against her.[8] Sardar recalled speaking with fury as he rejected her offer, causing her to storm out of his family's house, never to return.[9] Sardar was bullied as a teenager by "Paki-bashing" white youths, and he imagined Lady Birdwood as a churail, the seductive, but ferocious female demons of Urdu folklore.[10] Sardar argued that Lady Birdwood with her thesis that to be British was to be white was not "aberration" in British life, but rather was she was the "quintessence" of Britishness.[11] Referring to Lady Birdwood's convictions in the 1990s for writing, printing and handing out anti-Semitic literature, Sarder wrote: "Racism as overt as that preached by all her hate literature is merely the flip side of the Great Tradition, the underlying, but unstated message of the 'Great Books of Mankind' that I read in my childhood. It is the notion of civilization as a one-way street, an inexorable path of progress that must take all peoples towards the same pinnacle, by the same route".[12]
He read physics and then information science at the City University, London.[citation needed] After a five-year stint at King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – where he became a leading authority on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca —– he returned to work as Middle East correspondent of the science magazines Nature and New Scientist.[citation needed] In 1982, he joined London Weekend Television as a reporter and helped launch the trend-setting Asian programme Eastern Eye.[citation needed] In the early 1980s, he was among the founders of Inquiry, a magazine of ideas and policy focusing on Muslim countries, which played a major part in promoting reformist thought in Islam.[citation needed] While editing Inquiry, he established the Center for Policy and Futures Studies at East-West University in Chicago.[citation needed]
In 1987 Sardar moved to Kuala Lumpur as an advisor to Anwar Ibrahim, the Education Minister.[citation needed] Ibrahim went on to become Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia and following his imprisonment on abuse of power charges, the leader of the Opposition.[citation needed] He came back to London in the late 1990s to work as Visiting Professor of Science Studies at Middlesex University, and write for the New Statesman, where he later became a columnist.[citation needed] In 1999, he was appointed editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futurology, and became involved in Third Text, the prestigious journal of arts and visual culture, which he co-edited till 2005.[citation needed] Also in 1999, he moved to the City University London, London, as Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies.[citation needed] From 2001 to 2013, he was Professor of Law and Society in the School of Law at Middlesex University.[citation needed]
After leaving London Weekend Television, Sardar wrote and presented a number of programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. He conceived and presented Encounters With Islam for the BBC in 1983, and two years later his 13-half-hour interview series Faces of Islam was broadcast on TV3 (Malaysia) and other channels in Asia. In 1990, he wrote and presented a programme on Islamic science for BBC's Antenna and his six-part Islamic Conversations was broadcast on Channel 4 early in 1995. He wrote and presented the highly acclaimed Battle for Islam, a 90-minute film for BBC2 in 2005. And followed that with Between the Mullahs and the Military, a 50-minute documentary on Pakistan for Channel 4's Dispatches series.[citation needed] Most recently he wrote the three-part one-hour documentary The Life of Muhammad for BBC2, broadcast in July 2011.[13] He has appeared on numerous television programmes, including the Andrew Marr Show and Hard Talk, and was a regular member of the 'Friday Panel' on Sky NewsWorld News Tonight during 2006 and 2007.[citation needed] He appears in various filmed philosophical debates[14] at the Institute of Art and Ideas.
In 2009, Sardar re-launched the defunct Muslim Institute as a learned society that supports and promotes the growth of thought, knowledge, research, creativity and open debate; and became the Chair of the reorganized Muslim Institute Trust.[citation needed] He conceived and launched, in 2011, the quarterly Critical Muslim, a ground-breaking journal of freethinking that seeks new readings of Islam and Muslim culture, jointly published by the Muslim Institute and Hurst &Co.[15][16]
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/32) with Ziauddin Sardar in 2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.[17]
Sardar has lived the life of a scholar-adventurer and has travelled extensively throughout the world. From 1974 to 1979, he lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he worked for the Hajj Research Centre at the King Abdul Aziz University. During this period he travelled throughout the Islamic world researching his first book, Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World (Croom Helm, 1977). In the early 1980s, he edited the pioneering Muslim magazine 'Inquiry', before establishing the Centre for Policy and Futures Studies at East-West University in Chicago. During the 1990s, he lived in Kuala Lumpur. He has also lived in Chicago and The Hague and for short periods in Cairo and Fez.[citation needed]
Sardar describes himself as a 'critical polymath'.[18] His thought is characterised by a strong accent on diversity, pluralism and dissenting perspectives.[citation needed] Science journalist Ehsan Masood suggests that Sardar 'deliberately cultivates a carefully calculated ambiguity projecting several things at once, yet none of them on their own'.[19] Futurist Tony Stevenson points out that his 'intellectual aggression' hides a 'sincere and deep humanity': 'while his cultural analysis is surgically incisive, it is largely free of the theoretical correctness of academic thought', while he 'draws on a depth of academic thought', he 'always remains accessible'.[20]
The fundamental principle of Sardar's thought is that 'there is more than one way to be human'. 'I do not regard "the human" either as "the" or as a priori given', he has said. 'The western way of being human is one amongst many. Similarly, the Islamic way of being human is also one amongst many. The Australian aboriginal way of being human is also another way of being human. I see each culture as a complete universe with its own way of knowing, being and doing – and hence, its own way of being human'.[21] The corollary is that there are also different ways of knowing. The question that Sardar has always asked is: 'how do you know? The answer depends a great deal on who 'you' are: 'how you look at the world, how you shape your inquiry, the period and culture that shapes your outlook and the values that frame how you think'.[22]
He has produced some fifty books over a period of 30 years, some with his long-time co-author Merryl Wyn Davies. These books include the classic studies The Future of Muslim Civilisation (1979) and Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985), a vigorous intellectual assault on postmodern thought, Postmodernism and the Other (1998) and Orientalism (1999), and the international bestseller Why Do People Hate America? (2002). He has published two books on cities: The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (2000) and Mecca: The Sacred City, which won the first prize at the Lahore Literature Festival in 2014 and the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism for a non-fiction book.[citation needed] Two collections of his essays and critical writings are available as readers: Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: A Ziauddin Sardar Reader (2003) and How Do You Know? Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations (2006). His two volumes of autobiography, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim and Balti Britain: A Provocative Journey Through Asian Britain, have been highly praised.[citation needed] He wrote Reading the Qur’an.
Sardar was the editor of the journal Futures from 1999 to 2012.
Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim, Granta, London, 2005
Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: a Ziauddin Sardar reader, Pluto Press, London 2004 (introduced and edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell).
The A to Z of Postmodern Life: Essays on Global Culture in the Noughties, Vision, 2002
Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, Pluto Press, London, 2002 (Edited with Sean Cubitt)
The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture & Theory, Continuum, London, 2002 (Edited with Rasheed Araeen and Sean Cubitt)
The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.
Rescuing All Our Futures: The Future of Future Studies, Adamantine Press, London
Postmodernism and the Other: New Imperialism of Western Culture, Pluto Press, London, 1997
Explorations in Islamic Science, Mansell, London, 1989; Centre for the Studies on Science, Aligarh, 1996
Muslim Minorities in The West, Grey Seal, London, 1995 (edited with S. Z. Abedin)
How We Know: Ilm and the Revival of Knowledge, Grey Seal, London, 1991
An Early Crescent: The Future of Knowledge and Environment in Islam, Mansell, London, 1989
The Revenge of Athena: Science, Exploitation and the Third World, Mansell, London, 1988
Science and Technology in the Middle East: A Guide to Issues, Organisations and Institutions, Longman, Harlow, 1982
The Touch of Midas: Science, Values and the Environment in Islam and the West, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982
Information and the Muslim World: A Strategy for the Twenty-first Century, Islamic Futures and Policy Studies, Mansell Publishing Limited, London and New York 1988
Shaping Information Systems of the Islamic World, Mansell, London, in 1988
Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come, Mansell, London, 1986
The Future of Muslim Civilisation, Mansell, London, 1979
Hajj Studies, Crown Helm, London, 1979
Islam: Outline of a classification scheme, Clive Bingley, London, 1979
Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World, Croom Helm, London; Humanities Press, New Jersey; 1977
Sardar has also contributed a number of books to the Introducing... series published by Icon Books, including Introducing Islam, Introducing Chaos, Introducing Cultural Studies, Introducing Media Studies, Introducing Mathematics and Introducing Postmodernism.
Ziauddin Sardar, 'What do we mean by Islamic Futures?' in Ibrahim M Abu-Rabi, editor, The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought, Blackwell, Oxford, 2006, 5562–586.
Ziauddin Sardar, 'The problem of futures studies', in Ziauddin Sardar, editor, Rescuing All Our Futures: The Future of Future Studies, Adamantine Press, London; Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT; 1998, pages 9–18
Ziauddin Sardar, 'Listening to Islam', in Listening to Islam: Praise, Reason and Reflection, ed. John Watson (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005).
'Same again ...' The Ideas Book edited by Linda Carroli, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2005.
'Foreword', Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, Pluto Press, London
The Erasure of Islam' tpm: The Philosopher's Magazine Issue 42 Third Quarter 2008 77–79
‘Touched by Wonder: Art and Religion in the 21st Century’ in Touched edited by Paul Domela, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, and Editore Silvana, Milan, 2011.
‘Transmodern Journeys: Futures Studies and Higher Education’ in Adrian Curaj et al., editors, European Higher Education at the Crossroads, Volume 2: Governance, Financing, Mission Diversification and Futures of Higher Education, Heidelberg: Springer, pp1038–1055
‘The Future of the Arab Spring in Postnormal Times’ American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 30 (4) 125-136 Fall
‘Islam: Introduction’ in Emma Mason, editor, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2015, pp171–181
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.64
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.64
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.64
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.68
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.68
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.68-69
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.66
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.69
^Ziauddin Sardar, ‘British, Muslim, Writer', in Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art edited by Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, London, 2006 p.69
^Ehsan Masood, 'Introduction: the Ambiguous Intellectual’, in Ehsan Masood, editor, How Do You Know: Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations Pluto Press, London, 2006, p1
^Tony Stevenson, ‘Ziauddin Sardar: Explaining Islam to the West’ in Profiles in Courage: Political Actors and Ideas in Contemporary Asia, editors, Gloria Davies, JV D’Cruz and Nathan Hollier, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2008, page 80.
^Ziauddin Sardar interviewed by Tony Fry, ‘On Erasure, Appropriation, Transmodernity, What’s Wrong with Human Rights and What’s Lies Beyond Difference’, Design Philosophy Papers Collection Four, edited by Anne-Marie Wallis, Team D/E/S Publications, Ravensbourne, Australia, 2008, 83–91.
^Ehsan Masood, ‘Introduction: the Ambiguous Intellectual’, in Ehsan Masood, editor, How Do You Know: Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations, Pluto Press, London, 2006.
Tony Stevenson, "Ziauddin Sardar: Explaining Islam to the West" in Profiles in Courage: Political Actors and Ideas in Contemporary Asia, editors, Gloria Davies, JV D’Cruz and Nathan Hollier, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2008.
Anne Marie Dalton, "The Contribution of Ziauddin Sardar’s Work to the Religion-Science Conversation", World Futures: Journal of General Evolution, Volume 63, Issue 8, 2007, Pages 599 – 610.
John Watson, editor, Listening to Islam with Thomas Merton, Sayyid Qutb, Kenneth Cragg and Ziauddin Sardar: Praise, Reason and Reflection, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005).
Jose Maria Ramos, "Memories and method: conversations with Ashis Nandy, Ziauddin Sardar and Richard Slaughter", Futures 37 (5) 433–444 (June 2005).
Leif Stenberg, "Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Ziauddin Sardar on Islam and science: marginalisation or modernisation of a religious tradition", Social Epistemology 10 (3–4) 273–287 July–December 1996.
Tomas Gerholm, "Two Muslim intellectuals in the postmodern world: Akbar Ahmed and Ziauddin Sardar", in Akbar Ahmed and Hastings Donnan (Editors), Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity, Routledge, London, 1994.
Ernest Hahn, "Ziauddin Sardar", Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 4 (1) 139–143 (June 1993).
Nasim Butt, "Al-Faruqi and Ziauddin Sardar: Islamization of Knowledge or the Social Construction of New Disciplines", Journal of Islamic Science 5 (2) 79–98 (1989)
