Jump to navigation. The life and works of Ziauddin Sardar, rooted in his Pakistani and British upbringing, encompass a wide spectrum of subjects including autobiographical treatises along with searchlight on Orientalism, Post- Modernity, Muslim Diaspora, Future Studies, and the U. While traversing through his numerous writings, this article benefits from a first- hand interaction with the eminent British Muslim writer spanning three decades as it assesses his diverse interests and intellectual contributions.
Ziauddin Sardar hereafter Zia embodies numerous personalities varying from an academic to an orator and from an original thinker to a contrarian critic, whose role as the author of multiple works converges with that of an institution builder.
I had heard about Zia for quite some time even when, following my doctoral degree in , I taught in Pakistan for the next decade. Of course, the major contemporary news was the Iranian revolution and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Pakistan itself was under a totalitarian dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq d. Overnight, the hitherto forsaken dictator and repressive Islamist became a close ally for helping fight a sanctified war against the evil empire.
A few years later, I chanced to go back to my old university in the U. These were challenging times when schisms within the Muslim polities had begun to converge with the East-West polarities further squeezing space for civic groups. The daily fatalities from an enduring Iraq-Iran War only further underlined the aimless killings amidst the pervasive Muslim helplessness and despondency.
With this growingly volatile backdrop, some Muslim writers busied themselves advocating a hyped-up but dangerously segregated Islamisation of knowledge, which they anchored on a self-assumed self-sufficiency. Like an overarching British iden- titarian paradigm, he keenly looked for a macro Islamic identity, defined on his own terms, neither too immersed in tradition, nor too irreverent to modernity.
