![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
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.S. foreign policies. 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. Zia’s writings, lectures, editorial work and organizational activities situate him in the vanguard of a new and dynamic Muslim scholarship that refuses to be objectified and advances the intellectual profile of several pertinent discourses impacting communities across the world.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Of course, Professor Ismael Raji Al-Faruki (1921–1986) felt that the Muslim aspects of learning and intellectual heritage were missing from the contemporary scholarship including in many post-colonial Muslim states, and thus tried to re-orientate the focus in a co-optive way. For Faruki’s works, see Yusuf (Citation2021). Professor Akbar S. Ahmed and a few other Muslim scholars rather went beyond Faruki’s formulations for a balanced relationship between knowledge and Islam, and instead attempted for separate and not often persuasive niches for different disciplines.
2 Mahomet, an employee of the East India Company, first landed in 1784 at Cork in Ireland where his former commanding officer had based himself after returning from India. Educating himself in early mythologies, the Indian Muslim had to convert to Anglicanism to marry his Irish partner. It was here in Cork that he published his book of Travels, making him the first Indian to write a volume in English. He opened his Hindustani Coffee House in London’s Portland Square for the former colonials before moving to Brighton to establish hot baths featuring Indian herbal treatment. For more on his life and works, see Fisher (Citation1997); also, Narain (Citation2009, pp. 693–716) and Khan (Citation1998).
3 “Dean and Jane Mohamet worked hard throughout their lives. They lived through periods of feast and famine, reinventing themselves and their fortunes by using and adapting aspects of Indian culture to fit the fads and fancies of the English market…Dean Mohamet was a Bihari: he was born in Patna, Bihar, to a Muslim family related to the Nawabs of Murshidabad” (Sardar, Citation2008, p. 44).
4 “This is the legacy I brought with me to Britain. Hakim Sahib inculcated in me a distaste for colonialism and what British did in and to India. For me, this is not about some dead and distant past. The history lives with me, and shapes the way I see Britain” (Sardar, Citation2008, pp. 59–60).
5 “Orientalism is a form of inward reflection, preoccupied with the intellectual concerns, problems, fears and desires of the West that are visited on a fabulated, constructed object by conventions called the Orient” (Sardar, Citation2008, p. 13).
6 Zia met Professor Salam in his office at the Imperial College. After his education at Cambridge, Salam, a scion of a traditional Punjabi family and adherent to a sect often decried by other Muslims, returned to Lahore to join Government College, Lahore—his alma mater. Salam served Pakistan in the 1960s for a while but most of his teaching and research happened in the West where he died in 1997 of Alzheimer.
7 Following several debates on television and articles in the British newspapers such as The Independent and The Guardian, Zia teamed up with Merryl Davies to pen a volume on Rushdie affair at a time when the tempo was quite ascendant (see Davis & Sardar, Citation1990).
8 An anthropologist with personal interest in Islam, Davies became a Muslim and worked for the BBC until she joined Zia in collaborative writing. Both later found themselves in Malaysia working as close associates of Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian politician and one-time Deputy Prime Minister under Mahathir Muhammad. In 2011, Davies gave an interview to an on-line Welsh newspaper, recapping her journey from a mining village to London’s cosmopolitan culture and conversion to Islam without changing her name or attire (see Walesonline, Citation2011).
9 Merryl Wyn Davies passed away in Malaysia on 1 February 2021. For an obituary note, see “Merryl Wyn Davies (25 June 1949–1 February 2021)”, The Muslim Institute: https://musliminstitute.org/freethinking/muslim-institute/merryl-wyn-davies-23-june-1949-1-february-2021
10 A recent investigation finds several common grounds between Islam and Post-modernism, and takes Zia to the task for not fully comprehending this interface, thus disallowing himself a fresher perspective. See Mohammad Shafiq, “Islam in Postmodern Times: Modernism, Postmodernism and Sufi Tradition in Islam”, PhD thesis, University of Sunderland, 2019.
11 For one such comparative work, see Antoun (Citation1994).
12 He simply said: “‘My address is 9 Hillsea Street, London E1, United Kingdom’. I left the podium and returned to sit with the audience. Pandemonium broke out. The Chair insisted that I return to the podium and give a ‘proper address’. I refused”. On public insistence, Zia did utter some words showing pessimism in Pakistan given his experience of the conference and other unneeded bureaucratic extremities (Sardar, Citation2018, pp. 10–11).
13 In fact, Zia had brought a female Muslim student from a meeting that ended quite late making it impossible for her to travel at a late hour. Zia had forgotten to take the keys for their flat necessitating the need to ring the doorbell that caused his Mother—Mumsey—open the door in a rather state of shock. Zia’s apparent obsequiousness made the matter worse with Auntie Rashida imputing all kinds of meanings to this ‘misdemeanour’ and the punishment took the shape of reading Thanwi’s volume aloud by our author.
14 This is the term Zia uses for himself in one of his oft-quoted works (Sardar, Citation2005, p. 201).
15 For a recent biographical work on Siddiqui and his involvement with Muslim student groups in Britain, see Jordan (Citation2019).
16 According to Zia, Rushdie, other than selectively using works on Islamic history such as the Prophet’s biography by Martin Lings, intentionally aimed at maligning him and especially his wives which only encouraged racist and such phobic groups to have a field day on Islam and Muslims. Western media, in most cases, facilitated this demonization by otherwise liberal and critical elements to the extent that the volume by Zia and Merryl Davies dilating on these themes was consistently rejected by several publishers until a Native American publisher, John Duncan, took the initiative under Grey Seal.
17 Another British Pakistan author saw the contestations between the U.S.-led NeoCons and Muslim militants as a clash of similar typologies but with no less horrendous human cost.
18 Zia, in this interpretive work, builds up the case for context(s) while reading and understanding the powerful and enduring text of the Qur’an. Highlighting the vital issues of plurality and inclusivity, Zia articulates the need for a varied and more time-based understanding of the Muslim holy book and goes beyond the usual Arabic literalism (Sardar, Citation2015c).
19 This work is a personal and historical searchlight on Islam’s holiest city that never was the capital of any Muslim polity yet retains an exceptional sanctity due to the Ka’aba.