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Ziauddin Sardar

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Professor Ziauddin Sardar (1951 - ) lived in Saudi Arabia (1975-1980), and is now based in London, is a prominent writer regarding the future of Islam and science and technology. He often writes columns in The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper, and the New Statesman, a weekly magazine.

Ziauddin Sardar is a writer, broadcaster and critic. He is a leading writer on the future of Islam and has published widely on science and technology. A Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies, Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, London, he has published over 40 books on various aspects of Islam, science policy, cultural studies and related subjects.

Professor Sardar is the editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futures studies and co-editor of Third Text, the critical journal of visual art and culture.

Quotes

On Imam Bukhari, Hadith Criticism, and Imams Malik, Shaf'i, and Hanafi: "The usrah meetings always started with a reading of a particular verse (or verses) of the Qur’an, followed by the consultation of two or more famous commentaries on the meaning of the relevant verse(s). We would then look at the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his authentic Hadith to discover if they could illuminate the verse(s) further. As this programme of study developed and Jaffar took us through the biography of the compilers of Hadith and the great Imams who codified Islamic Law, I encountered an outlook that was startlingly fresh. It became evident that these great luminaries were not at all like the contemporary leaders of the Islamic movement who had been opening and then foreclosing paradises on me. These authentic voices that became traditional authority were more critical and less certain of their opinions. They thought and wrote as men of their own changing times, not as monuments of imperishable stone.

I was deeply impressed by how gentle and moderate the classical scholars really were. Take Bukhari, the compiler of one of the major collections of authentic Hadith. An exceptionally polite and mild-mannered person, Bukhari in fact pioneered the science of Hadith criticism, a vast field of research combining ethics, morality, sociology, law, politics, economics and logic into a unique discipline of intellectual inquiry. At the centre of Hadith criticism is the notion of isnad, or attestation. It concerns tracing each link in the chain of narrators, those who reported a saying or action of the Prophet. Nothing was taken of granted, critical inquiry required investigation the qualities of each link in the chain as regards memory, accuracy, truthfulness, examining their competence as reliable witnesses whose testimony would be accepted in the court of civil law and tracing the chain right back to Prophet Muhammad himself. But even that was not good enough. Time and geographical circumstances had to be investigated to establish that it was physically possible for individuals in the chain of narrators to have met. Moreover, further investigations were needed to ensure that the Hadith was not against reason or established historical fact; or against the teachings of the Qur’an; or that it did not express a partisan view; or that it did not contain warning of heavy punishment for ordinary lapses of conduct or mighty rewards for ordinary acts of piety.

Bukhari, who had a passion for archery, began his study of Hadith as a young boy (in his native city – Bokhara, as his name testifies). By the age of sixteen, which would have been about the year 825, he had memorized early texts, knew the chain of narrators of thousands of Hadith and had learned the biography of the transmitters. Then he began to travel extensively, meeting scholars, collecting Hadith and discussing the techniques of Hadith criticism. He would take a bath and pray every time he examined a particular Hadith – given that he had collected around 60,000, it is not surprising it took him sixteen years to compile his collection of authentic Hadith: the Sahih. Often, as one of his students reported, he would wake up a number of times in the middle of the night, light his lamp with a flint, make some notes, and then go back to sleep. The student asked: ‘Why did you not call me instead of suffering all these things alone?’ ‘Because’, Bukhari replied, ‘you are young and I did not wish to disturb your sleep.’ Of all the Hadith he examined, he included about 7,000 in his book and labeled only 2,602 as authentic. Having compiled the Sahih he was still not satisfied; he revised the text three times. When it was finally published, Bukhari’s reputation spread far and wide. In Baghdad, where he had settled, scholars queued up to test his prodigious memory. On one occasion ten men were assembled to stage a kind of quiz show: each was told to recite ten Hadith, but mix up the isnad and the content. Bukhari patiently listened to the recitals, on each occasion saying he did not recognize the Hadith. But he was definitely not the weakest link. When they had finished, he repeated the performance placing the correct isnad with the corrected Hadith.

Scholarship, in its authentic traditional guise, was definitely more than prodigies of memory; that was merely the technique – the computer software of the times – on which thought depended. It was the quality of the thought on offer that was capturing my imagination. Consider Imam Malik. The School of Islamic Law this Medinan scholar inspired is said to be the most rigid, extreme and uncompromising. Yet Malik himself was anything but rigid and free from doubt. He was asked by the Caliph to write a book that would be distributed throughout the Muslim world as a guide to Islamic law. Anyone differing from this book could then be prosecuted. Malik rejected the idea outright, declaring his opinions were not certain. Anyways, he said, the Companions of the Prophet were to be found all over the Muslim world, and people could learn from these individuals, rather than from a single book. Imam Malik insisted there was more than one way to practise Islam; and that people should be free to go to any fountain of knowledge they deemed fit.

Much the same can be said of Imam Shaf’i, a disciple of Imam Malik, who went on to establish his own School of Thought. The story goes that Shaf’i went to the governor of Medina with a letter of introduction from the governor of Mecca, demanding an audience with Malik. The governor took Shaf’i to Malik’s house, and Malik, impressed by his intelligence, took the young man on as one of his students. Shaf’i, a handsome and generous young man who gave most of his earnings to the poor, remained in Medina until Malik’s death – by which time he was a brilliant jurist in his own right. After visiting Iraq, where the jurists followed the School established by Imam Hanafi, another mild-mannered individual who favoured personal reasoning rather than total reliance on Hadith and analogy, Shaf’i concluded that Maliki theories had many weaknesses. But after debating with Hanafi scholars, he concluded that the Hanafi School too was flawed. He devoted the last years of his life to producing a synthesis of the two Schools of Thought which appeared as Al-Shafi’is Risala. After a life of debating and challenging received opinions, Shaf’i, who never shied away from disagreeing with anyone, died at the hands of followers of Imam Malik who beat him to death. The legal opinions of these scholars, the substance that forms the body of Islamic Law, was never meant to be absolute, comprehensive or eternal, let alone the ultimate understanding of what constitutes the Law in Islam. They themselves saw, and emphasized, that their personal opinions were just opinions, which they changed frequently, and never intended to be Eternal Law. To claim, as for example Hassan al-Banna did, that the Imams had solved all problems for all time, amounts to attributing divine authority to gentle, unassuming, unsure men…

Jaffar carefully avoided the differences in various Schools of Thought and stayed away from controversial issues. ‘Learn the basics,’ would say, ‘then you can judge for yourself.’ When we had covered the ‘fundamentals’, the usrah sessions became a forum for questions and answers and general discussion on the nature of belief. Jaffar would sit on a chair, surrounded by his students sitting in a circle on the floor. He would begin the session with a proposition and ask one of the students to defend and another to oppose it. Sometimes we would end with a debate in which Jaffar was on one side and the students on the other. (Desperately Seeking Paradise, 48-52)

On Wahhabism (Sardar points to Ibn Taymiyya, not Wahab, as the most important figure in the evolution of contemporary Wahhabist thought): "What changes is our understanding of the constants. And as our understanding develops, Islam of one particular epoch may not bear much resemblance – except in devotional matters – to Islam of another epoch. Wahhabism, I had concluded, had been employed to introduce two metaphysical catastrophes in Islam.

First, by closing the interpretations of our ‘absolute frame of reference’ – the Qur’an and the life of Prophet Muhammad – it had removed agency from believers. One could only have an interpretive relationship with a living, eternal text. Without that relationship of constant struggling to understand the text and find new meanings, Muslim societies were doomed to exist in suspended animation. If everything was a priori given, nothing new could really be accommodated. The intellect, human intelligence, became an irrelevant encumbrance since everything could be reduced to a simple comply/not comply formula derived from the thought of dead bearded men.

Second, by assuming that ethics and morality reached their apex, indeed an end point, which the Companions of the Prophet, Wahhabism, which became the basis of what later came to be known as ‘Islamism’, negated the very idea of evolution in human thought and morality. Indeed, it set Muslim civilization on a fixed course to perpetual decline. Instead, I suggested that it is not only possible but necessary both for individuals and societies, now and in the future, to rise to higher levels in understanding and realization of Islamic values than those achieved by the Companions of the Prophet or their society. Indeed, the challenge of our time, I argued, was to work out values and norms that were clearly and distinctively better than those worked out by the Companions of the Prophet." (Desperately Seeking Paradise, 151)

"In recent times, a number of Muslim countries declared themselves to be Islamic states and ostensibly established the shariah. But what is actually put into practice is a small number of classical juristic rulings concerning punishments, status of women and other spectacular aspects of classical jurisprudence. Thus, great show is made of 'Islamic punishments' or hudud laws, and floggings and amputations are advertised. These are in fact 'outer limit' laws to be carried out only under extreme conditions and after certain basic requirements of social justice, distribution of wealth, responsibilities of the state towards its citizens, mercy and compassion are fulfilled. What we thus get is an austere state operating on the basis of obscurantist and extremist law, behaving totally contrary to the teachings of the Qur'an and spirit of Islam, yet justifying its oppressions in the name of Islam! The self-declared Islamic states are thus nothing more than cynical instruments to justify the rule of a particular class, family, or the military." As an example, he notes that "traditional Muslim thought has been very unkind and oppressive to women. While religious scholars constantly recite the list of women's rights in Islam, they have been systematically undermining these very rights for centuries... For example, the Qur'anic advice about modesty in behaviour.. has been interpreted exclusively in terms of the behaviour of women. 'Modest' and 'decent' behaviour for women in public has been interpreted as a rigid dress code despite the...deliberate vagueness which [is] meant to allow all the time-bound changes that are necessary for social and moral growth of a society. In a total perversion of the Qur'anic advice, dressing modestly has thus been interpreted to mean dressing like a nun, covered from head to foot, showing only a woman's face (in some circles only the eyes), wrists and feet. An injunction meant to liberate from the oppressions of 'beauty' and 'fashion' ends as an instrument of oppression."

"1. The excesses of modernist leaders who have maintained their power in Muslim societies largely by coercive means and have ruthlessly persecuted the traditional leadership, including imprisonment, torture and execution of religious leaders and thinkers." Many of whom sought to refine and spread a more modern Islamic philosophy and an associated modern polity including most norms respected in democracy.

2. The spectacular failure of the economic and development policies of the modernist leaders which have led to the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands." Usually in direct defiance of traditional Islamic economics and obligations such as zakat and khalifa.

3. The continuous abuse and ridicule since the 1950s of traditional thought, lifestyle and everything associated with it." This is often symbolized by the modern dress of secular folk which is viewed as scandalous by traditionals.

4. The policies of Western powers to deliberately undermine Islamic oppositions in Muslim countries, demonize Islamic leaders, prop up oppressive, westernised regimes, and reduce Muslim states to economic paupers and debt-ridden societies.">>

Books

Sardar has also contributed a number of books to the Introducing... series published by Icon Books, including Introducing Muhammad.

External links

 

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