WORLD FUTURES 2022, Vol. 78, NOS. 2-4, 222-230
Tahir Abbas
Universiteit Leiden, The Hague, The Netherlands
Abstract
I reflect on the intellectualism of Ziauddin Sardar in three fields. First, in his science of Islam, Zia reasons the need for critical enquiry from within. Global Islam is open, fluid, and dynamic, but it is missing in much of the world of Islam today. Second, how we view the Other is how we wish to project the Self— and vice-versa. Until the Self neutralizes itself, the Other is unknowable. Individualism is at the axis of Othering. Finally, where change is the only constant, the mind must be prepared to think beyond axioms and norms reliant on the past.
Introduction
Ziauddin Sardar’s work traverses several fields, earning him the title of Muslim polymath. Over the years, he has written on contemporary multi- cultural society, postcolonial studies, media studies, future studies, and Islamic studies. He came to England from Punjab in Pakistan as a young boy and grew up in Hackney. The tribulations and vicissitudes of life in these local settings in the late 1950s and 1960s are entertainingly captured in Desperately Seeking Paradise (2004), his much-acclaimed autobiog- raphy. In it, he describes on one occasion how he set a pile of books on fire in a history class. He was angered by their content and wanted to demonstrate to his teacher that these accounts were worthless, now reduced to the same dust upon which they were built. This spirit is an indication of the intellectual rebelliousness that would which has remained a personality trait throughout his working life. Going on to read pure sciences at City University, his future was seemingly destined, but his love for writing, journalism, and his belief in the importance of asking urgent questions became his true ambition.
My connection to Zia’s work goes back to the very late 1970s when my father purchased for me one of my first ever books, Muhammad: Aspects of His Biography (1978). It is replete with high-resolution pho- tographs documenting the life of the Prophet Muhammad. It contains images and photographs of a history that brought life to stories, say- ings, and symbolisms associated with Islam that I could not even imagine. Growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s, my first observa- tions of Zia in motion was variously as a talking head on television programmes. My father would describe him as an agitator; someone who was not an authentic scholar, presumably because he did not have a long beard or carry a Jinnah cap on his receding scalp. Zia had long hair, sometimes in a ponytail, and a Groucho Marx mustache on a formidable top lip that was always still while he talked animatedly. My father described Tariq Ali in the same terms; the simple explan- ation is that he was someone who had sold his soul in the pursuit of western audiences. After all, I grew up at a time when homophobia, casual racism, endemic sexism, and rampant Islamophobia were the norm—and that was just at home.
Over the years, Zia and I have got to know each other and work together. I am a member of the Critical Muslim editorial board, contribu- ting to the magazine, and taking part in the events of the Muslim Institute (an organization with roots in the early 1970s, but one that Zia has led in revitalizing since the early 2010s), whenever I am in or near the country. I feature in his second of third memoirs, Balti Britain (2008), as one of the six subjects explored as part of his study of multi- cultural life in Britain. Our discussions on identity and belonging were recorded in his usual ebullient and effervescent style. The third of his chronicles, A Person of Pakistani Origins (2018), charts his earliest memo- ries of life in Punjab, including the later discoveries he had made about his own family’s links to empire, giving him a new insight into how he saw himself as a Pakistani Briton today.
Knowing Self and Other
Reading Zia’s work over the years has spoken to me in numerous ways, in particular when thinking about and engaging with Islam and the world of Muslims. His work on equality, diversity, and inclusion is as insightful today as when it first came out. There will be numerous contributions in this festschrift enthusiastically writing about the wonders of reading Zia. I provide my reflections on reading his work through what it means to be a British Muslim as this is what it speaks to me the most. Through Zia, religion is better expressed not as a set of hardened rules and rituals but as a flexible, open-ended embrace of human society and the physical world. In this respect, such a prospective possesses Eastern philosophical notions presented by the likes of Confucius, Buddha, and Rumi. Part of the assignment of thinking through Zia’s prodigious body of work span- ning over four decades is that it is possible to pick and choose how one connects with his work. He is both traditionalist and modernist but critical of both schools of thought. His audiences are Muslim or secular, with all appreciating that knowledge is relative—as there is no single dominant way of knowing and being in the world. This is a consistent theme throughout his work, which infers dynamism and energy in his constant search for the next question major question to solve. His own philosophical and intellectual vivaciousness can be seen throughout his body of work in the range and depth that allows readers to select what connects with them the most.
Zia preserves the importance of knowing religion, reason, and rationality as not inseparable but rather essential in being and becoming a Muslim in the world today. How these values are imbued into an intellectual framing underscore my approach to faith and belonging. Those of us who are born in a space where our legacies originate from elsewhere but where our lives are fashioned by something very different altogether can take comfort from this work—we are not moronic but rather tested but with no obvious remedies. Bridging these worlds intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally was a grueling affair but by reading Zia’s work it is pos- sible to find a path through it all, coming out on the other side sensing much more wholeness while relishing the opportunities to keep asking questions and providing challenging answers. Truth is subjective. What was learnt yesterday is a day old. What we will discover tomorrow will be dependent on where we see ourselves as human beings in the future. Past, present, and future are depictions of imaginaries, for which there is no limit. The Self is as a figment of the imagination as is the Other. Nothing is real. Our recognition of the world is preconceived. If we go about our daily lives with these kinds of intellectual challenges, either we hit a wall or we continue to search. For Zia, it is the latter, as no answer will ever satisfy. For some, this is a burden, for Others, it is the agony and the ecstasy. This world teaches us to seek that which we are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. Here, the words of Rumi express it best— what you are seeking is seeking you.
My interpretations of the world find themselves somewhere in between robust scientific method (the logical enquiry of testable social phenomenon), and a humanistic-spiritual worldview that seeks to place the existence of humankind within a cosmic continuum. Naturally, unless guided, exploring these avenues can create more challenges than solutions. As a young student, while Islam safely parked in mostly halal quarters, free-market neoliberalism, anti-racist Marxism, Zen Buddhism to ethical hedonism were toyed with, but something was missing. Translating my attempt to understand Islam through a post-enlightenment discourse that wrestled between the Self and the Other, egoism and altruism, and between faith and reason, I was running from valuing Islam because of what I had found up to that point felt suffocating, narrow- minded, and irrecoverably out of date. Rather than critically engaging with a system of knowledge that had been inherited through fear of retribution, I sought to put it in a box and throw away the key, replacing it with other ways of knowing and comprehending the world at my rela- tionship to it. In the end, I found a path to self-discovery through unraveling the Self, through my extensive sojourns into the world of Islam, in part inspired by Zia’s writings on religion, reason, and rationality. The essential solution being to appreciate knowledge systems as relative continuums in time.
In his biographical accounts, his sense of himself and the Other, and how they evolved, there is no fixed point, and this is arguably deliberate. It is determined by his deep sense of enquiry, his superlative command of the English language, and his witty and penetrative style. It simultaneously cajoles and enlightens. His writing transmits a keen eye for observation while making challenging arguments with compelling justification in a clear and accessible manner, which appeals to a wide audience. It also sparkles a progressive, liberal resolve concerning his Islamic studies ideals, which strike a chord with second-generation Muslims navigating the delicate arena of engaging with life in a secular and liberal society but often possessing profoundly conservative religious heritage. This religion was passed through parents eager not to lose sight of their origins in a country that became ambiguous to their existence having extended its hands a generation previously. Zia’s writing on science, development, Islam, and Muslim cultural relations and Islamic intellectualism intersect the needs and wants of many Muslims searching for a clear voice in the fuzzy haze of Islamic knowledge.
There is No "I"
Identity is not a fixed concept. Humankind did not discover its identity from within but from without. The existence of multiple identities is the reason for an identity crisis of global proportions (Sardar, 2006). Identities come under challenge due to dislocation and globalization, which forces a reconsideration of ourselves during times of such uncertain change. People ordinarily classify themselves as members of communities, cities or nation- states in generally historically homogeneous terms. Yet notions of the Self are under constant trial, with the presence of Others seemingly threatening this identity due to their need for co-existence. The Self is set in the belief that identity is pure and unitary. As Zia states:
Consider, for example, the territory called “England”. It is not the sole preserve of “the English” anymore: the population now is much more heterogeneous, with “Englishness” (however it is defined) as only one segment in a multi-ethnic society. Moreover, the history and tradition that are associated with this “Englishness”—the Empire, House of Lords, fox hunting, the national anthem—are either questionable or meaningless to the vast majority of new-English who now live in England. Worse: this Englishness becomes quite insignificant when it is seen in relation to a new European identity which itself is an amalgam of countless Other cultural identities. Not surprisingly, “the English” feel threatened (Sardar and Ahmad, 2012, p. 2).
These words seem prescient in post-Brexit Britain. Little Englandism is dominating the political and media landscape, in which differences in society are routinely demonized. Existential differences have continued despite allusion to a one-nation philosophy, but all forms of social reform that might lead to a discernible change in the lives of citizens at the material, social or political level are disdained. Here, Europe is the demonized Other. Recognition or rationalization of the immense influence of European populations and cultures upon the very nature of England is removed from the popular discourse. English is a highly racialised category: it is to possess an Anglo-Saxon heritage measured by inherited blood. This narrow, invariably inward-looking, myopic, and distorted sense of the Self, with its class distinctions that concentrate power and patronage, creates a deeply divided social world. Fragility, insecurity and disillusionment signify the lives of everyone else in society. In this realization of the narrowing of the Self, Others are homogenized and reduced to the idea of a multicultural Other. However, while this Other contains linguistic, ethnic, racial, political, and religious divisions and commonalities, multiculturalism moderates the Other to a reducible form. In a plural society, in which the Self and the Other are hard divisions, multicultural- ism has the impact of reducing differences. Yet, the dominant discourse for much of the period leading up to the events of 9/11 was benign multi-culturalism. Thenceforth, Muslims and Islam have become the Other. Differences between the Self and the Other are defined in terms of Muslim and the non-Muslim, with Muslim groups on the receiving end of the dominant hegemonic discourse maintained on the part of the non- Muslim Other, with elites framing these debates in these ways.
There is Only 'We'
For Zia, there is a need to separate the person from the individual. The former is a combination of different memories, experiences, and outcomes, while the latter is an abstract concept that has no meaning beyond the values assigned to it. But while identities are shaped by the attitudes and behaviors of humans toward each other, the mind plays its role. What we choose to remember about who we are and how we see others is also a question of what we choose to forget. The relationship between the Self and the Other, between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by Others, is an arrangement not without its existential power differentials because the dominant Self has always faced the gaze of the dominant Other until rebellion, revolution or a reimagination can occur on both sides, naturally or through force. For Zia, to ensure success in a society consisting of different groups, the problem is not the Other. It is the Self. Success will be determined by diluting the sense of the importance of individualism in dominant western discourses and physical spaces. Transcending individualism is the key to a path to a successful multicultural society.
Here, integration and assimilation are seen as failed concepts. For Zia, integration assumes the dominant culture “the yardstick of civilisation”. Assimilation into the idea of an indivisible unitary whole, moreover, was doomed from the start because its inherent racial logic was never in question. The emphasis on shared norms and values and the importance of bringing to the center those caught up at the periphery through politics are nevertheless of importance. For Zia, both minority and majority must let go of their fixed notions of the Self that prevent their abilities to embrace a wider notion of the Other that is purposively inclusive. The reality, however, is stark as certain norms resist change. Racism has a curious habit of reinventing itself, even when ideas of diversity and inclu- sion are presented as solutions to entrenched problems. But all truths are relative, including these. In reformulating what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget into narrower and narrower terms, the elimination of differences occurs between groups whose histories are often shared throughout a much wider historical period. The sense of the exclusivity of the few relative to the averageness of the many leads to a sense of entitlement for the few and a sense that something is missing in the rest of us. These are natural consequences of the differential access to power and privilege that come with the power to shape identity from within and without. As Sardar and Ahmad (2012, p. 5) state,
The selectivity of historic memory is part of its inventiveness. History always seeks ancient roots, the better to justify its innovations ... Thus, the notions of race and class are intrinsic to the Self-definition of the English. Without the idea of race there is little left for English identity to hold on to: only being a disadvantaged minority within Britain, the complete inversion of received history ...
Ongoing discussion on the apparent assimilability of Muslims in Europe reflects more on the idea of racism and racialization of the group rather than an understanding of history. However, throughout history, Europe has conventionally thought Islam to be an external Other. Muslims, in their turn, have always assumed that Europe had nothing to do with them. Muslims are presented as the perennial Other, but there would be no Europe were it not for the presence of Islam on its borders. Likewise, without its encounters with European Christianity, there would be no Islam as we know it today. To render both as invisible in their respective foundations results in a deepening sense of difference. Islam and Europe are intrinsically linked. Yet much of the contemporary discourse concentrates on the idea that Islam and Muslims have little to offer Europe today. Europe forgets the history of the foundations of the Renaissance. Muslim scientist taught Europeans how to think rationally, separating magic from science. Muslims even taught Europe liberal humanism. As European Christianity evolved in many different secularizing directions, many of its core values and symbols remain in all walks of European life and affairs. But power and influence rest in the hands of European Christians whereas Muslims and Islam are the “extreme Other”.
Extended Uncertain Times
Zia’s work on futures and post-normal times are pertinent concerns in an age of uncertainty. As I write, the world is deeply mired in the clutches of a pandemic. As limits are placed on the human condition, these post- normal times (PNT) will lead to a post-normal future, one that was pos- sibly beyond the realm of imagination before this deadly virus took hold of the globe. Ways of working, teaching, learning, and connecting are more digital than ever but will the human condition survive the lack of human contact and being human that are essential to the social animal? Zia developed PNT “in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense” (Sardar 2010, p. 435). As Zia states (in Sardar, 2007, pp. 97–98),
Perhaps the most fundamental shift that postnormal times will usher will be in the power to define. During the eras of colonialism, modernity and post-colonialism, the West had defined what it is to be human and ‘modern’, what is freedom, rationality, science and civilization, what is ‘free market’, ‘democracy’ and ‘international law’, what are ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian causes’, and is economics, political science, architecture, art, history and tradition, what is sacred and what is not. The real power of the West rested on its power to define the key concepts of humanity and human society. But postnormal times tell us, if it tells us anything at all, that these definitions have passed their ‘sell by’ date. This is where creativity and imagination enter the equation.
In many ways, there is no such thing as normal times—as it is decided in an abstraction of what we can see if before us based on the experiences of the past and projections for the future. Any sense of the postnormal implies moving beyond what is considered normal today. By nature, nor- mal times are a moving terrain, subject to the human realities of the past but also a changing future where only one thing is certain, which is uncertainty. In a world locked down by a deadly virus, the normal today is dangerously wrong. A paradigm shift is inevitable. Global inequalities, climate change, xenophobia, racism, and hostility to immigration are rife. The events of Brexit and Trump have highlighted how ethnic nationalism, protectionism, and exceptionalism have been allowed to take hold among disaffected populations. Turbocharged by oligarchic influences on policy- making, the World Economic Forum hold events in Davos on the importance of climate change or global wealth distribution, but the vast majority of the global population experience an insecure world. The unprecedented gap between rich and poor across the globe leads to a dis- torted perspective among these polar extremes but also across huge swathes of the middle of societies who also face insecure futures for themselves and their families. In the context of intergenerational change, differences between children and their parents become even more apparent during these extended periods of postnormal times. The advent of the digital age that underscores communication technologies has become an unconscious part in the lives of people, leading to an acceleration of the collapse of the old with but with an undefined new.
The Certainty of Postnormal Futures
Although this convergence on identities can create problems of the mind, including depression and anxiety, it is an opportunity for radical change. It is an opening to reactivate imaginations to think beyond the normal scope of contemporary ideas in a way that radically challenges the past, the present, and the future. While postnormal times is a concept that creates agitation among certain philosophers and scientists, the existential fact of the matter is that things do change but the thing to do is to ensure that things do not change for the worse. Notions of the Self and the Other are pre- sumed on the idea that we know what they mean. In light of extended postnormal times, it is time to give up on these claims and think afresh.
Through his social and critical commentary, Zia provides a penetrative and insightful knowledge of Self and Other—his entire self and his visions
of the world speak for itself. Zia thinks likes a scientist—and he has applied his tools of learning and knowing to vast fields of Islamic and human enquiry. His work has bridged the spread of disciplines, from the cosmic to the human to the physical and to beyond our times. His work also teaches the importance of self-discovery through worldly study— assisting the self-realization as Muslims based on self-awareness through Islam. His work is the ammunition to fight against all oppressive structures—including within Islam. His ideas emphasize the importance of being a critical Muslim—not because it is cool to be rebellious—but that it is the duty of all thinking men and women in Islam.
For Zia, the essential issue is orthodoxy, dogmatism, and inward- looking knowledge systems in Islam, but he supports the view that it is possible to be true to Islam and also open. Not all welcome his work, however. Too many in the world of Muslims regard him as intellectual at the margins of their world, but it is these Muslims who often heed to his ideas the most. For some intellectuals, his ideas are generalized, untested, mere commentary, or not “pure” enough. Zia’s work does not seek to speak the inner workings of the academy, but few intellectuals speak to the public as his work while transcending traditional intellectual boundaries that can become straight-jackets of the mind. It is a testimony to the accessibility of his corpus of knowledge that his influence continues to touch the minds and hearts of others and reach the corners of the globe.
References
Sardar, Z. (1978). Muhammad: Aspects of his biography. Islamic Foundation.
Sardar, Z. (2004). Desperately seeking paradise: Journeys of a sceptical Muslim.Granta.
Sardar, Z. (2006). How do you know? Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, science and cultural relations. Introduced and edited by Ehsan Masood. Pluto.
Sardar, Z. (Ed.). (2007). The postnormal times reader. Centre for Postnormal and Future Studies.
Sardar, Z. (2008). Balti Britain: A journey through the British Asian experience. Granta.
Sardar, Z. (2010). Welcome to postnormal times. Futures, 42(5), 435–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.028
Sardar, Z. (2018). A person of Pakistani origins. Hurst.
Sardar, Z., & Ahmad, W. I.-U. (2012). Introduction. In W. I.-U. Ahmad & Z.
Sardar (Eds.), Muslims in Britain: Making social and political space. Routledge.