WORLD FUTURES 2022, VOL.78, NOS. 2-4, 268-272
Faisal Devji
Faculty of History, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
To read Ziauddin Sardar’s autobiographical writings, all characterized by a deep sense of irony, is to obtain a ringside seat at the spectacle of Islam’s globalization. For they show us that Zia was both a participant in one of the great historical phenomena of our times, and yet a curiously detached observer of its progress as well. A number of the contributors to this special issue dwell on this aspect of Zia’s career, when he “surfed” Islamic groups and movements in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Pakistan. But it was Britain that stood at the center of Islam’s globalization from the 1980s, bringing as it did students, exiles, and other visitors from all over the Muslim world together with immigrant populations.
Perhaps the first truly global demonstration of this hitherto subterra- nean process occurred in 1989, with the Rushdie Affair for which Britain was a crucial site. Despite his deep engagement with this and other events in Islam’s globalization, however, Zia could not be more different from its conventional representatives. In Britain these included figures ranging from institution-builders like Kalim Siddiqui and his Muslim Parliament to Tim Winter and his Cambridge Muslim College, by way of polemicists like Shabbir Akhtar and even extremists like Anjem Choudhary and Omar Bakri Muhammad. All, like the list of contributors to this issue, are unsurprisingly and disappointingly men.
Iftikhar Malik suggests that Zia differed from such Muslim intellectuals, activists, and religious entrepreneurs because he refused to be ghettoized even by an ostensibly outward-reaching project like the “Islamization of knowledge,” which sought to appropriate contemporary scholarship for Islam. Unlike his peers, rivals, and enemies in the Muslim circles linking London or Bradford to backwaters like Mirpur and Sylhet as much as to great cities like Cairo and Tehran, Zia always had an escape hatch out of Islam. This could be science, cinema, or futures studies, the last of which, Tony Stevenson tells us, served for him as the only kind of time in which non-Western peoples could imagine themselves both freely and in order to be free.
Vinay Lal, in his piece, rightly criticizes as being patronizing the appel- lation of Muslim polymath, which, however, Zia seems to rather like. Is this because the polymaths he is said to succeed are figures like the eleventh century mathematician-historian-astronomer al-Biruni, whose most famous work is today seen as his book on India? Zia, of course, performs the role in reverse, coming from the India of al-Biruni to describe the West as mathematician and anthropologist. Or are his polymathic predecessors figures like the famous twelfth century poet-mathematician- astronomer Omar Khayyam, or the thirteenth century philosopher- mathematician-astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi, both of whom were also suspected of heretical beliefs? All three were also concerned both with the past and, importantly, the future as astronomers. But the term polymath may also indicate a series of cunningly placed escape hatches from Islam conceived as a trap or totality with no outside. Even when inhabiting this world, after all, Zia has done so in a typically contrarian way, as a critic of orthodoxy who some contributors see as a modernist in the tradition of his fellow “person of Pakistani origin,” Fazlur Rahman, who happened to be one of my own teachers at the University of Chicago.
But as Abdelwahab El-Affendi points out, instead of recovering another aspect of the Muslim tradition in the way modernists do, Zia might more correctly be described as an open and audacious advocate of heresy as a force for change that has as much tradition on its side as any orthodoxy. Carool Kersten’s essay picks up on this recognition by focusing on the work of Reza Negarestani, who in a book that is both fictional and philosophical takes two heretical notions, one the Shia doctrine of taqiyya or dissimulation, and another the Ismaili one of qiyama or this- worldly resurrection, to describe the ostentatiously Sunni militancy of our own day.
Taqiyya names a doctrine that permits members of the Shia minority to evade persecution by passing as Sunni, but it can also refer to the philosophical position that truth is esoteric and must be hidden if it is not to destroy a society that is founded on deception. This can lead to the idea that the normative world of the religious law is fundamentally untrue or at least the product of history and convention. Qiyama refers to the resurrection not as some event to come at the end of time, but instead as an apocalypse that has already occurred or been absorbed into history. But if the end has already come, then history can no longer be linear but must become cyclical, with individual souls similarly achieving immortality through reincarnation in an endless series of ascending cycles which offer them chances to remake history both personal and collective.
Negarestani is certainly more like Zia than any of the post-9/11 apologists and neo-traditionalists who now infest Muslim debates in the West. Jordi Serra del Pino’s contribution to this issue goes so far as to claim that Zia’s attention to the Islamic “golden age” is tenuous at best and contradicts his ideas about futures studies. And, of course, the future is an entirely heretical principle in Islamic terms, since it disdains the Sunni fidelity to a virtuous past without at the same time being millenarian in nature. As the victors of Muslim history, after all, Sunnis can look back to a golden age and seek its recovery. But because the Shia acknowledge only a history of defeat and martyrdom, they possess no such vision of a past perfection. Their ideal is therefore inevitably located in a messianic future, which the Ismailis even brought about in the world by absorbing the apocalypse into time and as a consequence abolishing as no longer relevant the sacred law that had guaranteed Muslim tradition.
Though Zia makes light of the Ismaili vision of a paradise on earth at the site of the qiyama in Alamut, his futures work surely shares its anti- nomian and heretical dimensions. The focus on heresy also forces a pluralization of Islam without requiring the liberal narrative of reform and tolerance that El-Affendi correctly questions. Lal nicely describes the Indian origins of such a pluralization, and its great difference from Western multiculturalism, with its basis in physical genocide and cultural annihilation. He also points out how Zia’s closest intellectual peer might be his friend and collaborator Ashis Nandy, who has also focused on the moments when heresy came to transform and define Indian social relations.
Bruce Lawrence, for his part, shows us how Zia’s reading of the Quran is relentlessly pluralistic in a non-liberal and non-multiculturalist way, by forcing open narrative and analytical spaces rather than simply including previously external elements within or diversifying otherwise closed ones. And Scott Jordan tells us how, and often despite himself, Zia’s thinking repudiates binaries, including, naturally, that of orthodoxy and heresy. While so much of his career has been spent in trying to build a new world, not least for Islam, then, it may be more appropriate to assess Zia’s work as refreshingly and even thrillingly destructive in character. Recovery is not its strong point.
This also is something of a modernist convention, perhaps best illustrated by another would-be Pakistani intellectual, the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. In his work, too, we see calls to abandon the past and grasp the future twinned with a deeply nostalgic and even anxious valorization of this very past. Iqbal, too, was much concerned with the nature of time, and it is curious why he remains absent from the contributions to this issue, as, for the most part, he is from Zia’s own work. But I have suggested that Zia cannot really be placed in the realm of the modernists, though Serra del Pino draws our attention to the characteristically modern and utopian linearity of his thinking.
Yet, he also contends that Zia is more a futurist than he is anything else, including a Muslim thinker. And this becomes clear in his more recent arguments against postmodernism. A few contributors have pointed to the ambiguity of this criticism, since Zia’s alternative, the post-normal, appears to share so much with it. Not the least of these common- alities is the preposition “post,” which has, of course, become all too familiar in terms like post-structural, post-colonial, post-Marxist, and post-feminist. In all these cases, it indicates an inability or unwillingness to claim or name a distinct future whose historical structure could only repeat what we have come to think of as the modernist break.
This, however, means that such movements accept their continuing ties with the very principles they seek to repudiate, and so Zia is not incorrect in noting the survival and even expansion of modernity’s “grand narratives” as Lyotard would describe them in the postmodern condition. In the interview that is part of this issue, Zia trenchantly spells out why he thinks postmodernism serves as a kind of fig leaf for such grand narratives, which it in fact helps to protect as much as promote. His target, in other words, remains the modern, with postmodernity being a mere distraction.
The question that arises is whether Islam today is not the ultimate form modernity takes in the eyes of its believers as much as critics. There couldn’t be a grander narrative than Islam, with all its claims to unity and teleology. The normative impetus of so much contemporary Islamic thought only reinforces its utterly closed and conventional character. If this is the case, how can Islam pose a challenge to modernity? Surely, its role as one of this modernity’s early victims does not prevent Islam from impersonating its enemy as a kind of mirror image cast into the future. Zia’s career, spent joining and abandoning Muslim movements, gestures toward his frustrations with this kind of impersonation.
The “golden age” of Islam, moreover, itself a theme from Western orientalism, cannot provide a challenge to the modern. Only a heretical history, as I have suggested already, retains such a possibility. And Zia’s work is replete with heresies of various kinds, as so many of the contributors to this issue have pointed out. As Negarestani suggests in Kersten’s telling, Muslim militancy itself can only challenge modernity’s normative order by a disavowed attachment to the very heretical forms it seeks to demolish. It is the perversity of this attachment that makes such militancy so violent, alongside the intimacy with its external enemy in the West. Indeed, the modern history of Islam is full of such suppressed invocations of heresy.
This sometimes results in an even more violent effort to enforce orthodoxy, as we see with Iqbal’s polemics against the Ahmadis for apparently disputing the finality of prophethood. And yet he seems to have upheld the doctrine himself only in order to assert that the post-prophetic period was a site of human freedom from divine authority. Similarly, Iqbal’s criticism of the Sufis was belied by the extensive use he made of their terms and ideas, which provided him with the only philosophical vocabulary he could retrieve from the Muslim past. Perhaps it is this heretical tradition of thinking that requires our attention, though separated from the urge to remake orthodoxy by such surreptitious means.
Heresy, of course, proudly proclaimed as such rather than being denied, is not simply a Muslim matter. Zia’s work has consistently taken heretical positions in science and epistemology. Islam must be brought into line with these ventures, several the contributors to this issue suggest, and one way do so is by recovering its own heretical tradition rather than some lost golden age. Having belabored this point for long enough, let me close this set of reflections by remarking on how Zia’s career seems to have remade the attitudes and modes of expression of his associates and interlocutors in this issue.
Reading the essays at first, I was surprised by how quirky as well as prickly so many of them were. Then it struck me that they were in fact reflecting the style and openness to the new of their subject, one Ziauddin Sardar. While I have only met Zia once and corresponded with him a few times, I could recognize the freedom of his thinking in the words of his commentators. It is an immensely attractive style, whose accompanying wit makes its learning into an existential as much as archival form. If only other scholars, and particularly those who write on Islam, had such lightness of touch even when dealing with the weightiest of issues. That may be the most identifiably British part of Zia’s writing, and one that allows me as a historian to see his work as one of the most interesting accounts of Islam’s globalization over the last few decades.