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How Do You Know? Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations

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How Do You Know? Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations How Do You Know? Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations ZIAUDDIN SARDAR Introduced and edited by EHSAN MASOOD Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI SSardarardar 0000 pprere iiiiii 55/4/06/4/06 110:40:160:40:16 First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Ziauddin Sardar and Ehsan Masood 2006 The right of Ziauddin Sardar and Ehsan Masood to be identifi ed as the author and editor of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2515 7 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2514 9 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England SSardarardar 0000 pprere iivv 55/4/06/4/06 110:40:160:40:16 Contents Introduction: The Ambiguous Intellectual 1 Ehsan Masood Part I: Islam 1 Jihad for Peace 15 2 Re-reading the Life of Muhammad 21 3 Faith and the Written Word 32 4 Rescuing Islam’s Universities 43 5 What Do we Mean by Islamic Futures? 55 Part II: Science and Knowledge 6 Guardians of the Planet: Muslims and the Environment 91 7 Muslims and Philosophy of Science 108 8 Dewey Departs: Ideas on Classifying Knowledge 114 9 Arguments for an Islamic Science 121 10 Islamic Science: the Way Ahead 161 11 Science Wars: a Postcolonial Reading 193 Part III: Cultural relations 12 Coming Home: Sex, Lies and All the ‘I’s in India 217 13 The A, B, C, D (and E) of Ashis Nandy 242 14 God Bless America! 264 15 Managing Diversity: Identity and Rights in Multicultural Europe 270 16 Beyond Difference: Cultural Relations in a New Century 288 Notes 310 Ziauddin Sardar Bibliography 327 Index 339 SSardarardar 0000 pprere v 55/4/06/4/06 110:40:160:40:16 Introduction: The Ambiguous Intellectual Ehsan Masood Writer, thinker, scholar, theorist, broadcaster, critic, journalist and futurist; Muslim, British, Pakistani, South Asian. Ziauddin Sardar has many occupations and more than one identity. Indeed, many of his critics complain that he deliberately cultivates ‘a carefully calculated ambiguity’ projecting several things at once, yet none of them on their own. He wants to be seen simultaneously as both traditionalist and modernist – while at the same time being a severe critic of both. Sardar’s evolution into a polymath began with a much more defi ned intellectual range: the modernisation of traditional societies, particularly those with predominantly Muslim populations. It is his extensive writings on this theme that form the core of How Do You Know: Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations. The book is intended as a companion volume to Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: a Ziauddin Sardar Reader, which is concerned largely with Sardar’s writings on postmodernism and futures studies. Some of the essays in this new volume are drawn from Sardar’s earliest books, written in the late 1970s and the 1980s, such as Explorations in Islamic Science and Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come. This was also the formative period of his own ideas and position. During the 1970s and 1980s he travelled and wrote prodigiously about science, technology, international development, Islam and the environment. Part of the aim of How Do You Know is to introduce Sardar’s ideas that were formed in that period to a generation of English-speaking readers who have come to know him largely from his columns in the New Statesman, his contributions to newspapers like the Independent and the Observer, popular science writing, and television and radio appearances. The question that Sardar has always asked is: how do you know? For Sardar, the answers we get from using particular methods – such as the scientifi c method – provide at best partial answers. He says that a great deal depends on who ‘you’ are: how you look at the world, how you shape your inquiry, the period and culture that shapes your 1 SSardarardar 0011 iintrontro 1 55/4/06/4/06 110:40:050:40:05 2 How Do You Know? outlook and the values that frame how you think. In Islam, Sardar insists, knowing is always accompanied by shaping: to know the world is to interact with it, to shape it and understand it according to the principles, values and worldview of Islam. Much of his work on Islam seeks to combine theory with practice. Indeed, Sardar and his network of intellectuals, the Ijmalis, pioneered concepts – such as defi nitions of knowledge (ilm in Arabic) and public interest (istislah) – as analytical tools that can be used to develop practical policies from theoretical work. KNOWING ISLAM AND THE WEST For Sardar, Islam is not merely a religion, culture or civilisation. It is, above all else, a worldview. It is a way of looking at the world and shaping it. It is a way of knowing, being and doing; a way of being human. Like conventional theorists, Sardar does not ‘locate’ Islam anywhere; he has consistently argued that Islam is located everywhere, not least in the west, which has its own Islamic history and inheritance, and now a major Muslim presence in Europe and America. Similarly, the west is now everywhere: ‘there is now as much “west” in Bombay and Kuala Lumpur as in Europe’, Sardar believes. The difference between Islam and the west is a difference of perception. In Sardar’s eyes, Islam, or being Islamic, is a different way of perceiving the world than that to being western, or of the west. By contrast, Sardar sees ‘the west’ not so much as a culture, or a place, but as a concept and epistemology: as a specifi c way of knowing. In much of the west, he has argued, rationalism is considered the only way (or the best way) to Truth. The knowledge categories emerging from the west – such as natural science, social sciences and humanities – are both a product and an embodiment of this way of wanting to know; or wanting to ask questions. Today it is the west that provides the dominant way of thinking and asking questions. People all over the world think, plan, work, play, study, consume, or waste increasingly as is done by people who live in western countries. Islam, for Sardar, provides as an alternative mode of inquiry to that of the west. For him it is a way of knowing that will generate different answers to questions about equality and justice, rights and duties, accountability and responsibility – or what it means to be human in a non-western sense. SSardarardar 0011 iintrontro 2 55/4/06/4/06 110:40:050:40:05 Introduction: The Ambiguous Intellectual 3 Most of his writings on Islam are an exploration. Each of the fi ve chapters in the part on ‘Islam’, for example, explores the idea of knowledge and historiography within the Muslim faith. In the chapter ‘Faith and the Written Word’, for example, Sardar explores the relationship between Muslim civilisation and the written word. In ‘Re-reading the Life of Muhammad’, he calls for opening up the biography of Prophet Muhammad to critical analysis – something that Muslim scholars are still largely reluctant to do. In the chapter ‘What Do We Mean by Islamic Futures?’, Sardar returns to a favourite theme: creating a distinct discipline geared to shaping viable futures for Muslim societies. Social and physical reality can never be defi ned by a single knowledge system and for Sardar the idea that reality can be compartmentalised into ‘physics’, ‘sociology’, ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, ‘law’ and ‘ethics’ is not based on some universal axiom. Rather, it is a product of asking questions in a certain way. These questions, in turn, are based on the needs and requirements of a certain set of people in a given time in our history. One of those ‘requirements’ was the colonial project of European countries. Much of Sardar’s intellectual energy has been devoted to arguing that many western knowledge categories are inherently Eurocentric because they supported the growth and material prosperity of the west at the expense of non-western peoples. Many of these disciplines have evolved and changed with time. But for Sardar, if anything, they have become more and not less Eurocentric. Just as ideas of modernity represent a more sophisticated form of Eurocentrism than colonialism, so the evolution of knowledge categories has made them more and not less Eurocentric. In colonial times, Eurocentrism was overt and obvious. In their modern incarnation, Eurocentrism, for Sardar, is deeper, though not so easily discerned. When he worked for the magazines Inquiry, Nature and New Scientist, Sardar took off on several grand tours of Muslim countries in the 1970s and 80s. These resulted in a series of essays and later a clutch of books that explored the relationship between science, technology, development, environment, ethics and values, both in Muslim countries as well as in the broader developing world. Sardar’s articles frequently tackled the wider questions relating to science, such as its history, sociology, implications, and its relationship to colonialism. Colonialism has been a recurring theme in Sardar’s work – the earliest work being no exception. Sardar discovered that throughout the southern hemisphere, centuries-old traditions of SSardarardar 0011 iintrontro 3 55/4/06/4/06 110:40:050:40:05 4 How Do You Know? learning and scholarship had been erased, replaced by a set of ill- fi tting western-style institutions.
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