Ziauddin Sardar - Brief Biography

Brief Biography

Ziauddin Sardar was born in Pakistan, but educated and brought up in Britain. He read physics and then information science at the City University, London. After a five-year stint at King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia - where he became a leading authority on the hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca - he returned to work as Middle East correspondent of the science magazines Nature and New Scientist. In 1982, he joined London Weekend Television as a reporter and helped launch the trend setting Asian programme ‘Eastern Eye’. In the early 1980s, he was among the founders of Inquiry, a magazine of ideas and policy focusing on Muslim countries, which played a major part in promoting reformist thought in Islam. While editing Inquiry, he established the Center for Policy and Futures Studies at East-West University in Chicago.

In the late eighties Sardar moved to Kuala Lumpur as advisor to Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, who is now the leader of opposition. He came back to London in the late 1990s to work as Visiting Professor of Science Studies at the Middlesex University, and write for the New Statesman, where he later became a columnist. In 1999, he was appointed editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futures studies, and became involved in Third Text, the prestigious journal of arts and visual culture, which he co-edited till 2005. Also in 1999, he moved to the City University, London, as Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies.

After leaving London Weekend Television, Sardar wrote and presented a number of programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. He conceived and presented ‘Encounters With Islam’ for the BBC in 1983, and two years later his 13-half hour interview series ‘Faces of Islam’ was broadcast on TV3 (Malaysia) and other channels in Asia. In 1990, he wrote and presented a programme on ‘Islamic science’ for BBC’s ‘Antenna’ and his six-part ‘Islamic Conversations’ was broadcast on Channel 4 early in 1995. He wrote and presented the highly acclaimed ‘Battle for Islam’, a 90-minute film for BBC2 in 2005. And followed that with ‘Between the Mullahs and the Military’, 50-muniute documentary on Pakistan for Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ series. Most recently he wrote the three-part one hour documentary ‘The Life of Muhammad’ for BBC2, broadcast in July 2011. He has appeared on numerous television programmes, including the ‘Andrew Marr Show’ and ‘Hard Talk’, and was a regular member of the ‘Friday Panel’ on Sky News ‘World News Tonight’ during 2006 and 2007.

Sardar was amongst the first Commissioners of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (March 2005-December 2009); and served as a Member of the Interim National Security Forum at the Cabinet Office, London, during 2009 and 2010. Currently, he is Professor of Law and Society at Middlesex University. His journalism and reviews appear most often in The Guardian, the Independent, the UK weekly magazine, New Statesman and the monthly magazine New Internationalist. Sardar's online work includes a year-long project for the Guardian, ‘Blogging the Qur’an’, published in 2008. Sardar is the Chair of the Black Umbrella Trust, which publishes the journal Third Text; and, in 2009, became the Chair of the reorganised Muslim Institute Trust. He has recently launched a quarterly magazine Critical Muslim, jointly published by The Muslim Institute and Hurst & Co