Ziauddin Sardar - Futures

Sardar is editor of the journal Futures and has explored what a viable future for Muslim civilisation will look like in his two studies, The Future of Muslim Civilisation and Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come.

In the former he argues that Muslim societies are obsessed with looking at their past and that the way forward is to reconstruct Muslim civilisation, intellectually and culturally, "brick by brick". Sardar suggests in this book what a Muslim future could look like. In the latter book, he offers a critique of ideas such as the notion of an "Islamic state" and "Islamic economics".

Sardar also argues that the future has already been colonised to a very large extent. Forecasting, prediction and other methods of studying are often used by larger nations in their attempts to control smaller ones. Sardar says: "To keep the future open to all potentials, alternatives and dissenting possibilities, Sardar believes that it is necessary to envisage alternative futures from different civilisational and cultural perspectives."

Later, he went on to develop a new discipline: that of ‘Islamic futures’. This was based on five principles: 1: Islam must engage with the contemporary world not just as a religion, but as a way of shaping and understanding the world. Islam can provide a matrix and methodology for tackling problems and generating future choices and possibilities for Muslim societies. 2: Muslims must perceive themselves as being a civilisation, rather than members of a set of fragmented nation states. This is the only way to avoid stagnation and marginalisation. 3: Plurality and diversity must become the cornerstones of Islam. 4: Shaping viable and desirable futures for a Muslim civilization must involve the active participation of communities and conscious effort at consultation (shura) at all levels of society with the aim of achieving a broad consensus (ijma). 5: To shape desirable alternative futures, Muslims must engage constructively with the contemporary world in all its dimensions.

Contemporary times, Sardar has argued recently, have become ‘postnormal’. ‘The espiritu del tiempo, the spirit of our age, is characterised by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, upheaval and chaotic behaviour. We live 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. Ours is a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future. It is a time when all choices seem perilous, likely to lead to ruin, if not entirely over the edge of the abyss. In our time it is possible to dream all dreams of visionary futures but almost impossible to believe we have the capability or commitment to make any of them a reality. We live in a state of flux beset by indecision: what is for the best, which is worse? We are disempowered by the risks, cowed into timidity by fear of the choices we might be inclined or persuaded to contemplate’. He identifies three drivers of postnormal times: complexity, chaos and contradictions. The three ‘c’s’, he argues, force us to rethink our ideas on progress, modernisation, efficiency and enhance the importance of social virtues, individual responsibility and ethics, and the role of imagination.