Ziauddin Sardar - Islam, Qur'an and Islamic Reform

Islam, Qur'an and Islamic Reform

A believing Muslim, Sardar is one of the strongest internal critics of Islam. He believes that the tendency to fall back comfortably on age-old interpretations is now dangerously obsolete. Islam’s relationship and attitude to women, minorities, and notions of exclusivity and exclusive truth need to change fundamentally. In his work, Reformist Ideas and Muslim Intellectuals, Sardar states that: "Muslims have been on the verge of physical, cultural and intellectual extinction simply because they have allowed parochialism and traditionalism to rule their minds." He adds: "We must break free from the ghetto mentality."

Sardar's most consistent output has been in the area of post-colonial Islamic reform, which is the subject of many of his books, including Islamic Futures: the Shape of Ideas to Come (Mansell, 1985) and The Future of Muslim Civilization (Mansell, 1987). Sardar believes that present-day Islamic societies have allowed creative thinking to fossilize. This is a situation which stands in contrast to Islamic history when scholars and scientists let their minds roam free and created an extraordinary renaissance in ideas, new knowledge and technology.

In Islamic futures, Sardar enunciates several principles that need to be at the heart of all contemporary Islamic societies. These include: the need to recognize and promote plurality and diversity; the need to achieve progress through a consensus; and to engage constructively with the modern world.

On the subject of Hadith and Qur'an, Sardar believes strongly that each generation must "reinterpret the textual sources in the light of its own experience", as happened throughout Islamic history and in each of the world's Islamic cultures. Sardar says that scripture needs to be seen as a product of its time and, therefore, must be periodically re-examined. If this process ceases to happen, sacred texts, according to Sardar, will lose their relevance to those who use and love them.

In his recent book, Reading the Qur’an, Sardar insists the interpretation of the Qur’an requires focus on four specific contexts. First, one needs to examine the context of the text itself and see what it is saying about the same subject in different places. Second, one needs to examine it in the context of the life of Prophet Muhammad and see what is happening to him, what is the event or the circumstances on which the Qur’an is commenting. Third, one must appreciate the verses of the Qur’an within the specific social, cultural, political and technological context of the Prophet’s time – they often address the Prophet and his followers, and it speaks to them in the historical context in which they lived. The Qur’an is a text revealed in history. Fourth, we can only interpret the Qur’an according to our own contemporary understanding so we also bring our own social and cultural context into play. The contextual analysis of the Qur’an, Sardar suggests, shows that not everything in the Sacred Text is universal – many verses have significance for the time they were revealed. The universal massage of the Qur’an can only be derived by examining its concepts and basic themes. The Qur’an, he argues, ‘calls for rational, considered thought and interrogation not of appearances but of the deeper implications and meaning of how human beings think and act within and between all the diversity of our cultures, histories, languages and beliefs’.