Ziauddin Sardar

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/32) with Ziauddin Sardar in 2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.

His family belonged to the Durrani warrior clan that founded the state that ultimately became Afghanistan after the break-up of Persia following the assassination of Nader Shah in 1747.

Under the Raj, it was official policy to recruit the so-called "martial races" from what is now modern northern India, Pakistan and Nepal into the military.

His grandfather served in the Indian Army under the Raj, was decorated for bravery during the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the family's surname was changed from Durrani to Sardar, Urdu for Leader, in recognition of his courage in leading men under fire.

Sardar's grandfather also served under William Birdwood when he was a junior officer in the Indian Army, and when his son immigrated to Britain, he sought out the company of Birdwood's son, Christopher and his daughter-in-law, Lady Birdwood.

Ziauddin Sardar (ضیاء الدین سردار; born 31 October 1951) is a British-Pakistani scholar, award-winning writer, cultural critic and public intellectual who specialises in Muslim thought, the future of Islam, futurology and science and cultural relations.

He wrote or edited more than 50 books Prospect magazine named him as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals and The Independent newspaper called him: 'Britain's own Muslim polymath'.

Ziauddin Sardar was born in Dipalpur, Punjab, Pakistan.

However, he was both educated and brought up in Britain.

Ziauddin Sardar, when growing up in 1960s London, was lectured by Lady Birdwood on his English.

In 1968, she tried to recruit him into her anti-immigration crusade, arguing that having a Muslim Pakistani immigrant writing for her magazine, New Times, would dispel the charges of racism being made against her.

Sardar recalled speaking with fury as he rejected her offer, causing her to storm out of his family's house, never to return.

Sardar was bullied as a teenager by "Paki-bashing" white youths, and he imagined Lady Birdwood as a churail, the seductive, but ferocious female demons of Urdu folklore.

Sardar argued that Lady Birdwood with her thesis that to be British was to be white was not "aberration" in British life, but rather was she was the "quintessence" of Britishness.

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 1982, he joined London Weekend Television as a reporter and helped launch the trend-setting Asian programme Eastern Eye.

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 1987 Sardar moved to Kuala Lumpur as an advisor to Anwar Ibrahim, the Education Minister.

Ibrahim went on to become Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia and following his imprisonment on abuse of power charges, the leader of the Opposition.

Referring to Lady Birdwood's convictions in the 1990s for writing, printing and handing out anti-Semitic literature, Sarder wrote: "Racism as overt as that preached by all her hate literature is merely the flip side of the Great Tradition, the underlying, but unstated message of the 'Great Books of Mankind' that I read in my childhood. It is the notion of civilization as a one-way street, an inexorable path of progress that must take all peoples towards the same pinnacle, by the same route".

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, the pilgrimage to Mecca —– he returned to work as Middle East correspondent of the science magazines Nature and New Scientist.

He came back to London in the late 1990s to work as Visiting Professor of Science Studies at Middlesex University, and write for the New Statesman, where he later became a columnist.

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.

In 1999, he was appointed editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futurology, 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, London, as Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies.

From 2001 to 2013, he was Professor of Law and Society in the School of Law at Middlesex University.

After leaving London Weekend Television, Sardar wrote and presented a number of programmes for the BBC and Channel 4.

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, a 50-minute documentary on Pakistan for Channel 4's Dispatches series.

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.

His journalism and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, the UK weekly magazine, New Statesman and the monthly magazine New Internationalist.

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.

He appears in various filmed philosophical debates at the Institute of Art and Ideas.

Sardar's online work includes a year-long project for the Guardian, 'Blogging the Qur'an', published in 2008.

In 2009, Sardar re-launched the defunct Muslim Institute as a learned society that supports and promotes the growth of thought, knowledge, research, creativity and open debate; and became the Chair of the reorganized Muslim Institute Trust.

Most recently he wrote the three-part one-hour documentary The Life of Muhammad for BBC2, broadcast in July 2011.

He conceived and launched, in 2011, the quarterly Critical Muslim, a ground-breaking journal of freethinking that seeks new readings of Islam and Muslim culture, jointly published by the Muslim Institute and Hurst & Co.

In 2014, Sardar re-launched the Center for Policy and Futures Studies at East-West University as The Center for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies, which focuses more acutely on his recent work on Postnormal Times.