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S E C U L A R K N OW L E D G E V E R S U S I S L A M I C
K N OW L E D G E A N D U N C R I T I C A L
I N T E L L E C T UA L I T Y

The Work of Ziauddin Sardar

SAEED UR-REHMAN
Australian National University

ABSTRACT

This article examines the politics of Islamic postcolonial Occidentalism as a

response to the secularizing influence of western modernity. By taking the
work of Ziauddin Sardar, a Pakistani-British intellectual, as an example of
Occidentalist Islamic thought, I have attempted to problematize the binaristic
division of the world into two neat categories: the secular West and Islamized
Islam. Sardar’s reactionary ideas have been contrasted with the work of
secular Muslim scholars such as Pervez Hoodbhoy, Fatima Mernissi and Eqbal
Ahmad. The article seeks to foreground the secular and critical traditions
within Islamic societies, which are often repressed by obscurantist and
reactionary intellectuals. The main argument of the article is that a valid
critique of Islam is not always Eurocentric in its origin.
Key Words  Pervez Hoodbhoy  Islam  modernity  Pakistan  Ziauddin
Sardar  secularism

Modernity is generally defined as a secularizing social condition (Archetti,

1996) that produces a rationalized social sphere which, Max Weber has
argued, is a distinguishing characteristic of the West (Weber, 1930: 24–7).
Thus, the secularly rationalized social sphere and its Eurocentricity challenge
non-western modes of knowing and being in the world. The contemporary
conditions of knowledge production have become Eurocentric through the
dominance of western modernity achieved through colonialist and imperial-
ist practices, producing a westernization of knowledge production and
meaning-making at a global level. As Radhakrishnan has opined, ‘for so
many of us of the third world, modernity came through as a powerful
critique of our existing selves and systems, ergo as a higher and superior

Cultural Dynamics 14(1): 65–80. [0921–3740 (200203) 14:1; 65–80; 021406]

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66 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

form of knowledge’ (Radhakrishnan, 1996: xix). Modernity, as many

western and non-western thinkers believe, is a western phenomenon
because the West has configured the public sphere on secular rationalist
ideals. This article attempts to examine, through the work of one Muslim
intellectual, how contemporary knowledge production in Islam has
attempted to grapple with the secularizing effects of western modernity.
The argument that informs this paper is that the task of the critical
intellectual in this context is to provide a critique of the dominant modes of
knowledge production without replicating the monolithic structures of
thought that are being critiqued. To substantiate this argument, I will
analyse how Ziauddin Sardar’s work critiques the West and reproduces the
same binary structures of thought that it seeks to dislodge or subvert. The
analysis will be situated within the context of contemporary debates regard-
ing the relationship between the West and Islam and will draw upon the
work of other theorists whose ideas can serve as comparison or contrast.
The focus of the paper will be on the Occidentalization of the West as the
secular Other of Islam by Sardar who, as will be demonstrated below, pro-
motes an uncritically homogenized and idealized Islam as a strategy of
retreat from the challenges posed by the dominance of (western) secular
rationality, a combined consequence of modernity and colonialism.
Ziauddin Sardar, a British Muslim intellectual of Pakistani origin, is a
prolific writer, radio broadcaster and theoretician who has authored numer-
ous books, journal articles and journalistic essays on the relationship
between East and West, Islam, information futures of the world, and the
present of the West as a manifestation or consequence of modernity.
Sardar’s work engages with the global present as it has been configured by
western modernity, western colonialism and western postmodernity. His
critique of the West reminds one of the polemical style of Sartre’s writings
on colonialism (Sartre, 1963), Fanon (1963, 1967) Césaire (1972) and
Adorno and Horkheimer (1979). Reading Sardar’s work, one often comes
across categorical anti-western statements such as ‘the west is culturally,
morally and intellectually bankrupt’1 and ‘in the future we are not going to
get any new ideas from the west—all really new ideas of the 21st century
are going to come from the non-western cultures’ (Sardar, 1997: cybertext,
original capitalization). For Sardar, the West as a civilization is a trajectory
of ‘colonialism to modernity to postmodernism’ (Sardar, 1997: cybertext)
constituting one exploitative and imperialistic Weltanschauung that cannot
but dominate other civilizations: ‘a stronger culture always subsumes and
appropriates a weaker one. This is what the west has been doing over the
last four hundred years’ (Sardar, 1997: cybertext). One way of interpreting
such categorical statements is that they represent the marginalized cultures
of the world. My contention in this paper is that Sardar’s work, despite its
interventionist critique of the epistemic hegemony of the West and its power
to foreground non-western systems of knowledge production, not only

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 67

preserves the civilizational oppositionality it seeks to dismantle but also

essentializes Islam, the East and the non-West. Effective critique of western
Orientalism does not need to produce Orientocentric Occidentalism. This
does not mean that abolishing the centrality of the West leads to the impos-
sibility of having any centre at all but rather it means that critiques of
oppressive structures of thought, such as western Orientalism, reduce their
effectiveness when they replicate similar structures. According to Ella
Shohat and Robert Stam, pointing out the arbitrariness of the signifier ‘the
West’ can be a useful strategy for destabilizing the centrality of the West
(1994: 13). Shohat and Stam favour the idea of polycentrism over Euro-
centrism and they attempt to achieve a polycentricity in theoretical dis-
courses by shifting the intellectual gaze from the commonly held
Eurocentric semantics of the signifier ‘the West’ to the othered significations
of these directional signifiers, such as East and West: for example, Shohat
and Stam point out that the Arabic word maghreb, meaning West, refers to
North Africa (1994: 13). However, it is important to point out that this strat-
egy of Shohat and Stam of disorienting the dominant linguistic and cultural
significations of a term does not annul the term ‘the West’ but instead
problematizes its hasty and uncritical deployment in Orientalist as well as
Occidentalist thought.
In many of Sardar’s writings, one notices an ‘either/or’ move from a
critical interrogation of the dominance of the western episteme to an easy
justification and celebration of Islamic and religious modes of knowing and
stating the world. In this way, the Eurocentric binary constructions of the
Self and the Other, which celebrate the western Self while constructing the
non-West as a homogeneous and uncivilized or pre-modern Other, have
been reversed. The binary that the work of Edward Said attempted to
destabilize in order to create an enunciative space for critical intellectuality
has been inversely reproduced, leading towards the construction and
preservation of the West and Islam as two cultural monoliths that exist
without any marginalities, fissures, and identitarian problematics within
them: for example, the Romanies, immigrants, refugees, and the Samis and
other minorities in Europe and in the West; and the often precarious
conditions of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu minorities in those countries
where Muslims dominate the organization of the polity—the criminaliza-
tion of non-Islamic religious practices by the Saudi government is one such
example. However, my point is not that Sardar’s celebratory talk of Islam
is of an absolutist nature. I am trying to point out that the West and the East
are not locked into a given oppositionality but rather a historically and
culturally produced oppositionality—an oppositionality that is preserved
and perpetuated not only by theories of civilizational hostility, such as
Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World
Order (Huntington, 1996), but also in the critique of such theories. Intel-
lectual intervention of western epistemic hegemony does not necessarily

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68 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

need to subscribe to or reproduce the logic of either/or in order to launch

effective critical thought. The West and the East, as Shohat and Stam have
also argued, are not fixed formations (1994: 15) and need to be regarded as
conceptual tools that one employs while assigning them temporary essences
because there are no given essences that can be sutured to these signifiers.

Secularizing the West and Islamizing Islam

The issue of how non-western intellectuals represent the West has been a
point of discussion, especially after Said’s Orientalism. In a study of Iranian
intellectuals and their constructions of the West as the Other, Mehrzad
Boroujerdi describes the practice of Othering the West prevalent among
Iranian intellectuals as ‘Orientalism in Reverse’ (Boroujerdi, 1996: 10).
Explaining his choice of this term rather than Occidentalism, Boroujerdi
states that Occidentalism is supposed to abandon the epistemological
apparatus of Orientalism, whereas ‘Orientalism in Reverse’ is Orientalism
inverted and applied to the West in the same manner as Orientalism was/is
applied to the Orient (Boroujerdi, 1996: 12). What Boroujerdi describes as
‘Orientalism in Reverse’ has been described as Occidentalism by Wang
Ning in his ‘Orientalism versus Occidentalism?’ in the context of the
Chinese intellectuals and their representations of the West (Ning, 1997) as
well as by Xiaomei Chen (1994).
I intend to employ the concept of Occidentalism, instead of ‘Orientalism
in Reverse’, to study the work of Ziauddin Sardar because the opposite of
Orientalism can be better described as Occidentalism because this term
recognizes the agency of the knowledge producer more than the term
‘Orientalism in Reverse’ which assigns a greater originary value to western
Orientalism. Moreover, the concept of Occidentalism has also been
employed by Edward Said as a descriptor of uncritical intellectual response
against Orientalism. On the concluding page of the first edition of his
Orientalism, Edward Said highlights the problematic of binaristic thought
with the following emphatic words:

Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not
Occidentalism. No former ‘Oriental’ will be comforted by the thought that having been
an Oriental himself he is likely—too likely—to study new ‘Orientals’—or ‘Occidentals’
—of his own making. (Said, 1978: 328)

It is precisely this attempt to preclude emotive reductions and hasty

ramifications of his sustained critique of the stereotypes and imaginings of
Oriental subjects that has been thwarted in Ziauddin Sardar’s work. While
deconstructing totalizing views about the Orient as a place of superstitions
and irrationality, Sardar has established equally totalizing and essentializ-
ing views about the always oppressive West, thereby further ossifying the

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 69

civilizational chasm that essentialist thought has been producing against the
Other. The manner in which an essence of a cultural artefact is constructed
remains as reductive as Orientalizing practices criticized by Said in his
Orientalism.
Ziauddin Sardar’s response to the material and cultural dominance of the
West as a civilization evinces a binaristic will to construct the West as essen-
tially Other to Islam. Sardar achieves this by reducing the heterogeneity of
the West to an essential category. This essentialization derives its inspira-
tion from the tradition of western critical theory as well as Arab and Muslim
critiques of the West. For example, in his first book Science, Technology and
Development in the Muslim World, Sardar declares that Muslims ‘should
learn from others but there is no need for us to borrow their spectacles as
well. This borrowing of other people’s spectacles is a result of lack of self-
confidence’ (1977: 44). This lack of self-confidence can be corrected if there
is no ‘cultural or scientific imperialism’ and that means becoming a
practitioner of Islamic science because a Muslim can ‘only be one of two
things: a completely occidentalised scientist who retains some contact with
his traditional religion or a Muslim who has some contact with occidental
science’ (Sardar, 1977: 46).
This view of the Muslim subject as a possessor of a unified and immutable
self is problematic for many reasons. First, it does not take into account
many instances where Muslim identity itself is indeterminate: for example,
this view glosses over the countless debates in different Muslim countries
regarding the Islamicity of various sects within Islam—one can cite the
case of Pakistan’s Nobel Laureate physicist Abdus Salam who lived in exile
till his death because his sect had been declared un-Islamic in Pakistan
(Hoodbhoy, 1998: cybertext). Second, this epistemically violent division of
the Muslim self as either ‘occidentalized therefore not a true Muslim’ or
‘Muslim therefore not completely occidentalized’ can buttress the brutal-
ization of Muslim polities because many of the ulema, not all, believe that
Islamic punishment for apostasy is death, hence the famous fatwa against
Rushdie. Third, by attempting to obliterate the amorphousness of Islamic
identities, this binaristic compartmentalization of Muslim subjectivity into
two formations preserves the division between the East and the West that
itself was, largely, created by Orientalist scholars to make the Orient an
object of study, hence Edward Said’s observation that, for the West,
Orientalism maintained ‘the difference between the familiar and the
strange’ (Said, 1978: 43).
Sardar also maintains the difference between Islam as the familiar and
the non-Islamic and foreign West. Islam is the realm of the familiar Self,
despite its internal fissures and heterogeneous formations, and the West is
the realm of the Other, an imagined space of ideational and cultural alter-
ity that can be homogenized into a totality. In another book, co-authored
with Dawud G. Rosser-Owen, one can observe how the text homogenizes

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70 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

and occidentalizes the West, producing a monolithic civilization without any

marginalities and multiplicities within itself: ‘there is little basic difference
in the cultural and territorial origins of the Capitalist West and the Com-
munist East’ (Sardar and Rosser-Owen, 1978: 2). This homogenization of
the West leads to other generalizations aimed at constructing and preserv-
ing an originary and essentialist cultural oppositionality between the Occi-
dent and the Orient:

In our framework we shall refer to them as the Occident. The Occident is no longer
restricted to Europe and Outremer but has its ‘outremers’ all over the place. Anything,
therefore, which belongs to the Occident, whether found in Europe or in Asia, is
occidental. (Sardar and Rosser-Owen, 1978: 2)

The Occident is produced as an autotelic entity which has its essence

manifest in the world of objects that are identifiable as Occidental objects.
After essentializing the multiplicity of objects that are supposedly united
into the Occident, the text claims to know the immutable essence of the
Oriental Self and any signs of exteriority in the cultural or epistemic bound-
aries of this Oriental self result in Occidentalization: ‘Any “Oriental” who
aspires to what is occidental or who has achieved his aspirations is thus
either occidentalising or has been occidentalised’ (Sardar and Rosser-
Owen, 1978: 2; original capitalization). There are two recognizable moves
in which Sardar’s work defines the Oriental Self: (a) the only form of Other-
ness is exterior to the Oriental Self and there are no schisms, fissures or
sources of aporia within it; (b) the Otherness is assigned to the Occident
which is defined by its essential exteriority (or foreignness) to the Oriental
Self. Moreover, this exterior essence of the Occident is considered an
immutable given which remains identifiable even when it has infiltrated the
Occidental Self. In this way, by defining the Occident as exterior to the
Oriental Self, Sardar’s work maintains the antagonistic Oriental–Occidental
binary that is the hallmark of Western Orientalist thought itself. One can
easily identify the conceptual similarities between Samuel P. Huntington’s
Orientalism and Sardar’s Occidentalism: the desire to fix the originariness
of the Occident and the Orient and to disallow any spatio-temporal per-
mutations and heterogeneity that one finds in Huntington’s The Clash of
Civilisations is not very different from Sardar’s immutable constructions of
the Orient and the Occident.
Let us consider, for contrastive and illustrative purposes, how Huntington
has constructed Islam as a civilization that is hostile to difference:
‘Wherever one looks at the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems
living peacefully with their neighbours’ (Huntington, 1996: 256) and
‘Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth century facts which
neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny’ (Huntington, 1996: 258). In the
above statements, Huntington constructs an essence of Islam by choosing
one set of events, i.e. intracivilization and intercivilization violent conflicts,

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 71

and claims that set to represent Islam in its totality. We can call this total-
ization through selection, where one aspect of a culture is regarded as rep-
resentative of the whole culture and, thereby, an immutable essence is
produced by the authorial figure. Similar to the way Huntington constructs
the violent nature of Islam, Sardar and his co-author construct the nature
of the West as a civilization that has stolen everything from Islam through
deceit and imperialism:
In the Thirteenth Century, Albertus Magnus, wearing Arab clothes, taught in Arabic
at the Sorbonne, the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, and optics. He had learned
these sciences at the University of Cordoba in Muslim Spain. Roger Bacon also studied
in Muslim Spain and taught the same subjects at Oxford . . . This is the beginning of the
story of ‘modern Western science’. (Sardar and Rosser-Owen, 1978: 30)

Similarly, in another book titled Explorations in Islamic Science, Sardar first

criticizes the West for plagiarizing and expropriating the work of Muslim
scientists of the Middle Ages:
. . . [the] achievements [of Muslim scientists] in astronomy, physics, biology, medicine,
chemistry, mathematics, are still attributed to Western scientists . . . [and] Western his-
torians of science have systematically and consistently played down the contribution of
Muslim scientists to civilisation. (Sardar, 1989b: 11)

These historical facts are supposed, ipso facto, to prove that Western science
is a ‘usurped’, ‘borrowed’ and ‘derivative’ way of knowing the world and,
because of its participation in the production of the western episteme, can
be invalidated as a whole. The fact that western science is part of the
western episteme and that episteme has become dominant because of
colonization on a global scale does not automatically validate the alterna-
tive, which in this case is the Islamic episteme. The fact that it is possible to
critique one form of epistemic oppressiveness and closure does not validate
another form of epistemic closure, hence Edward Said’s cautionary state-
ment already cited. Western Orientalism cannot be replaced by Oriental
Occidentalism. Because one set of constructs, grouped together into a civi-
lizational episteme, can be criticized and analysed does not necessarily vali-
date an alternative set of constructs. The closure of the western episteme
cannot be challenged by the closure of the Islamic episteme.
The point of contention here is not the truth-value of the observations
made by Sardar but how the ‘truth’ that Muslim scientific achievements
have been expropriated by western scientists and historians is employed to
Occidentalize the Occident in a manner not very different from the way in
which Orientalists produce the essence of the Orient. In both cases, another
culture is represented by intellectuals who select and interpret ‘facts’ for the
purpose of producing ‘valid’ knowledge. In his book Covering Islam,
Edward Said delineates how first some Islamic image or representation is
extracted from the multiplicity that is the Islamic world and then a generaliz-
able knowledge statement is made from that singularized representation
(Said, 1981: 162–73). The process of representation becomes the process of

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72 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

essence-making, a method for making statements rather than asking

questions about what is being represented. This process of essence-making
through selecting and interpreting representative facts is then used for
certain purposes—to produce an object of knowledge such as the Orient or
the Occident to serve a particular discourse. One can posit that the
Orientalist produces representations and interpretations of the Orient for
the Occident and the Occidentalist produces the Occident for the Orient.
Both the Orientalist and the Occidentalist make statements on behalf of the
Other culture and produce and preserve the identity of their respective
culture as well as the Other cultures. In this way, representing the Other
becomes an assertion of the interpreting Self, a way of subsuming the
alterity of the Other under, to borrow a phrase from Robert Young, the
‘imperialism of the same’ (Young, 1990: 15). Representation seeks to
homogenize the Other as well as the Self.
The tendency in non-western intellectuals to contain the Oriental and the
Occidental formations of subjectivity into two neat categories and to repress
the countless instances where only the porosity of the self is manifest repro-
duces an oppositionality between the West and the non-West which itself is
part of the western colonial project. The task of the postcolonial intellec-
tual is to undermine the oppositionality between the East and the West that
was created to justify colonialism rather than to preserve it, hence the
critical importance of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the colonial subject, as the
hybrid subject, as opposed to the colonizing subject or the colonized subject
(Bhabha, 1994).
Moreover, one of the ramifications of Sardar’s Islamic Manicheanism, i.e.
the sustained production and maintenance of the opposition between
benevolent Islam versus the malevolent West, is that, while the West is being
produced as an imperialistic and oppressive Other, Islam is not critiqued
but rather idealized. The central argument of most of Sardar’s books is that
western modernity has produced the dominant episteme because of
colonialism and exploitation of non-western cultures and it has suppressed
the always benign Islamic episteme. The problem with this argument is that
the historical condition of the dominance of the West is employed to homog-
enize Islam as an ideal episteme. A critical genealogy of the dominance of
the western episteme does not automatically validate Islam as an idealized
community. Islam has its own sources of critique within it that have existed
from the earliest days of Islam to the present. From Al-Hallaj who was
executed for claiming to be the Truth himself to Al-Afriki who produced
resistive discourses against the Islamic edict of compulsory prayers
(Braudel, 1993: 76), from Ibn-e-Sina who did not believe in the Quranic
notion of the resurrection of the body after the Judgement Day (Braudel,
1993: 83) to Salman Rushdie (1988), Fatima Mernissi (1993) and Eqbal
Ahmad (2000), there is a tradition of resistance to the epistemic closure that
is generally considered Islam.

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 73

To attribute this vast body of resistive and critical discourses within Islam
to the influence of the secular West is a manifestation of the Occidentalism
of Sardar. In his book Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie
Affair, Sardar and his co-author seek to empty Islam of its own critical
heritage and resistive discourses and attribute all secularist influences to
western modernity: ‘modernity is the abandonment of traditional meaning
where secularism may have no coherence or conceptual validity . . .
Modernity is the end of authenticity, the assumption of another self’ (Sardar
and Davies, 1990: 10). Terms such as ‘traditional meaning’ and ‘authenticity’
are employed as the binary opposites of ‘modernity’ and ‘secularism’. This
opposition between secularism and tradition is misplaced because Islam has
never been constituted of a unified cultural tradition in the past or in the
contemporary era. Only essentialist ideologues have desired it to be so.
Islam has been and still is a multiplicity. One can cite countless examples
of debates and ideas within the Islamic civilization in its present formation
to support this claim. For example, Aziz Al-Azmeh, a Syrian Muslim intel-
lectual, opens his book Islams and Modernities with the following statement
‘the contention [of this book is] that there are as many Islams as there are
situations that sustain it’ (Al-Azmeh, 1993: 1). And Javed Iqbal, a Pakistani
Muslim intellectual, cites verses from the Quran—such as ‘If thy Lord had
pleased, All those who are in the Earth would have believed, all of them.
Wilt thou then force men till they are believers?’ (10: 99)—to prove that
Allah likes difference (Iqbal, 1967: 30). In another book Anouar Abdallah
has collected about 100 essays from contemporary Muslim intellectuals who
support free speech (Abdallah et al., 1994). All the scholars whose essays
are collected in this volume employ different methodologies and epistemic
inspirations to support their claim for freedom of speech within Islam. The
sources of their inspiration are heterogeneous: Sufism, western and Islamic
traditions of rationalism and, among many others, the idea of basic human
rights.
The effort to impose the closure of singular meaning on the multiplicity
that is Islam by Sardar is a dangerous enterprise because this kind of
reaction by Muslim intellectuals fortifies the media representations of Islam
as fundamentalist and violent (El-Baghdadi, 2000) but also places the
sanctity of human life in jeopardy. According to the authors of Distorted
Imagination, secularism is absolutely western and its sole justification
derives from the dominance of western modernity and colonialism:
‘Secularism remains the product of Europe: its concepts of liberty and
freedom are to be assessed and comprehended’ (Sardar and Davies, 1990:
31). Secularism, Sardar and Davies argue, is always external to the Islamic
world and therefore secular ideas only inhabit Islamic subjectivities when
western modernity has been internalized: ‘secularism is not a choice, cer-
tainly not a choice that arises from within’ and ‘internalizing modernity
means renunciation of a distinct history and culture’ (Sardar and Davies,

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74 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

1990: 10). There are two assumptions at work in the argument propounded
above: (a) cultural practices that are ‘external’ to Islam need to be rejected
and, in this way, the ‘purity’ of Islam can be preserved, (b) without inter-
nalizing western modernity, Muslim subjectivities cannot enter the domain
of the secular.
Both of the assumptions mentioned above are informed by an essential-
ist position on Sardar’s behalf regarding Islam and the West. Sardar’s essen-
tialism informs his portrayal of Islam as immutable and ahistorical as well
as the West being opposed to Islam because of its secular modernity. Before
discussing Sardar’s essentialist ideas of Islam and its values, the West,
modernity and secularism, I would like to outline how essentialism operates
in philosophical arguments. According to Diana Fuss, essentialist state-
ments often ‘make recourse to an ontology which stands outside the sphere
of cultural influence and historical change’ (1989: 3). If we examine Sardar’s
ideas about Islam and the West in his various books, we encounter a cluster
of statements that posit an unchanging essence to these two conceptual
categories. The essence of Islam is posited to be divine and ahistorical and
to be something to which the worldly culture of Arabia had nothing to
contribute. Islam is an expression of Allah’s unchanging agency whose
ontology is outside the Arabian culture. For example, in his introduction to
An Early Crescent: The Future of Knowledge and the Environment in Islam,
Sardar states that, when it comes to dealing with change, Islam wants
believers to form ‘social consensus’ with the help of ‘the participation of the
total community’ because ‘Islam wants its followers to approach and study
change with awe and humility’ (Sardar, 1989a: 1). Though Islam wants to
accommodate change with the participation of a mythic ‘total community’,
Islam itself, for Sardar, is beyond change and therefore ahistorical—Islam
is extraneous to history. It is the unified voice of God in the multiplicity of
worldly texts. Islam has a singular eternal origin, whereas the text of the
world is profane with its beginnings, middles and ends. And this divine
singularity of Islam, in the contemporary world, has been challenged by the
West which has achieved epistemic dominance because of colonial and
imperial exploitation.
In Sardar’s work, the only challenge that appears to the Islamic episteme
is the dominance of the western episteme. In his book Explorations in
Islamic Science, Sardar critiques western science for its ideological content.
He traces the origin of western science to the Enlightenment: ‘the
Enlightenment was the intellectual and scholarly tradition which is respons-
ible for shaping the character and style of contemporary Western science
and technology’ (Sardar, 1989b: 52). The Enlightenment, Sardar argues,
separated the pursuit of knowledge from the pursuit of values. Sardar, in
the tradition of western critical thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer,
holds industrialization responsible for what he describes as the ‘environ-
mental devastation’ (Sardar, 1989b: 54). He does not subscribe to the

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 75

Enlightenment point of view that there can be objective and value-free

knowledge. For him, it was colonialism that installed ‘the myth of neutral-
ity’ of western science in the world (Sardar, 1989b: 55). He employs Thomas
Kuhn’s (1962) idea of ‘paradigm’ to support his arguments against the ‘myth
of neutrality’ of western science and to establish that scientific knowledge
is ‘socially constructed’ (Sardar, 1989b: 56). For him, ‘ideological forces’
determine ‘that which is desirable to know and that which is undesirable’
(Sardar, 1989b: 57).
As far as a critique of the scientificity of western science is concerned,
Sardar’s ideas are similar to the ideas of Foucault and Said. Foucault,
especially in his earlier works, specifically in Madness and Civilisation
(1965) and Discipline and Punish (1977), established the relationship
between knowledge and power and sought to undermine the myth of objec-
tivity. In his The Order of Things, Foucault established how various objects
of analysis are produced by different discourses that assign centrality to the
category of Man. Inspired by Foucault’s theory of the inseparability of
knowledge and power, Edward Said launched the project of undermining
western knowledge of the Orient and implicated the entire western
civilization in the racialist project of Orientalism: ‘My contention is that
Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient
because the Orient was weaker than the West’ (Said, 1978: 204). But Said
was critically astute enough not to subscribe to the notion of nativist
authenticity as a strategy of resisting Orientalism, hence his warning that
Occidentalism is not the solution to the problems generated by Oriental-
ism. But Sardar not only produces Occidentalist discourses but also
promotes Islamic nativism.
For Sardar, the critical premise that western scientific knowledge attained
dominance because of colonialism ipso facto moves to substantiate the
Islamic episteme. Sardar offers Islam as an alternative way of producing
knowledge of the world and describes it as Islamic science. The western
scientific project, Sardar argues, has disenchanted the world because of the
value system that inspires it (Sardar, 1989b). Each civilization, according to
Sardar, produces a system of knowledge production that is conducive to its
development or dynamicity: for China, Chinese epistemology, for Islam,
Islamic epistemology (Sardar, 1989b: 70–81). Because the universality of
western science is not autotelic or a priori but is a result of historical con-
tingencies, Islamic science becomes a tenable option for Muslims (Sardar,
1989b: 81–109).
While the first part of the Sardarian critique of western science and post-
Enlightenment rationality is tenable—in the sense that a materially
dominant civilization moulds the world in its own image, the second part is
what I seek to problematize here. Sardar’s argument operates in the follow-
ing way: the myths of neutrality and objectivity as prevalent in the western
post-Enlightenment episteme can be critiqued because one can attribute

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76 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

their dominance to western imperialism and colonialism; therefore, the

Islamic way of knowing the world is valid a priori and beyond critique.
There are problems in the prescriptive part (i.e. the part that suggests an
alternative to the dominance of western episteme) of the Sardarian thesis.
First of all, Sardar’s critique of the dominant western episteme validates
itself within a structure which does not step outside of ‘myth of neutrality’
itself. In this sense, his critique of western rationality is accessible to his
readers from different cultures because of the rational content of his
arguments. In this sense, his critique of modernity operates within the
epistemic structures globalized by western modernity but also existing in
non-western cultures even if not in politically dominant formations, such as
Avicenna’s critique of certain Quranic beliefs. The critical aspect of the
Sardarian thesis is similar to what Anthony Giddens describes as ‘reflexivity
of modernity’. Reflexivity of modernity, for Giddens, signifies modernity’s
doubt and critique directed at itself: ‘[the] reflexivity of modern social life
consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and
reformed’ (Giddens, 1990: 38).
The prescriptive part of the Sardarian thesis (i.e. the part that prescribes
Islamic science as an alternative to the dominance of the western episteme)
is problematic for the following reasons. First, Sardar idealizes and homog-
enizes the Islamic episteme as one unified set of internally coherent state-
ments. In Islam, for Sardar, ‘all forms of knowledge are interconnected and
organically related by the ever-present spirit of the Quranic revelation’
(1989b: 82). Second, Islamic science is different from western science in the
sense that Islamic science seeks to produce knowledge for the ‘pleasure of
Allah’ whereas western science is ‘science for science’s sake’ (Sardar, 1989b:
95). The set of statements that Sardar produces in order to outline what
Islamic science is is informed by the notion that reason should be subject to
revelation and it is only because of western dominance that reason has been
secularized.
Sardar’s thesis is Occidentalism in the sense that critique is only applied
to the West and Islam and other non-western formations are idealized and
exoticized. According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, Sardar’s thesis does not take
into account the hostility that Islam has directed against rational inquiry
within the social spaces in its jurisdiction:

. . . [the] writings of all the major [Muslim] philosophers—Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Al-Razi,
Ibn Rushd, etc.—simultaneously show contempt for, and fear of, ignorant masses . . .
because it was not hard for fanatical mullahs to incite the masses against the philo-
sophers. (Hoodbhoy, 1991: 94)

If one were to apply the insights of Said’s Orientalism uncritically to the

account of Muslim ecclesiastical hostility to scientific rationality in Islam,
one could posit that Hoodbhoy’s position was informed by an internaliza-
tion of western Orientalism. But, to borrow a critical insight from Aijaz

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 77

Ahmad, suppression of criticism is not an ideal way of expressing solidarity

with those whose projects and conditions one wants to promote (Ahmad,
1992: 160). It means that all critical enunciations by Muslim thinkers against
closure in the Islamic episteme against scientific modes of inquiry are not
informed by western Orientalism. Muslim subjectivities can attain self-
reflexivity without the West, and without participating in the process
described by Sardar as ‘Occidentalisation’. It is the totalizing arguments
of Sardar that are as epistemically reductive as Orientalist descriptions,
from Hegelian to Huntingtonian, of the inability of Muslims to attain self-
reflexivity and to conduct rational inquiry. For Abdus Salam, the Pakistani
scientist who won the Nobel prize but still remained persona non grata in
‘the land of the pure’ (the literal meaning of the word ‘Pakistan’) because
his sect had been declared un-Islamic, one of the causes of the decline of
scientific rationality in Islam, other than external influences and invasions,
is ‘discouragement to innovation’ (Salam, 1987: 82). This ‘discouragement
to innovation’ and its concomitant absolutism within Islamic cultures do not
receive any critical attention from Sardar.
Sardar’s prescription for scientific inquiry to remain within the limit of
the Quranic revelation is not only a reductionist answer to the challenge of
secularism, rationalism and modernity but also displays a disregard for the
potential of Islam as a faith to survive within the realm of the ethical and
the spiritual. The present inequalities that exist between cultures and
nations, Hoodbhoy argues, can be critiqued from within modernity because
‘there is no law of nature confining scientific and technological progress to
the developed nations of the West’ (Hoodbhoy, 1991: 138). Hoodbhoy’s
strategy of appropriating the claim of universality to assert the claims of
Islamic and Third World emancipatory projects is similar to Fatima
Mernissi’s demand for secular legal and state structures in the Islamic world.
According to Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan theorist of Islam, the veil and
the modern world, there is a need to acknowledge that the current preva-
lence of irrational authoritarianism in the domain of knowledge production
in Muslim countries is a result of the despotism of the national/postcolonial
elite, for ‘rational analysis would not serve the purposes of the despots’
(Mernissi, 1993: 24). For Mernissi, modernity, rationality and freedom of
thought have always been present in the Islamic world as sources of aporia
that the Islamic world has not contemplated. The dominance of western
modernity, democracy and the secular state in the contemporary world,
Mernissi argues, makes the problem of freedom of thought and modernity
more urgent not foreign (Mernissi, 1993: 21).
If one analyses Sardar’s work from Said’s definition of an intellectual, one
can establish that Sardar is not a critical intellectual in the Saidian sense. In
his book Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said illustrates his
vision of the intellectual by citing the example of Theodor Adorno and
describing him as a ‘quintessential intellectual’ because Adorno critiqued

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78 Cultural Dynamics 14(1)

‘all systems, whether on our side or their side, with equal distaste’ (Said,
1994: 41). Drawing upon Adorno’s critical distance for all homogenizing
systems and master-texts, Said constructs the figure of the critical intellec-
tual as a generator of a ‘destabilising effect’ (1994: 41). In another essay in
the same book, Said links his figure of the intellectual with secularism: ‘the
intellectual has only secular means to work with’ and argues that theo-
logical or revelationist modes of knowledge production are more suitable
for ‘private life’ because in the public sphere they can produce disastrous
and barbaric results (1994: 65). This is not to suggest that Edward Said is
uncritical of the disastrous or barbaric consequences of secular rationality
when applied for the purposes of subjugating entire populations of Third
World countries. It is, rather, to foreground, for contrastive and illustrative
purposes, the nuanced and rigorous modes of analysis with which Said
deploys his critical acumen against essentialist generalizations whether they
are informed by the secular or the sacral.
Sardar’s critique is limited to the material and epistemic dominance of
western civilization over Islam but his work on Islam is contained within the
parameters of exoticization and homogenization. For example, in his book
Science and Technology in the Middle East, Sardar does not address the
cultural and theological constraints placed on modes of thought that seek
to transcend the sacral. Instead he first mentions a process of ‘Arabization’
of science and then seeks to promote a nativist construction of ‘Islamic
science’ which will be ‘a true embodiment of the values, culture and
civilisation of Islam’ (1982: 18). The problem whether science needs to be
Islamized or Arabized is left unexamined and Sardar moves on to celebrate
another construct ‘Turkish-Islamic science’ (1982: 19). The basic problem
that remains unacknowledged in Sardar’s work is the heterogeneity within
Islamic cultures and how one can represent their specificities without revert-
ing to easy self-congratulatory essentializations of a multiplicity that is
Islam. For other Muslim scientists, such as Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Sardarian
project of Islamizing science ‘seeks to capitalize on the science practiced by
early Muslims’ without sharing ‘any qualities which immortalized the
achievements of scientists in Islam’s Golden Age’ (Hoodbhoy, 1991: 149).
By declaring rationality and secular inquiry as ‘western’ and therefore
oppressive concepts, the Sardarian project becomes an uncritical enterprise
that further compounds the problems of Third World and Muslim societies.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, in his book Islam and Science, has listed a number of
examples that illustrate how the Pakistani academic and bureaucratic
establishment has attempted to deal with the secularizing effects of mod-
ernity (Hoodbhoy, 1991). Secular and scientific inquiry in Pakistan has been
seriously curtailed through official policies that discourage members of
general public and academia from debating the validity of concepts author-
ized by Islamic/divine injunctions. Recently, one has also learnt of a medical
teacher being sentenced to death for discussing the bodily customs of

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Ur-Rehman: Secular versus Islamic Knowledge 79

pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabia. The secular project in Pakistan has suffered
because of the Occidentalism prevalent in anti-colonial/critical knowledge
production as well as obscurantism of the rulers.

NOTE

1. Compare with Aimé Césaire’s polemical statement in Discourse on Colonialism:

the West is indefensible.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

SAEED UR-REHMAN, MA Honours (Wollongong), is working on his doctoral thesis

on postcolonial knowledge production from Pakistan at the Department of
English, Australian National University. His academic writings have appeared in
Kunapipi, New Literatures Review. His journalistic writings have been published
in The Frontier Post. Some of his poems are available in the on-line South Asian
magazine Chowk (www.chowk.com). [email: saeed.urrehman@anu.edu.au]

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