Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar's introspective and often hilarious autobiography as he travels through the Muslim world seeking spiritual brotherhood and uncovering the beauty and warts of Islamic spiritual practice.

In an attempt to get our Ill Fated Muslim Book Club away from the saccharine "Zeitoun" narrative of Muslims, we chose Ziauddin Sardar's account of Muslims and the complexity he finds therein. Sardar tells it as he sees it, with a lot of wit and humor.

The American Muslims did not bother to read show more it. They wanted to talk about Ayn Rand. The displaced European Muslims loved the book and were dismayed by the Americans' reactions. I hate Ayn Rand.

My German husband decided to raise the stakes. He firmly believes in the philosophy of Yoda, "Do or Do Not". In our case, "Read or Read Not." He would introduce a book of such controversial nature that it would be the crucible to test this community of Muslims and discover their true intellectual boundaries. show less

In Introducing Philosophy of Science: A Graphic Guide, Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon explore different societal understandings of science from the Enlightenment forward, with special attention to how scientists considered their own work. The authors successfully condense the various concepts and conflicts to simple, short paragraphs and illustrations, linking everything in a way that the reader can easily grasp. Perhaps most valuable is their "Further Reading" section at the end, which show more serves as a guide for those researching the history or sociology of science. In their conclusion, Sardar and Van Loon argue for greater public awareness and involvement in science in order to counter the role of special interests and ensure greater responsibility in the discipline. show less

This book was recommended to me about 5 years ago, I bought it but never got around to reading it. That was a mistake. I reviewed a book on chaos theory earlier in the year and discovered that its author was the same.

Sardar is a scientist and deep intellectual. Moreover, he is a learner and a seeker, and so I felt an instant connection to him. Sardar has traveled the world and seen all sides of the umma, and desperately wishes to save it from itself. The book chronicles years in England show more spent learning from Muslim scholars, years spent in Saudi Arabia bemoaning the Kingdom's destruction of history and ruining the hajj by clogging it with modern pollution, and years spent watching the Muslim world turn more and more insular and backward.

Sardar's circle of intellectual scholars write articles and advise governments to seemingly no avail. He was at a meeting in Pakistan when Osama bin Laden and others in the mujahideen could not find a way to reconcile their differences, and the future was clear. They reached a ghastly depression when their fears were realized on 9/11 and afterward.

I enjoyed Sardar's observations in his travels to places like Turkey, Syria, and Iran. I learned about how much hope the umma placed in the Iranian revolution, and how bad it was when those hopes were dashed by the violent tyranny that emerged.

All along the way, Sardar explains ancient Muslim history and philosophy, illustrating the different schools of thought and what they mean for today. I learned a great deal about Islam that I never knew before. Sardar's problems with Muslim clerics today are very similar to the ones I have with evangelical pastors.

If you're an American who thinks he knows a decent amount about Islam, or has read several books on the subject, think again and afresh and read this book. Sardar believes in a pluralist Islam. It's not clear to me why he rejects Christianity. It seems to me that what he's looking for is clearly found in Jesus and the teachings of the Bible. I'd love to have a conversation with him.

This book was better than I could have imagined, and much different. Wish I had read it 5 years ago.

5 stars out of 5. show less

The title misuses the term "Philosophy of Science" as if it didn't already have a long standing and useful meaning. Though this book is arguably philosophy as applied to science, our language already has terms that describe what it is doing--"cultural studies," or "critical theory," and I say this as someone who is politically in accord with what this book is trying to do.

It treats science as the enemy (which I'll admit it often resembles) but without taking science's actual value seriously. show more For example, take the quote "In over five decades of science development, most of the Third World countries have nothing to show for it. The benefits of science just refuse to trickle down to the poor." The statement concedes that science has benefits (something that you'd be hard pressed to find in most of the book) though never quite says what they are. I grant you that the "Third World" (a phrase from the middle of last century which needs to be updated) has been left behind, often intentionally, from much we in the west take for granted, but I'd blame capitalism and power politics and plain old greed (something which long preceded Galileo) before considering science's role. Science has been developing for way more than five decades and leaving the poor behind for way more as well, so I also wonder about that choice of phrase, which coincidentally matches the age of the term "Third world." There have been several successful attempts to bring, say, medical science to developing nations, even when it can be attributed to eradicating diseases we fear will end up infecting us if we don't do so, and I know of doctors who volunteer time helping the "wretched of the earth" which could be criticized as insufficient salves to guilty consciences but that would ignore the fact that there is good being done.

The real problem with the book is that the author doesn't seem to know any actual science. He takes the second law of thermodynamics as a cultural artifact, and it does presume our culture's ideas of measurement, but I never get the feeling that he knows what it actually is trying to encompass.

It mainly targets the "soft sciences" which are low hanging fruit while never discussing the reasons why they are called "soft."

There are actual things I could learn from this book if I trusted they were being presented without distortion (which I don't).

And to add to the above, I found the graphics a weak feature, uninspiring and unattractive. show less