Abdulaziz sachedina biography of william

Toronto, ; assistant professor department history, assistant professor department French and general linguistics, University of Virginia, ; assistant professor department religious studies, oriental languages, University of Virginia, ; associate professor, University of Virginia, ; professor, University of Virginia, since Visiting lecturer department religious studies U.

Visiting assistant professor department religious studies University of Virginia, Visiting professor Faculty Shari'a U. Jordan, Amman, Margaret Gest visiting professor religion Haverford Pennsylvania College, Adjunct Professor department religion Temple University, Philadelphia, Visiting scholar U. Member of advisory board law and religion EmoryU.

Lecturer in field. Abdulaziz Sachedina has been listed as a noteworthy religious studies educator by Marquis Who's Who. Member American Academy Religion editorial board journal. Tantur Ecumenical Center. Muslim Perspectives on Health and Suffering. Why now? Encyclopedia Iranica , Vol. I, Fasc. John L. Esposito Oxford, Roger Savory and Dionisius Agius Toronto, XII London , Pp.

Khare , Pp. XX, No 1, Suppl. William M. Brinner and Stephen D. Ricks Scholars Press, Atlanta, Georgia, The Rushdie File , ed. Does it mean that you were a historian of the Middle East studies when you were offered a position in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in ? AS : Yes and no. My first task was to equip myself with the methodologies that were prevalent in the academic study of religion.

For the first three years I trained myself to teach courses in religion, theologies, religious practice, mysticism, and so on. I was primarily a historian, and now I began to relate beliefs and doctrines chronologically to the events in Islamic history. It was broadening my work on Islamic idea of future savior — Al-Mahdi. I began to pay attention to the sociology of religion, to cultural anthropology and the psychology of religion.

These were all new but very interesting fields for my own development as a historian of religion. I was also called upon to lecture in courses on Islamic law, Islamic business, Islam and medicine, and so on. UVA supported my research and my scholarly interests. The demands on me provided me opportunities to expand my narrow academic specialization.

AT : Is this what you meant when earlier you said you were trained in classical studies which led your way to the modern topics in human rights, democracy and bioethics, which are in some way related to legal schools of Islamic practice? AS : Yes, indeed interpretive jurisprudence fiqh and usul al-fiqh was at the heart of my studies. However, my academic studies are geared towards relating historical events to specific judicial decisions fatawa from the juridical sources of Islam.

This inquiry constitutes my essential research interest even today. I am still looking for ways to demonstrate how juridical studies can benefit from history. AS : That is correct. History and jurisprudence, history and literature, religion and literature, religion and politics, law and ethics, have remained my focus in Islamic studies.

Hence, in each of my published work, I try to develop the connection and demonstrate the need for interdisciplinary approach to the academic study of Islam. In this connection it is important to point out our collegial work in UVA which prompted serious interest in my future studies. I had never thought about such a trajectory. As a believer, deep in my heart, I entertained the belief that Islam is the best religion.

One day everyone will become Muslim. That was my childhood image of my religion. I had never thought I would be teaching Islam as one of the world religions in Department of Religious Studies, which is strong in Christian and Jewish studies. I was the only person teaching Islam. The department was strong in its offerings in other eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism.

So I had to relate my work to my colleagues in religion. I could have isolated myself and become completely separated as I used to hear in some institutions the teachers of Islam, mostly graduates of Near Eastern Civilizations and Cultures, were not talking to the colleagues in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, African religions.

I could have followed that path; I could have remained totally submerged into Islamic studies and Arabic studies. But I chose the other path. I convinced myself that I needed to sit in conversation with my colleagues. I had never paid attention to the jargon that was common to these scholars of human rights or freedom of religion that I started picking up in conversations with my colleagues.

Professor David Little was a sociologist of religion, quite well-known in his own field of comparative ethics and human rights. Professor Jim Childress was working on moral reasoning and in bioethics. I started having conversations with him on common ethical issues, not only on the organ donations but in search of principles of bioethics in Islam.

How was Islamic law responding to the modern medical questions? Was it possible to teach Islamic ethics? What direction would ethics take in Islam: will it be philosophical? All these questions became part of my search in bioethics and other comparative ethics concepts. Since I was the only one who taught Islam, I had to pay attention to the broader implications of Islamic religious thought.

This pressure functioned as a constructive and challenging motive for broadening my education in the context of the Department of Religious Studies at UVA. I must confess that the relevance of religion in the Muslim communities in North America was my major research question. If religion cannot speak to modernly educated men and women and guide them to become better persons, then what good is religion for?

So I really moved in different areas of the study of religion that had practical application in business, bioethics, social ethics, and personal ethics of modern men and women. AT : Thanks for your elaboration. However, it raises two related questions: The first question is the context and setting in which you are engaging your scholarship. The second question is regarding your setting in the community.

As a Muslim you lived as a member of a minority in Charlottesville where University of Virginia is located. Consequently, some of the research questions were probably becoming relevant for the believers. This is the first context to which you could speak. The second context is obviously the socio-political one within which Islam as a religion was being debated.

Maybe some of the conversations about human rights and Islam were a little bit intimidating and appeared aggressive to the religious people in the community. From the beginning of our conversation you have emphasized the ways in which these contexts influenced your research projects. Could you speak to these briefly? AS: Yes, I think University of Virginia was a gold mine for me to understand academic study of religion.

This meant that these teachers fully appreciated religious practice, even if they remained non-practicing themselves. Accordingly, we had Jewish rabbis teaching Judaism, we had Catholic priests teaching Catholicism, we had ordained ministers teaching Christianity. He was the graduate of University of Chicago Divinity School. In other words, they were trained not only in the modern methodologies; but also in intellectual appreciation of the traditions they specialized in.

Even in the relatively non-confessional domain of Religion and Literature the department had attracted Professor Nathan Scott, one of the most prominent authors in the field, who was also a member of Episcopalian church. In cultural anthropology we had another internationally known Chicago professor, Victor Turner, with whom a number of our graduate students in the History of Religions took courses.

These are only some of the important names connected with the University of Virginia. I joined UVA, as a young assistant professor, who was now searching for different mentors in religious studies — quite different from my professors in University of Toronto, and was intending to create my own niche in research and interpretation of Islam.

I was like a fully winged bird that could fly off the safety of the nest of University of Toronto and could now venture to sit in any company of scholars I chose, because I was a full-fledged member of the academic community. That parallel with the bird flying off from the security of its nest is very important to keep in mind. I felt I had the freedom to do anything I wanted even when faced with challenges in my transition from a historian of religious ideas to a scholar in need of an anchorage in religious studies.

For me to search for commonalities and common ground in conversation, if not agreement and differentiation at the academic level, it was critical to find my own calling in academia. Obviously, in academia you could not afford to remain isolated. Isolation would have been the stifling of my own potentials in learning from others, including my students.

I had come to UVA for one year in as a visiting professor to replace a colleague on research leave. But my training in languages and history landed me in a joint appointment the following year. UVA saw me as an academician who represented authentically the field of Middle East and Islamic studies, being thoroughly grounded in Arabic, Persian, Urdu-Hindi, Swahili and other languages spoken in the Muslim world.

I had already been exposed to Ottoman Turkish language minimally, mainly because my research was not directly related to Turkey as much as it was connected with India, Iran, and the Arab world. I had full support of the Department of Religious Studies to choose my research priorities and pursue these with my best ability. My colleagues welcomed me and engaged me in all sorts of conversations.

More importantly, this intellectual interaction with them led me to develop new interests in the academic study of Islam. My colleagues introduced me to history of religions as developed in Chicago. They made me aware of the new methodologies in the field of cultural anthropology, sociology of religion, comparative ethics, and so on.

This provided me the rare opportunity to study the classical Arabic and Persian sources with different set of questions. I was well trained in the philology and book culture of Muslim societies. But now I was plugging into new themes and methodology to infer different meanings and significance of these sources. My 35 years at the University of Virginia were the best years that any academic institution can provide to an ambitious scholar with a vision to make a difference in the way Islamic studies was studied and taught in North America.

AS: As pointed out earlier, this book was the sequel to my first book on Islamic Messianism. Let me add this that The Just Ruler demonstrated my own intellectual development in the context of religious studies. My interest in legal studies was growing fast and at one point I even considered seriously to enroll at the prestigious Law School of UVA.

AT : While as an Assistant Professor there or before? AS : By that time, I was already tenured. My interests in human rights made me aware that my work would not receive the deserved attention if I had no degree in law. My conversations about the freedom of religion would not be taken seriously without being adequately founded upon the international norms that were known to the scholars of international law.

I was committed to uphold human rights principles and my interest was not simply academic. Needless to say, that my work on human rights has not received the necessary recognition by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Retrospectively, if I had my law degree then my work on human rights would have allowed me to contribute richly to the debates about the need for more inclusive foundation for promoting human rights across different nations and cultures.

I firmly believed that academic work needs to go beyond the academia to benefit the general society. This remains my academic vision. Professors are not simply to restrict themselves in the Ivory Tower. They should be thinking about the communities and go beyond safe precinct of academia. However, the UVA administration wanted me to resign my professorship to begin my studies in law, at least for two years.

That condition was difficult for me when I had my family responsibilities. The result of my interest in human rights was the first book that we co-authored with my colleagues and with our PhD student John Kelsay , who is now teaching at FSU in Tallahassee. This book was on the conflict of cultures, the question of freedom of religion in Islam and Christianity.

Then I embarked on the project on democratic pluralism, a subject closely related to the freedom of religion. I was working on interfaith relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims and beginning to identify primary courses to understand and expound Islamic sources on this subject. If you look at the chronology of my publications, I had already started working on the better relationship between religious communities, better relations between Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

So, when Dr. Montville, who directed the project of Preventive Diplomacy, proposed the topic of religious pluralism and democracy, I was ready to pen it. AT : So in other words, to affect changes you were engaging the non-governmental as well as governmental organizations. I was consulted on the question of the freedom of religion in Islam and related topics from time to time.

It is important to emphasize here that the field of my consultation was limited to what we call the spiritual and moral dimensions that were otherwise ignored by other consultants. By this time, the Iranian revolution had already occurred. Without ever wishing to be so, I became the media person from UVA. I still remember reading the banners of those who demonstrated against Iranian embassy in Washington in They were oblivious of their own revolution against the British Crown in 18 th century.

One can imagine the kind of pressure I must have gone through in the 80s. On the one hand, there was a need to remain neutral in matters of politics that was generated by the modernist presuppositions about the role religion should or should not play in public square; on the other, it demanded a careful presentation of Islam, as a religion and culture.

AT : Our readers are surely interested in what were the circumstances that led to the fatwa of Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq against you. But we can leave it for some other time. However, by this time your publications had increased and you were making waves in the world of academia. AS: There were very few Muslim scholars who could talk intelligently about Islam in the s.

With my research interests and their relevance to contemporary issues I was able to speak about Islam more intelligently, discuss it more rationally, and add the human face to Muslims. That caught the imagination of the media. The s saw a sharp increase in my enrollments in the courses I taught. If the pre-Iranian revolution attracted 15 or 20 students at the most, now my enrollments jumped to and in some basic courses on Islam.

It was an interesting period of the growth in Islamic studies. Iran was making headlines almost every week, and surely, people wanted to know more. I was speaking in different churches and synagogues, and other non-religious institutions. AT : By this time, American engagement in the region had become more intense. AS : There was a clear difference in the way Americans were paying attention to the Muslim world at this time.

In the post this changed all of a sudden. The Iranian revolution highlighted something that had already happened in the when Malik Feisal used the oil embargo to show his displeasure of the American foreign policy that ignored the rights of the Palestinians. When the Iranian revolution happened, instead of Feisal, there was a religious figure who challenged the supremacy of the West.

That kind of possibility was ruled out long ago. From the s, religion was simply a culture. For the social scientists, without warning, there was a paradigm shift. If the scholarship on the Middle East had concluded the need for modernization through secularization, Khomeini revealed a complete departure from that paradigm of secular, political leadership of the Middle East countries.

In fact, political scientists even now seem to be oblivious of the religion factor in analyzing Middle East politics. Already there were problems between Israelis and Palestinians, and more and more we, scholars of Islamic studies, were being sucked into the politics of Western relations and interventions in the Middle East as information analysts.

The media depended on us to be the supporters of their preconceived theses about the events in the Middle East. AT : Was it difficult to speak to some of these stereotypical ready-made contexts? AS : Yes, I think it taught me something very important about the media. It was obvious that the media have a thesis about any program involving Middle East or Islam.

They usually have something to prove to the American public. They got us to speak so that they could find confirmation of what they had already decided to project to the people. They raise all the possible questions on the subject, because they want to know whether you are the person who can represent their preconceived views. On many occasions my views were not the same as theirs.

The next thing you hear from them is that they have found someone else to speak on the subject; or, they never call you back. On one occasion, PBS called me for their evening newscast. The subject was the situation created by endless violence in Iraq in post As such, I was willing to share my insights. After their initial interview by phone they decided that they would call another Middle East expert.

Close to the news hour, the other professor became unavailable. PBS called me back and requested me to come for the story on Iraq. By that time, I had already committed myself to a different meeting and I turned them down. There was always a struggle with the media because the media sometimes uses the expert to get all the basic information they need and publish a very short comment from the expert.

What appeared in the article in New York Times was only one sentence by me. They had spoken for two hours with me. My ideas were here and there in that article, but what was quoted from me was a sentence to support what they wanted to present in the newspaper. The journalists have no time to verify the information they put in their article.

Hence, one does not expect them to provide deep inquiry. Surely, when an academic like yourself speaks to some of these issues as a public intellectual, where do you see your role? AS : I think the media uses the expert and then labels them. Working with the media is one of the hardest things that I have come across in my profession. You become their star if they can detect their line of thinking in you.

They avoid taking a chance with too independent an expert. Since that interview BBC has not spoken to me, because I had disagreement with one of their favorite spokespersons. It shows that the media claim of evenhandedness or impartiality in their journalism is relative. The problem with the experts is one of self-importance and self-promotion.

That inclination takes away the impartiality they claim to have pursued in their being consulted or interviewed. AT : Do you think this problem is shared by the academia today as well? AS : As I stated just now, the claims to objectivity are at the most relative if not outright inscrutable. My sojourns in Iran, Iraq and other Muslim countries equip me with the reliable and deeper knowledge of the region and their peoples.

I am in touch with these countries very intimately. The case of, for instance, a scholar who has not visited these countries or peoples, or has a defective knowledge of the languages that are spoken in these regions has a disadvantage in representing them in his research and writings. AT : This may be a good transition to some of the questions on your own pedagogy.

Tell us a little bit about your relationship to your own students. Your transition from a traditional study of Islam to the University of Toronto raises questions about your own relationship to your students and the way they shape yours and you shape their thinking. Do you have any rising stars in your courses? AS : Let me start by saying that I have had an extremely fruitful relationship with my graduate students as far as learning is concerned.

They come to me sometimes knowing the languages of the region, sometimes without any knowledge of the region. I never hesitated to train them. I have hardly trained any Muslim student, except for one or two. Most of my students have been Christians. In other words, in the forty years that I have trained students, I have trained a number of them without insisting that they follow my methodology.

I have allowed my graduate students to develop their own methodology. However, I have always emphasized upon them to be critical, and to demonstrate their points with evidence from the sources that are primary rather than secondary. If they quote secondary sources, then they must engage the secondary sources in their evaluation of the substance that they find objectionable.

More importantly, I have insisted upon my students not to hesitate to critically evaluate my own scholarship and express their counter-arguments without any fear. These indicators could be methodological or textual or contextual. You use these indicators in order to develop your ideas and your method of interpretation. So my academic energies are invested to seek independence from me, as far as substance goes, but listening carefully to what I teach them in terms of the rules of engagement.

How do you engage a text that you are unfamiliar with? You might also have some pre-understanding about it—how do you rid yourself of the pre-understanding in order for you to develop a kind of involvement that is necessary to produce the best work that you are capable of creating. And the best work, in my opinion, is a combination of, first, a good methodology, and second, the evidence and documentation produced by looking at primary sources.

By the way, this is a major problem that I face in my teaching in modern American university. I have built a reputation of training good students in Islamic studies and other institutions in North America are expecting these students trained by me to do outstanding work in teaching and publishing. I get requests from other universities to introduce candidates who can teach Islam, preferably those trained by me.

My work is to make sure that students who work with me are capable of reading original Arabic texts. If they cannot read a text in the original language then they cannot produce original research. My own approach is that if I am studying a topic on which there is no information available from the classical texts, then I do not pursue the subject unless there is a demand for that by other readers.

I feel uncomfortable to talk about something without going through the classical texts, without first of all exploring the tradition in its original sources. That is part of my strategy to render the scholarship credible. Classical sources provide necessary anchor to introduce a new subject. Hence, I move from classical to the modern.

Many of my students are modernists and they try to plug into classical literature. But sometimes they are unable to do it because they do not have good linguistic or cultural training. The way I have worked so far is to keep the language training and fieldwork at the center. One of my graduate students was working on the ethics of IVF clinics in Iran.

He spent whole year in Iran to study these clinics in different cities, conducting interviews with physicians and patients in Persian to understand the culture of infertility and the medical procedures that had been introduced by Assisted Reproductive Technology ART in Iran.

Abdulaziz sachedina biography of william

That is my pedagogy. I start from classical and continue to the contemporary literature on the subject in their original languages. That is more meaningful, in my opinion, and epistemologically, it is more satisfying and carries necessary cognitive validity. I need to make sure that I know my sources and I am able to plug into them, bring them to highlight in order to apply my methodological rules and principles in modern times.

These could be sociological, anthropological issues; or they could be issues related to history, culture, and belief. AT : I hear quite clearly that mastery of research languages and traditional sources is necessary for a successful study of Islam and Middle East. After all, my pedagogy is to reveal a different and innovative way of reading the classical sources, whose familiarity is the only way to overcome the barriers created by the suspicion of academic study of Islam in Muslim countries.

It took me almost ten years because I was not willing to publish immature work on a topic dealing with very sensitive issues connected with life and death without knowing it and dealing with it with thoroughness. I also created a space for conversation with secular bioethics. I tried to bring them in as much as possible, but that required entering a field in which there were hardly any sources that treated the issues related to modern bioethics.

The product that we have in hand at the moment can claim to have some kind of authenticity, reliability being original rather than trying to copy from here and there, and synthesizing information from disparate sources that have appeared in the last twenty years.