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At a time in the history of the world, when religious
intolerance is at an all time high, it’s rare and refreshing
to find a religious scholar who actively and consistently
promotes peace and harmony. Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina
cherishes inclusiveness of all faiths. “The more I study
other faiths, new traditions and various schools of
thought, the more I understand my own faith” says Sachedina.
Professor of Religious Studies at University of Virginia in
Charlottesville he is a recognized expert in Islamic theology,
law, and ethics in U.S.A. He sits with the US
congress and senate on a range of issues from cloning to
biological research and is available to give advice on matters
such as dietary laws in prison to wearing a beard in the police
force.
Apart from academia, Sachedina is an icon among Muslims of North
America for his work in bringing the community together.
Sachedina’s love for learning and imparting knowledge
stems from his childhood. Born in Tanzania where he
completed high school in Dar-es-Salaam, he says “Although my
father died when I was 12, I recall growing up in an atmosphere
that was scholarly and intellectual, where reading was a
tradition. I was drawn to a study of religion, and had a
penchant for teaching and lecturing at a young age.”
Influenced strongly by his mother, Sachedina says, “my
mother was a teacher, public speaker and advocate for women’s
rights and following her footsteps, I taught math, English and
religion at age 13 to children younger than I.” Well on
his way to becoming the powerful orator he is now, at age 17
Sachedina had his first experience in public speaking when
he addressed over a thousand people about the Prophet of Islam
and his teachings. He was a confident young man –
too confident he explains “along with the religious
influences I also inherited certain unhelpful attitudes – a
defensiveness and narrow view of human religiosity so I used to
argue about religion constantly when I was a youth.”
All this changed in 1967
when Sachedina went to Iran to do his B.A. Honors in
Persian language and literature. In Iran he also took
private lessons to learn Arabic and Islamic Sciences i.e. law,
jurisprudence, theology, tradition and history. “One
of the greatest influences in my life and work is that of my
teacher, Dr. Ali Shariati, well known sociologist, historian and
philosopher. Dr. Shariati saw history as an instrument of
recording human experience as it goes through self-development
and my analysis of history is influenced by his teachings.
Dr. Shariati taught us to look at history as a whole,
about inclusiveness and how to strengthen religious
knowledge without sectarianism.”
Commenting on
religious violence, Sachedina laments, “I’m extremely
saddened by people fighting in the name of religion. We can’t
use history to relive our differences – we need to use history
to move on and resolve those differences through dialogue –
not to make the same mistakes. And dialogue is between
equals. We have no right to control the showering of
Divine Mercy on humanity.” Sachedina’s immense passion
for peace shows on the contours of his face and the sadness in
his eyes when he talks about sectarian violence.
“Religion becomes a weakness when used for violence by self -
righteous and ignorant people and ignorance can only be erased
through reading and reflection. “
In his
fervent pursuit of peace and understanding between
communities, Sachedina cites a quotation from
the Qur'an which he used as an introduction to a recent series
of lectures. “…and had God not checked the evil
oppressors among the people …. a great number of monasteries,
churches, synagogues and mosques where God’s names is
mentioned frequently would have been by now destroyed.”
Attended largely by Muslim youth and non-Muslims, the purpose of these lectures was to remove barriers and bring
people together. He moves easily from Arabic to Persian and back to
English, equally comfortable in Swahili, Gujrati, Urdu, Hindi or French
and German.
Author of
numerous books and papers, Sachedina 58, has a soft
spot for Toronto.
“I share a special connection with Toronto for many reasons”
and he proves this by coming to Toronto whenever he can, to
share his knowledge and findings. From 1971 to 1976
Sachedina was a student at the University of Toronto where he
completed his Masters and P.H.D. in Islamic and Middle Eastern
Studies.
“Toronto was my first stint at studying Islam in
the West and it was an eye opener. My teachers
constantly challenged me to look in from the outside. I
had already studied Islam from a religious perspective but
Toronto was an opportunity to study Islam from a historical and
intellectual perspective, a methodology which forced me to be
objective.” He smiles as he recalls, “when I presented
my first dissertation proposal, my professor threw it back at me
calling it defensive and subjective. Fact is, I was
defensive about my faith and I’m grateful to my professors who
forced me to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of my own belief
system, as an outsider.”
Sachedina doesn’t
downplay the efforts of his U of T professors to take him
through this journey without hurting his faith. “It was
a transition from believer to observer and it helped me see the
beauty of Islam as an outsider. Contours and landscape are
always sharper and more attractive from a distance.”
Sachedina’s first job in 1976 was teaching Islam at University
of Waterloo and part-time at Wilfred Laurier University.
“This was a time when Islamic History was a relative stranger
to North American culture – it was considered history of “the
other”. The approach was patronizing and the
methodology, orientalist, but thanks to my professors, I was
prepared for the challenges.”
In forty years
of teaching at various academic institutions all over the
world, and lecturing his own community, Sachedina stresses
the importance of reading and research. “Our community
in general is not a reading community – we tend to read only
that with which we agree and have a comfort level – not
anything that makes us think. This is detrimental to religion.”
The Muslim community, which like many others, is victim of
sectarianism, is not wholly comfortable with Sachedina’s
push for unity and minimizing differences. And Sachedina
has been hurt by the implications. “The community has
difficulty choosing between academic language and the emotional
rhetoric of the mosque. But I am an academic and have a
responsibility towards history and to the community. In
Islam there is freedom to develop scholarship freely and
this means that there is something to be learnt from all
scholarly works – irrespective of faith or sectarian leanings.”
Do the challenges ever deter him? “I believe in the
power of Divine Guidance. When you enjoy what you do, you
find a spiritual reward. I’m exhilarated when I read
books, learn something new, or write a paper and I believe that
from the Islamic perspective, if I stay within the sphere of
what the Qur'an teaches, I’m blessed.”
Without
missing a beat, Sachedina explains that he sits on more than a dozen
advisory and editorial boards including the Encyclopedia of
Ethics, Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, Journal of American Academy of Religion and
Tanenbaum Center for Inter-Religious Understanding to name a few.
To
quench his ongoing thirst for knowledge and to keep himself up to par on
current issues as well as spirituality, Sachedina talks animatedly
about his three current challenges. “I’m working on a
web site course on the mystical dimension of Islamic
tradition which deals with Islamic Art and Architecture as an
expression of Islamic Spirituality. I’m also working on a
project on Islamic law for Muslim Physicians, which undertakes to
investigate judicial rulings in the section of Islamic law that deals
with issues of bio-ethics. Another project is a comparative Study
of Legal Methodology in Islamic Schools of Legal Thought.” In
the latter project Sachedina is developing the work of Muslims jurists
from five schools of Islamic law
– four Sunni and one, Shiite.
Sachedina has a wife and
two children and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. His latest
publication is The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and his website at University
of Virginia is: www.people.virginia.edu/`aas/home.htm
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