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Toronto Star
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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