The brutal and rapid rise of the Islamic State has added a whole new dimension to Western foreign policy on the Middle East. With IS apparently “no weaker” after a year-long campaign of air strikes, might US militarism be exacerbating age-old misunderstandings between East and West? Or is it IS who are repeating the mistakes of the past?

Critic and scholar Ziauddin Sardar is among Prospect magazine’s Top 100 Public British Intellectuals, and ‘Britain’s Own Muslim Polymath’ according to The Independent. His interests include Islamic science and transmodernity. Here he speaks to Claire Ramtuhul about interpretation and misinterpretation of Sharia law, and the history of conflict between Islam and the West.


Has the West misunderstood Sharia law? What aspects of Sharia law do you think are often overlooked?

First, it is important to understand that the West has always seen Islam as the alienable other. This means that, historically, the West has three main problems within Islam: the first was to ask why was there a need for a prophet in the Arabian desert, given that Jesus had already died to redeem humanity? The second problem was an intellectual one, because during that period Islam was intellectually in the ascendant, and Europe felt marginalised from the world of science and learning. The third, of course, was the fact that Islam presented a military threat.