Ziauddin Sardar > Quotes

“Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilization: it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one's way of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one's Self.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Black Skin, White Masks

“A moral compass does not cease to function because one's surroundings are new and strange, or else it is no compass at all.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City

“1. The economic wave of liberalization that began in the 1980s has achieved global proportions after the fall of Communism. Markets became free from all state constraints and capital could now move across borders with ease. Multinational corporations could move from country to country in their quest for cheap labour and tax exemptions.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“Basing his work on F.R. Leavis’s (1895–1978) ideas on literary criticism, Hoggart argued that a critical reading of art could reveal “the felt quality of life” of a society. Only art could recreate life in all its rich complexity and diversity.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“2. Liberal democracy is widely accepted across cultures from Eastern Europe to Africa, along with its symbolic associations: respect for human rights, environmental protection, cosmopolitanism etc.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“Diaspora, from the Greek, means “dispersion”.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“Sir Thomas Roe in 1605 to establish a company in India,”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“3. Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“4. In postmodern feminism, gender and race do not have a fixed meaning. Each individual is seen as a composite of elements from a range of available modes of subjectivity. While these elements may be contradictory in themselves, they are appropriate in different contexts. No one is naturally male or female. Femininity and masculinity are socially constructed and are a site of political struggle about meaning.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“What remained of that Baghdad, I wondered? The Baghdad of fountains of knowledge. The Baghdad at the centre, the fulcrum of a globalized culture that went on to humanize Europe: the Baghdad that taught Europe the distinction between civil society and barbarism, the difference between medicine and magic, and the importance of experimental method; the Baghdad that trained the West in scholastic and philosophic method, drilled it in making surgical instruments, told it how to establish and run hospitals and provided it with the model of a university complete with curriculum and syllabus, terminology and administrative structure; the Baghdad that schooled Europe in the importance of biography, the novella, the history of cities and historical and textual criticism. In short, the Baghdad that gave Europe its most prized possession: liberal humanism. By what intellectual conjuring trick had Europe self-servingly made the reality of its cultural debt disappear into a fairy-tale dream of Sinbad, Aladdin, harem ladies in diaphanous veils, the subject matter of pantomime and other such dissembling misrepresentations?”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim

“4. And finally, Synthesis: a theory self-contained, yet linked by analogy to other theories.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“2. Repetition and Imitation which amounted to unreflective mimicry of European and American theories.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“3. Repetition and Difference which used contemporary criticism to read Black texts, but critiqued the theory implicitly.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“Time is a dimension of human understanding, a challenge to our assumptions, imagination and our ability to make and, on occasion, break connections.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City

“The best richness is the richness of the soul;”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Islam: A Graphic Guide

“second definition came into use when feminists realized that society not only influences personality and behaviour, but also the ways in which the body appears.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“1. Feminist liberal politics stresses the importance of equality and opportunity in such areas as employment, access to education and childcare.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“we spend one-third of our lives immersed in the media. Our abilities to speak, think, form relationships with others, even our dreams and our own sense of identity are now shaped by the media. So, studying the media is studying ourselves as social creatures.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Media Studies: A Graphic Guide

“Pop fiction falls between the private and personal world of the home and the outside world of the publishers, studios, record labels and broadcasters, massive corporations which threaten to turn the most fundamental quality of human beings – our unending love of communication – into big business and, at its worst, propaganda.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Media Studies: A Graphic Guide

“2. Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture as though it was a discrete entity divorced from its social or political context. Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyse the social and political context within which it manifests itself.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“3. Marxist feminists view gender as a cultural phenomenon. Differences in women’s cultural practice are not seen as signs of essential differences between the sexes.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“4. Finally, Said defines Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“5. Black and non-Western feminists concentrate on racism and colonialism, and view these as tools for understanding gender relations. For black women, race remains an essential form of oppression.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“We live in an age of scepticism where the power of words as persuaders is continually and increasingly questioned. From advertising slogans and their glib promises to the endless examples of broken promises and failed utopias of political rhetoric, or indeed the murderous promises inspired and fulfilled on the basis of such rhetoric, we take words with a large pinch of reasonable doubt. We reach for alternative forms of corroboration. However, when other proofs are absent we are thrown back to the phrase that once ruled the London Stock Exchange: 'My word is my bond'. An assessment of human nature - the quality, character and actions of a person - is what determines the probability whether verbal claims are credible. The word is indeed our last resort.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City

“1. The Black Aesthetic which linked Black literature and the struggle for Black Power and repudiated white literary critical methods.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“Archaeological evidence, however, is not our only source of insights into history. Our window into the past includes words as well as memories, what today is known as oral history. Learning about the past from words requires a kind of detective work. Humanity's written records are a jigsaw full of gaps that need to be filled. The gaps exist for no other reason than that writers of yesteryear were not writing for today's audiences. They had their own concerns, their own reasons to write, and no requirement to answer today's questions.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City

“3. Orientalism, Said insists, always “overrode the Orient”. As a system of thought, “it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq or Arabia. Similarly, a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“What is done with one's vision of the past has enormous implications for how present realities are handled and the quality of idealism that can be applied to shaping the future.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City

“Racism developed as a set of ideologies and pseudoscientific doctrines after the Renaissance, especially with the industrialization of Europe and the process of colonization.”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide

“the Quraysh leadership and remained”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City