Abstract:ÌýIt is one of the ironies of our time that a global consensus on social governance, pluralism and the rule of law as the pillars of mature democratic life has never been stronger – yet achieving those goals seems harder today than at the end of the Cold War. Religious traditions that should enrich the quest for inclusive, accountable and ethical lives have too often become captive to the politics of exclusion, inequity and violence. And not only in the developing world, where most of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims live. In the West too, seemingly liberal societies have frequently failed to uphold their traditions – notably since September 11th, 2001.
Author
Dr Amyn Sajoo
Amyn B. Sajoo is aÌýat Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies in Vancouver, Canada. A specialist in international human rights, civil society and public ethics, Dr Sajoo was educated at King’s College London and McGill University, Montreal. He has taught at the University of British Columbia, McGill, Simon Fraser University and The Institute of Ismaili Studies, and was a 2005 Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University.
Dr Sajoo earlier served as a human rights advisor with the Canadian department of Justice in Ottawa. He also served as a Canada-ASEAN Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, where his fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia culminated in the monographÌýPluralism in Old Societies and New StatesÌý(1994). He subsequently led a comparative civil society seminar project at the ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡, and was editor of the ensuing volume,ÌýCivil Society in the Muslim World: Contemporary PerspectivesÌý(2002).
As the chief editor of the ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡â€™ÌýMuslim Heritage Series, Dr Sajoo launchedÌýA Companion to the Muslim WorldÌýin 2009, which was followed byÌýA Companion to Muslim EthicsÌýin 2010 andÌýA Companion to Muslim CulturesÌýin 2011. His work on plural modernities resulted in the edited volumeÌýMuslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil ImaginationÌýin 2008.ÌýDr Sajoo is the author ofÌýMuslim Ethics: Emerging VistasÌý(2004), and has contributed extensively to scholarly journals and anthologies, as well as to the newsmedia on both sides of the Atlantic – including theÌýGuardian, theÌýGlobe & Mail, theÌýTimes Higher Education Supplement, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
The latest volume in the Muslim Heritage Series, published in 2018 isÌýThe Shari‘a: History, Ethics and Law