DESPERATELY SEEKING PARADISE
By Ziauddin Sardar
Published in Hardback (June 2004)
By Granta Books
368 pages
ISBN 0 862016502
Guide Price: £16.99

Ziauddin Sardar is one of the world's foremost Muslim intellectuals, and author of more than forty books on science, religion and contemporary culture. Now he shows a flair for immensely readable autobiography in this funny and moving account of his life as a restless believer.

'Desperately Seeking Paradise' is a unique and candid memoir of a journey inside Islam. As a young student in London, Sardar sets out on a quest to grasp the meaning and contemporary relevance of religion, and hopefully to find 'paradise'. In the feverish atmosphere of the seventies, Sardar experiments with the mystical branch of Islam, Sufism and with classical Islam, joining the study group of a famous Sudanese scholar.

Sardar then sets off on extensive travels through the Muslim world; to Iran, the Middle east, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Turkey, north Africa, Pakistan and China. On his travels, Sardar meets other Muslims and speaks to them about their beliefs and he yearningly describes Islam's Golden Age when Muslim culture and civilisation was at its zenith.

Sometimes his spiritual journey nearly ends in despair - after hopes for the Iranian revolution are dashed, after the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and after events of September 11 2001. He gains sustenance from a group of like-minded intellectuals committed to forging a middle, humane way between western secularism and Islamist certainty. But will he ever reach paradise?

'Desperately Seeking Paradise' is self-mocking, frank and passionate, and rare for the insight it gives into the experience of being a devout but questioning Muslim in the tumultuous decades of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. At a time when the view of Islam in the West is often distorted or simplistic, it is essential reading.

ABOUT ZIAUDDIN SARDAR

Broadcaster and columnist Ziauddin Sardar was born in 1951 in Dipalpur, North Pakistan and migrated with his family to London as a child. He has worked as an information scientist, journalist and lecturer and has published some forty books, most recently the international bestseller 'Why Do People Hate America?' written with Merryl Wyn Davies. He is a regular contributor to the New Statesman.