What links the West and the Muslim world is that both have multiple identities, writer Ziauddin Sardar tells Arminta Wallace
I'm baffled and, if the truth be told, a little bit miffed. I've phoned the writer and broadcaster, Ziauddin Sardar, at the appointed hour, only to be answered by an unshaven growl, which goes: "Can you call me back in one hour and half please?" The phone is then put down.
My mind goes into overdrive. Is Sardar being held by Islamic extremists who don't want him talking to the media? Or is his reluctance based on something more subtle, to do with the fact that I'm a woman, maybe? And - most importantly of all - after this unexpected hitch, will I still make my deadline? Happily, I'm too busy to brood. I do something else, and 87 minutes later on the dot - hell hath no fury like a female hack scorned - I dial the number again.
"Sorry about this morning, and thanks for calling back," says the cheerful voice at the other end of the line. There is, it turns out, no more sinister explanation than that Sardar was out on the town until very late, celebrating the Orange Prize triumph of the British-Jamaican writer, Zadie Smith, and her book, On Beauty.
"I was fast asleep when you phoned," he admits.
Interesting, though, how the mind works. I believe myself to be a reasonable person, well-disposed towards Islam - yet at the first sign of a hiccup in the course of an assignment involving an Islamic writer, even one whose ideas I've found to be particularly sympathetic, what's the first thing that occurs to me? Negative stuff to do with extremism and misogyny.
Just as well, then, that Sardar's talk at this week's Dublin Writers Festival, in association with Critical Voices, is titled Writing Connections: Bridging the Divide Between Islam and Europe.
"I think there is a serious gap of understanding between Islam and the West," he says. "In the West, the dominant view of Islam is the one that's presented by the extremists; but, of course, Muslims are a human community, and as with any human community you will get ranges of opinion, from one extreme to another with moderate and liberal in the middle. So I think the first thing to point out is that there are lots of varieties of Islam out there."
The problem is compounded, he adds, by the fact that the lack of communication works both ways.
"Most Muslims see the West in a mirror image of how the West has conventionally described the Muslims," says Sardar. "As licentious, violent, a monolithic body intent on invading Muslim countries, and so forth, with no distinction made between America and the various countries of Europe. So the first thing to do is to recognise that this divide comes from both sides."
Where there is a divide, of course, there is little or no space for dialogue - which allows both sides to claim they have a monopoly on truth.
"Believing in 'the truth' is very quickly transformed into 'we know the truth' - with a capital T," he says. "And from there to 'we own the truth'. This transformation from 'knowing' to 'owning' is very serious."
Like the communication divide, the truth divide also operates in a monolithic way, with Osama Bin Laden, for example, claiming that his version of Islam is the only correct one, while western secularists, in turn, insist that their version of liberal democracy is the only way to be human.
"The function of the writer is to illustrate that there are numerous ways to be human," says Sardar. "Particularly writers of fiction. I think this is what really good classic fiction actually does."
It is surprising to hear Sardar mention fiction - or maybe not. As a quick glance at his biography on the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, shows, he has written books on an extraordinary array of topics, from Aliens R Us: the Other in Science Fiction Cinema through Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars to the bestselling Why Do People Hate America? He has made films for the BBC, including the recently broadcast Battling for Islam. He edits the monthly policy journal, Futures, is co-editor of a critical journal of visual art and culture, and writes a column in the New Statesman, in which he discusses everything from the dilemma - for a Muslim man - of facial hair to the merits of alternative medicine.
This magpie range of interests is not accidental, but a result of Sardar's philosophy of life.
"In the kind of world we live in, there's nobody who doesn't have multiple selves," he says. "And globalisation has enhanced this. Whatever happens around the world, we are aware of it almost instantaneously now - so we are becoming more and more conscious of these multiple selves.
"I have multiple identities. I'm British, I'm Pakistani, I'm a Muslim, I'm a writer, I'm a father. And each identity has rich overtones. So I must be careful to look at your identity, and that of others, in the same way; and when I write, I need to be sure that I represent you not as a monolithic entity but in your multiple selves."
He calls this his "Mad" notion, or Mutually Assured Diversity, and he sees it as a crucial ingredient of a multicultural globalised world.
"It's everybody's responsibility, and everybody's challenge, to move away from monolithic views towards this idea of mutually assured diversity," he says. "This is where, I think, writers and authors could present different communities in a different way."
In his autobiography, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim, Sardar has put his ideas about diversity into practice. The book is a kind of road trip through a dazzling variety of Islamic landscapes, from the interiorised mysticism of Sufi sheikhs to the sharia-based political activism of the Muslim Brotherhood. It also documents his personal journey and its many stopping-off points: a period as a socialist in Hackney; a hugely influential stint of study with a Sudanese tutor who had studied philosophy with Karl Popper; and, perhaps more influential than anyone (as the book is dedicated to her), his mother.
There is a wonderful scene where Sardar describes a mother-son debate on the thorny topic of firdous, or paradise, as it occurs in the Koran. While making an extremely astute proto-postmodernist point about holistic interpretations and the integrity of the text, this extremely astute mammy manages to remind the 14-year-old Sardar - gently but firmly - that he has been neglecting his prayers. Sardar laughs.
"Well, my mother is a very, very simple woman - simple, but not simplistic," he says. "She has an almost profound simplicity and she is a towering figure, not just in my life but in my sister's as well. She always insisted on two things only. One was that we should be educated to university level at least. And that we should be Muslims - but questioning Muslims, in spite of the fact that she herself is quite traditional. She didn't impose her tradition on us. But she did argue that her tradition should play a part in our lives now."
"She has," he adds with a chuckle, "just gone off to California to spend six months with my sister, who lives there. At the age of 73, she doesn't argue that much any more. She just smiles knowingly."
Sardar stresses that he is not seeking to minimise the difficulty of the international situation we find ourselves in. Nevertheless, he is adamant that writers - indeed, all of us - have a responsibility to move the debate forward, well away from the clash of fundamentalisms towards which conservatives claim the world is inevitably headed. There is, he says, always another way of looking at things.
"When you look at the history of Islam from the perspective of the Crusades, it's almost totally a history of conflict," he says. "But this is just one interpretation. If you look at the history of Islam in Spain, for example, there's a history of co-operation and engagement as well - while the Crusades were going on at the same time.
"That's the thing about human life. Humans are capable of doing a number of different things - even contradictory things - at the same time. And that's what I think writers need to bring out. They really do have to illuminate the contradictions which enrich our humanity."
• Writing Connections: Bridging the Divide Between Islam and Europe, a talk by Ziauddin Sardar, part of the Dublin Writers Festival is at Project, Dublin, on Sat at 6pm
