Ziauddin Sardar and Liberal Islam

I have just attended a talk by Ziauddin Sardar in conjunction with Edinburgh International Book Festival 2005. He was talking about change in Islam; and what is being done to reform Islam from within. He was saying, among other things, is that the problem with Islam is its Shari'ah and its interpretation by scholars. He claimed that Shari'ah is not absolute and divine, hence it can be re-interpreted to suit the present age. He cited two problems with regard to Shari'ah: first is the criminal punishment or hudūd, he said and second is the family law such as marriage-divorce issue, inheritance between males and females and others. He seemed to be impressed with the Liberal Islam movements in Indonesia and other parts of the world, especially in Morroco. He drew much of his talk from his book Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim. I don’t need to comment much on what he has said in the book since there is already a beautiful review of it which you may find in this blog. Suffice for me to conclude here that Sardar has confused himself between the “permenance”(al-thubut) characteristics of Islam and its “flexibility”(al-murunah), and between Shari'ah and Fiqh. This perplexity has further led him to having such a facile and shallow kind of reasoning and analysis on Islam. He is truly a skeptic, as he claimed.