On December 3, 2025, the international community of Islamic Studies lost one of its most erudite and humane members: Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina. Like many scholars, I first encountered Sachedina through his writings on Islamic pluralism and ethics—fields closely aligned with my own interest in modern and contemporary Islamic thought. His strong conviction that Islamic teachings are and will remain highly relevant for Muslim and non-Muslim societies, if reasonably and honestly contextualized, is evident in his major works. Among these are The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (2000), Islamic Biomedical Ethics (2009), and Islamic Ethics (2022). His earlier scholarship, rooted in his doctoral research, explored the concept of justice in Shiite Islam through the figure of the “Hidden Imam”—the Islamic Messiah. This culminated in The Just Ruler in the Twelver Shiism (1988), later revised and republished as The Just Ruler in Shiite Islam (1998). Sachedina also co-edited several volumes on the Islamic world and human rights, collaborating with renowned scholars such as John Esposito and David Little.
My acquaintance with Sachedina’s work began when I was reading about how contemporary Muslim scholars address challenging modern issues in theology, philosophy, legal theory, ethics, freedom, and human rights. I found Sachedina remarkably balanced, occupying a thoughtful middle ground between “tradition” and “modernity,” a position that resonated with how I was developing my own understanding of religion in modern times and contexts, and of Islam in particular. He cited Shiite and Sunni scholars alike, and it took me many years to learn that he was himself a Shiite, an observant Muslim who had also learned Sunni ways from his father by attending Sunni mosques in Tanzania. One could easily sense a spiritual dimension and ethical depth in his arguments. In his writings on religion in the public sphere—for instance, in the years following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq—he called for de-sectarianism and for pluralism as the only viable path toward the emergence and consolidation of democracy in Islamic societies. The same Islamic ethos permeates his innovative work on biomedical ethics.
Sachedina was born in Tanzania in 1942, where he was raised and educated at a time when the country was still under British colonial rule. His mother became both his educator and spiritual mentor after his father’s death, as he recounts in a long 2017 interview with The Maydan—a major source of details on his life. Because of financial limitations, he continued his studies not in Britain but in India, after working for about three years in a bank. He enrolled at the renowned Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), one of the subcontinent’s most important institutions of Islamic education, founded by the acclaimed reformist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He earned his first BA there, studying Philosophy, Political Science, and Islamic Studies. From AMU, Sachedina moved to Iran in 1965, and later spent significant periods in Iraq and Jordan to further study the classics—both Sunni and Shiite—in their original languages, especially Arabic and Persian, alongside some Ottoman Turkish. He also studied French at AMU and acquired Urdu, Gujarati, and Hindi, in addition to his native Swahili. He completed a second BA, in Persian Language and Literature, in 1971. Sachedina often remarked that he was lucky to study under some of the brightest Iranian scholars of the time, in both religious seminaries and modern universities. He studied at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and also at the madrassa of Ayatollah Milani.
Most important to note about his scholarly sojourn in Iran is that Sachedina also studied under Ali Shariati, the famous Iranian social scientist, scholar of religion, and public intellectual of the years preceding the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution. Shariati’s works have been translated into multiple languages across the Muslim world, and his ideas continue to resonate widely and to be studied in universities around the globe. Sachedina admired Shariati—much like many of his peers, who took pride in the Islamic tradition as well as in Iranian national history and its transformative potential. And Shariati, for his part, apparently appreciated Sachedina, valuing the fact that he was not “Westoxicated,” meaning not blindly imitative of whatever comes from the modern “West,” and that he possessed a strong command of the Arab–Persian Islamic classics. (“Westoxication,” or Gharbzadegi in Latinized Farsi, is a term coined by the Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad and popularized by Shariati.) Sachedina recalled that his friendship with Shariati continued until the latter died in London in 1977.
Sachedina’s multiple academic foundations were further developed at the University of Toronto in Canada, where he received a scholarship for another MA, which eventually culminated in a PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 1976. This period marked a transition from simply reading historical texts to applying historicist approaches to them in light of modern socio-cultural and political developments. For him, historicism reinvigorated his critical energies and strengthened his belief that the Islamic tradition—when examined with intellectual honesty—can continue to enrich our understanding of its past realizations and enable relevant reinterpretations for the future. This intellectual orientation underpinned his publications on Islamic pluralism, Islamic biomedical ethics, and, ultimately, Islamic ethics for general human conduct.
Through Reset DOC, I reached out to him to join our seminars in North Africa, held in Casablanca in July 2019. During the Seminars, where he delivered a conference talk and taught several sessions to the Summer School students, he offered a masterful synthesis of his work. The students greatly appreciated both his insights and his pedagogical approach. I can still recall how he repeatedly emphasized that his defense of democracy and pluralism was “anchored in Islam,” as my handwritten notes from that event attest. In the week since his passing, I have read several tributes written by established academics in North American universities. They all emphasized Sachedina’s great humanity and the warmth he brought to his teaching—placing ethical relations between professor and student at the forefront of the learning process. He must have been influenced by the classical Islamic seminaries/madrassas in which the lived ethics of the professor-instructor are inseparable from their erudition, and where erudition is considered null and void if not accompanied by ideal comportment, or at least good comportment.
This characteristic was the reason behind the development of the historical science of biography writings (‘ilm al-tarajim, or ‘ilm al-tabaqat wa ‘ilm al-rijal) in the Arab-Islamic scholarly formative period. One’s influence in society as a scholar and community leader was, first of all, the story of a correct, just, and ideal/good human being. Sachedina, by all accounts, embodied this classical ideal. It is no surprise, then, to read in his biographical notes that he served the Muslim communities in Canada when he was a student, and later in Virginia, where he spent the last five decades of his university career. He served as professor and chair of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) at George Mason University from 2012 to 2025, after having chaired the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia from 1976 to 2012. He also chaired the Board of Directors of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) between 2005 and 2010, playing an important role in conversations with Muslim scholars worldwide on democracy and human rights. In addition, Sachedina made multiple media appearances after the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution and also after the 9/11 attacks. In these interventions, he consistently sought to distinguish among the diverse interpretations of political Islam and to clarify what mainstream Muslims believe and aspire to—namely, dignity and social justice, which, in his view, pluralism and democracy can offer.
Since the Casablanca Seminars of July 2019, I remained in contact with Sachedina, and through him, I learned of the newly established Center for Islam in the Contemporary World (CICW), directed by Dr. Ermin Sinanovic, at Shenandoah University in Virginia. I became a non-Resident Fellow of the Center for six months in 2021. This fellowship allowed me to meet another towering figure—Muslim physicist and philanthropist Dr. Yaqub Mirza—who, remarkably, passed away on the same day as Sachedina. The two men knew each other well. Dr. Mirza sponsored various research initiatives related to Muslims in the United States, including the creation of the CICW. This is only one example—drawn from my own experience, and from across the Atlantic—of the kinds of connections that Sachedina helped to forge in the service of scholarship, research, and the communities he cared so deeply about.
I had the chance to meet Sachedina again at a conference on Islamic Ethics that Professor Abdulkader Tayob organized in Cape Town, South Africa, in January 2022. I later wrote a review for the Brill Journal of Ethics on his book Islamic Ethics. It was through this book that I came to understand Sachedina’s intellectual position more clearly and to situate him within the broader intellectual map I have been attempting to construct on modern and contemporary Islamic scholarship, particularly with respect to ethics, pluralism, and democracy. It is through a scholar’s stance on ethics that we can discern their ontological and epistemological views—and, consequently, their ideas about reform and change.
In my reading, Sachedina believed—like many classical and contemporary scholars of Islam— that the Quranic message and the Prophetic example are ethical, and that law and ethics were interchangeable. In Islamic Ethics, he writes: “The thrust of Islamic revelation, more specifically the Qur’an, was to guide humanity toward good character and decent conduct founded upon justice.” He adds: “Islam emerged to organize a religious world community that needed both law and ethics”; and again: “Islam provided the key element of human moral responsibility by setting forth the thesis of human creation with an infused scale of moral judgement (fiṭra).” In other words, he held that ethics in Islam are intrinsic to the tradition rather than a later development—hence his conviction that they can still offer much to humanity at large if appropriately re-contextualized. While he leans toward the rationalist Mutazilite school to ground ethics in reason across different contexts—thus his historicist approach to legal prescriptions—he nonetheless remains a transcendentalist in the sense that revelation continues to function as a call beyond time and space, still capable of inspiring and guiding through its intrinsic ethical force. I place him in the category of “realist idealists,” to borrow a term from the Syrian-American scholar Louay Safi.
Sachedina’s realist idealism is what I cherished when I first began reading him some two decades ago, and it is what I later came to recognize in the many other dimensions of his life engagements that initiated before I was born. His confidence in faith, combined with an epistemological modesty expressed through his defense of pluralism, touched many who encountered him. He will be missed both as a kindhearted person and an erudite scholar “anchored in Islam.”
All the pictures were taken at the Reset DOC Casablanca Seminars in 2019. All reproduction rights are reserved.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to see and interact with our latest contents.
If you like our stories, events, publications and dossiers, sign up for our newsletter (twice a month).