What does it mean to search for paradise in a world that keeps remaking hell?

In Desperately Seeking Paradise, one of the world’s leading Muslim thinkers, Ziauddin Sardar, embarks on a lifelong quest to understand Islam and its place in the modern world. From his student days in 1970s London to journeys across Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and beyond, Sardar wrestles with faith, identity, and the allure of both mysticism and revolution. Along the way, he encounters the contradictions of a civilization once radiant in its “Golden Age” yet now struggling amid dogma and division.

Witty, irreverent, and profoundly human, this candid memoir captures the doubts and discoveries of a restless believer seeking a “middle way” between rigid fundamentalism and soulless secularism. It is both an adventure of ideas and a moving portrait of what it means to live, question, and believe in turbulent times.