He has written and edited more than 60 books[1] Prospect magazine named him as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals and The Independent newspaper called him: 'Britain's own Muslim polymath'.

[3] His family belonged to the Pashtun warrior clan of Durrani that founded the state that ultimately became Afghanistan after the break-up of Persia following the assassination of Nader Shah in 1747.

[4] Under the Raj, it was official policy to recruit the so-called "martial races" from what is now modern northern India, Pakistan and Nepal into the military.

[7] In 1968, she tried to recruit him into her anti-immigration crusade, arguing that having a Muslim Pakistani immigrant writing for her magazine, New Times, would dispel the charges of racism being made against her.

[9] Sardar was bullied as a teenager by "Paki-bashing" white youths, and he imagined Lady Birdwood as a churail, the seductive, but ferocious female demons of Urdu folklore.

[citation needed] After a five-year stint at King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – where he became a leading authority on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca —– he returned to work as Middle East correspondent of the science magazines Nature and New Scientist.

[citation needed] In 1982, he joined London Weekend Television as a reporter and helped launch the trend-setting Asian programme Eastern Eye.

[citation needed] In the early 1980s, he was among the founders of Inquiry, a magazine of ideas and policy focusing on Muslim countries, which played a major part in promoting reformist thought in Islam.

[citation needed] He came back to London in the late 1990s to work as Visiting Professor of Science Studies at Middlesex University, and write for the New Statesman, where he later became a columnist.

Sardar was amongst the first Commissioners of the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (March 2005 – December 2009); and served as a Member of the Interim National Security Forum at the Cabinet Office, London, during 2009 and 2010.

[citation needed] National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/32) with Ziauddin Sardar in 2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.

In the early 1980s, he edited the pioneering Muslim magazine 'Inquiry', before establishing the Centre for Policy and Futures Studies at East-West University in Chicago.

[citation needed] Science journalist Ehsan Masood suggests that Sardar 'deliberately cultivates a carefully calculated ambiguity projecting several things at once, yet none of them on their own'.