By: Zainab Salam, Editor-in-Chief with contributions from Petra Chase, Features Editor
If you’re studying political science, international studies, or history at SFU, you’re likely to have had the pleasure of encountering this remarkable professor. Having taken a course previously instructed by him (IS 302: Humanitarian Intervention), I conducted a video interview with Dr. Amyn Sajoo last fall.
“It’s certainly been a very long journey,” Sajoo recounted during our chat, smiling. “I’ve been very fortunate.” The SFU lecturer and scholar-in-residence was referencing his over four decades of contributions to diverse disciplines.
With a focus on human rights, he’s helped facilitate countless dialogues on an array of topics, including diversity and belonging.
He’s also written and edited volumes of literary works, imprinting a mark on the academic memory.
Sajoo received his doctorate in international human rights at McGill University in 1986. Then, one winter in the early ‘90s, a turning point in his scholarly journey happened. He had been acting as a policy advisor in applied human rights at the Canadian Human Rights Commission in Ottawa. “Out of the blue, I won this competition to accept a fellowship in Southeast Asia,” he recalled, with gratitude. It was through this opportunity at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore that he was sent to do two years of field work in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The result was his foundational book, Pluralism in “Old Societies and New States:” Emerging ASEAN Contexts, published in 1994.
Continuing his research focus on civil society — how people govern themselves and approach society, from non-government organizations to grassroots organizers to individual people — Sajoo was called to London. As a visiting scholar at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, he refined his focus, melding thoughts with other scholars on Muslim ethics and traditions.
These experiences helped him realize that “the secular approach to human rights in the West is not the only approach,” he explained. “It required me to take all my human rights background, and now apply it specifically to how Muslims were governed, and how they had their everyday existence — when you took Islamic thought, Islamic practice, and then the politics in its interplay.”
At SFU, Sajoo continues to bridge worlds. Between ethics and law, his lectures are committed to connecting scholarship with public discourse. In making complex ideas accessible to wider audiences, he demonstrates that research is not confined to academic spaces, but is deeply intertwined with lived experiences.
Interdisciplinary imperative
Islamic studies involves theology, history, philosophy, literature, and political social sciences — all through the lens of Islam and its influences. For Sajoo, it is not a single academic discipline. “There’s no other way of looking at Islamic studies,” he said. “It is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and can’t be reduced to a single department where it’s put into a warehouse.” The key, he explained, is context: the issues being addressed shape which disciplines are brought together.
Islamic studies faces structural challenges in universities. Sajoo pointed to the rigid departmental division that defines academic life. Through the declaration of a major, people are “put into a particular disciplinary area. And this narrows the approach,” he said. Because of this, multifaceted topics in universities like refugee crises or climate change, issues that are very important to what is referred to as the Muslim world, have “very weak means of pulling in Islamic studies at large and bringing that into play.”
He continued, “We haven’t got the intellectual courage or the imagination to say, ‘Interfaith dialogue is a very exciting field to get into, even for universities. And it’s not just some pious thing that should happen in a church, or a mosque, or a temple.’” Sajoo believes it’s important to separate religion from state, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the influence of religion on politics and identity.
The importance of dialogue
For Sajoo, the idea is clear: dialogue is not just a moral imperative, but an intellectual one. Engaging multiple perspectives — sectarian, national, and disciplinary — enriches all approaches to Islamic knowledge. After speaking fondly about intercultural exchange, he expressed excitement about how the digital age helps facilitate global dialogues.
At SFU, the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies promotes scholarship in Islamic studies. Sajoo has been “hosting a conversation series to do with citizenship and identity” with them since 2018. One conversation he highlighted was with Dr. Wenona Hall, last year. Hall is Stó:lō from the Sq’ewqeyl First Nation and SFU’s chair of Indigenous studies. Sajoo spoke of the new terrain Muslims face as settlers on unceded land, as they “now have a relationship with Indigenous Peoples who feel very deeply connected to us on matters like Palestine, minority rights, gender equity.” He noted, “I think our dialogue with Indigenous Peoples [ . . . ] is another thrilling thing to get into as a diaspora citizen.”
For Sajoo, Islamic studies must engage with lived experience. Turath (an Arabic word that means tradition) is dynamic, not static, and human beings navigate religion, ethics, politics, and all other facets of daily life in an intertwined reality. The idea of stewardship, which is present in many religions including Islam, is also crucial to the approach to human rights. It is the idea that “you are accountable, in a very deep way, for leaving the earth a better place than when you came,” he said.
Rethinking historical narratives
History provides remarkable feats of humanity, according to Sajoo. Upon insistence from me, (“It’s like asking a dad to choose his favourite child!” he protested) I had been successful at extracting some of Sajoo’s notable pages of history.
“To me, perhaps the most exciting era would be the 10th and 11th centuries in Cairo. When the Fatimids came from the Western part of North Africa [now Tunisia], they founded the city of Cairo,” he said. Cairo and Baghdad during this period became hubs for Islamic intercultural exchange and dialogue, where academics, artists, and even mental health doctors (the first psychiatric ward in the world) flourished.
Perhaps my favourite reference is to the Islamic Translation Movement which occurred in the 8th and 9th centuries. The movement set out to translate works from all the regions that Muslims, and those living in what was referred to as the Islamic world, had interacted with at that point. This initiative had proved to be incredibly valuable both within its temporal context, and to later generations; it led to preservation of various ancient texts and even helped activate the Renaissance period.
Sajoo is a careful communicator and he places an emphasis on the use of terminology. In our conversation, he expands on his critique of Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order, emphasizing the dangers of reductionism — oversimplifying complex concepts — and determinism — the assumption of the existence of a causal relationship between one phenomena and another. He communicates that Huntington’s framework, which predicts inevitable clashes between a limited number of civilizations, oversimplifies complex histories and denies human agency.
He stressed that societies should be understood in a plural and dynamic manner — as collections of interacting cultures rather than isolated, static entities. This perspective is essential in contemporary discussions of identity and citizenship.
Literature as a lens to truth
Sajoo also highlighted fiction as a vehicle for understanding human experience. While teaching in SFU’s liberal arts outreach program, he helped explore works ranging from South African apartheid, with André Brink’s A Dry White Season, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
“Fiction contains a lot more truth sometimes than non-fiction does,” he explained. “It may not be about facts, but it’s about truth.”
He posits the importance of diaspora literature to hold particular significance, offering insights into identity, belonging, and historical memory. Through literature, ethical and cultural questions come to life in ways traditional scholarship, alone, cannot achieve. The way Islamic history is often viewed through the lens of battles and sultans, or empires and elites, he highlighted, can be “reductive” as it overlooks the lives of everyday people.
Personal passions
Beyond scholarship, Sajoo maintains deep personal interests, notably in literature and chess. Despite the rare spare time, he finds solace and intellectual stimulation in these activities. Chess, in particular, is a meaningful practice. He notes the Persian and Indian roots of the game. He argues that the game mirrors broader patterns of human ingenuity and creativity that was preserved through time.
Sajoo also remarked on the “role of art” in our human existence. “Art is a very powerful place. People let down their guard a little bit and are willing to dialogue a lot more when you share with them the beauty of art.” He includes various mediums of art, such as the visual mediums and poetics. “It breaks the barriers between people. There is a shared appreciation of the aesthetics.” He encourages exploring the Gibson Art Museum at SFU on The Mountain of Lhuḵw’lhuḵw’áyten (Burnaby Mountain) campus.
A subject of interest for Sajoo is the intersection of environmental ethics and Islamic heritage. “Climate change is such a big issue,” he noted. Sajoo hosted professor Peter Dauvergne from UBC for an interview, in 2018, where they discussed Dauvergne’s book: Environmentalism of the Rich.
Sajoo is an encyclopedia. You can browse his extensive catalogue in the SFU library. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to witness him as a lecturer you can do so by watching his highly informative lecture, Populism, Citizenship, and Religion, on Vimeo.
