Sardar insists the interpretation of the Qur'an requires focus on four specific contexts. First, one needs to examine the context of the text itself and see what it is saying about the same subject in different places. Second, one needs to examine it in the context of the life of Prophet Muhammad and see what is happening to him, what is the event or the circumstances on which the Qur'an is commenting. Third, one must appreciate the verses of the Qur'an within the specific social, cultural, political and technological context of the Prophet's time – they often address the Prophet and his followers, and it speaks to them in the historical context in which they lived. The Qur'an is a text revealed in history. Fourth, we can only interpret the Qur'an according to our own contemporary understanding so we also bring our own social and cultural context into play. The contextual analysis of the Qur'an, Sardar suggests, shows that not everything in the Sacred Text is universal – many verses have significance for the time they were revealed. The universal message of the Qur'an can only be derived by examining its concepts and basic themes. The Qur'an, he argues, 'calls for rational, considered thought and interrogation not of appearances but of the deeper implications and meaning of how human beings think and act within and between all the diversity of our cultures, histories, languages and beliefs'. Science and empires As a child of parents who lived under the Raj as the colonial government was known in British India, much of Sardar's writings are about what happens to people, languages and institutions when one country is taken over by another country or empire. These ideas form the backbone to the second volume of his memors: Balti Britain (Granta, 2008). He has also written extensively on the relationship between knowledge and power, and on the development of scholarship that was designed to serve the needs of empire. Sardar argues that many advances in modern science and technology happened because of the needs of the military of European nation-states, or the many priorities of colonial authorities. In that sense he can be seen as a social-constructivist: someone who believes that the direction of science is dictated to a large extent by the social, political, cultural and financial priorities of societies and of those who fund science. During the 1980s, while working for Nature