Zaman Sabaoun Stanizai (Pashto/Dari: زمان سباوون ستانیزی ); is an Afghan academic who lives in the United States. Dr. Stanizai is a Professor of Mythological Studies at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and Professor of Political Science at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He has also taught English, Linguistics, History, American Government, Political Science, Islamic Traditions, and Sufism at various institutions of higher learning such as Kabul University in Afghanistan and several colleges and universities in the United States such as USC the University of Southern California and UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles.
Zaman Stanizai’s research in Linguistics is centered on an analysis of diachronic phonological changes in Indo-Iranian languages concentrating on the Pashto language. He has written on political theory with an emphasis on the viability of third world states encountering globalization, and on political identity focusing on the politicization of ethnic, national, and religious identities as contributing factors in regional and global conflicts and on sub-national and supra-national identities affecting regional instability. He has lectured widely on Islamic contributions to world civilizations reflecting on and contextualizing current conflicts in a historical continuum of human drama.
Dr. Stanizai’s analytical articles on global disenchantment are posted in English in the Cambridge University Open Engage site, George Washington University History News Network, the Middle East Institute website, and the Fountain magazine among others. He blogs on HuffingtonPost.com as well as Stanizai.org. His YouTube Channel carries hundreds of his video lectures and public presentations whose titles are prefixed with his last name for easy reference.
His articles in Pashto and Dari/Persian have been published in AfghanPedia, Rah-e-Madanyat Daily Kabul, ArianaAfghanistan.com, Taand.com, Dawatmedia24.com, and some other publications as well as in Stanizai.com.
Early Life and Education Zaman Stanizai was born in Logar, Afghanistan where he finished his primary education. He later attended Naderia Lycée in Kabul and as a recipient of the American Field Service scholarship attended Anacortes High School in Washington state and graduated as a member of the Honor Society.
He studied English and Education at the College of Education, Kabul University, and upon graduation taught in his alma mater. In the meantime, he gained proficiency in several European and Near Eastern languages.
As a Fulbright scholar, Zaman went to the University of Washington in Seattle to study theoretical Linguistics. He wrote his thesis on “Competing Diachronic Influences on the Pashto Sound System.” Zaman Stanizai returned to Afghanistan and to teach Linguistics at the Kabul University.
He lived through the political turmoil of the late 1970s: the Khalq-Parcham communist coup in 1978 and the Soviet invasion a year later. He lost many close relatives and friends to the communist atrocities, but luckily survived the many threats to his own life. At the end of 1980, Zaman Stanizai was able to escape with his wife and child and came to the United States.
He began teaching at the American Language Institute at the University of Southern California as he pursued his second academic career. Zaman Stanizai earned a second MA degree and a Ph.D. in Political Science at USC. His dissertation is titled: “The Economic and Political Integration of Central and Southwest Asia: An analysis of the Economic Cooperation Organization.
Dr. Stanizai engaged in extensive postdoctoral studies in Islamic mystical thought, Sufism, depth, and sacred psychology concentrating on the philosophical underpinnings of Ibn Arabi’s work and the didactic analysis of Rumi’s thought.
Political Activism Upon arriving in the United States, Stanizai helped organize the Afghan Freedom Society and became its president and the publisher and editor of its publicity organ, Freedom, a newspaper that took up the cause of Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation.
With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Stanizai closed the book on his political activism and became a peace advocate. He eventually became an active member of the Cyprus Peace Talks trying to bring the warring parties in the Afghan conflicts to the negotiating table. The Cyprus Peace Talks laid the groundwork for establishing a democratic system in Afghanistan. The U.S. plans to invade Afghanistan virtually hijacked the Cyprus Peace Talks. The framework of that effort, however, become the blueprint for the Bonn Conference in the post 9/11 world.
Having fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan earlier, Stanizai opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as a matter of principle and kept his distance from the U.S. installed regime in Afghanistan. In fact, as early as September 17, 2001, he was the only voice in the wilderness suggesting negotiations with what he called the ‘moderate Taliban’ instead of invading Afghanistan—something the United States did nineteen years later in 2020 after the loss of thousands of Afghan and American lives and a four trillion-dollar price tag, giving credence once more to Winston Churchill’s famous saying that, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” The more devastating effect of the U.S. invasion, however, was re-empowering of the warlords in ties and turbans who had destroyed the country prior to the rise of the Taliban and who have since held Afghan politics hostage in the name of one or another ethnic group preventing any chance of democracy getting a hold in the Afghan society.
Peace Activism In his peace advocacy, Dr. Stanizai addresses the prevalence of archetypal warrior culture and pursues a pacifist stream of consciousness that can be summed up this way: “Build tomorrow’s bridges from the bricks of yesterday’s walls of separation. Span them across the murky waters of cultural relativism to see yourself in the ‘other’ on the other side.” Dr. Stanizai has a visible presence in gatherings of peace advocacy and in the interfaith community dialogues in Southern California.
Writer - Poet - Thinker In his literary endeavors, Dr. Stanizai explores beauty in the depth of thought through a post-modern perspective. A published poet himself, he has translated the works of Rumi and Hafiz into English and has analyzed the poetry of Rahman Baba whose classical style he emulates in his Pashto and Dari Persian and English verse. His literary work is published in Pashto, Persian, and English.
Dr. Stanizai is the translator and editor of Dancing in the Mosque by the award-winning Afghan author Dr. Homeira Qaderi. (Release date: December 1, 2020 HarperCollins – New York, and March 1, 2020, HarperCollins – London.)
Zaman Stanizai is a deep thinker. His critical views have ruffled the feathers of many traditionalist circles. In politics, he believes in the inviolability of the sovereignty of states. He questions the validity of the nation-state both as a unit of analysis as well as a cohesive unit of the polity. He believes that establishing an Islamic State is not Islamic based on tradition and that neither the Qur’an nor the Prophet of Islam have prescribed any form of government and definitely not a theocracy.
In religion, Stanizai believes that the image and perception of the divine in most faith traditions are obsolete. It neither accommodates the longing of the post-modern inquisitive mind nor does it nourish the yearnings of a modern being in her attempt to connect with the transcendent reality. Stanizai believes that god is too serious a matter to be left to the theologians alone. Theology has failed to engage modernity in a meaningful way. This failure is even greater in the Muslim societies where the shari’a and its jurisprudential rulings are stuck in the misogynistic web of an earlier millennium.
In science, Dr. Stanizai believes that Darwin’s theory of evolution is compatible with early Islamic scholarship such as al-Jāḥiẓ’s (776-869) theories of “natural selection,” and “micro-evolution” explained in his Kitab al-Hayawan, Ibn Muskūyah’s (932–1030) “evolution of man” in his Fawz al-aṣghar, and Ibn Khaldun’s (1332-1406) concept of the "gradual process of creation’ in his Muqaddimah. But more importantly, the theory of evolution is in sync with the Qur’an that presents the androgynous Adam, not as the biblical first human, rather as an evolved early being who attained consciousness, intellectual reasoning, and consequently free will to take responsibility for her/his actions.
In philosophy, Dr. Stanizai believes that the greed of corporate capitalism in the West and the regressive traditionalism in the East has left the world technologically advanced, but spiritually impoverished. In its attempt to ‘develop,’ we have modernized, but in the process, we have disconnected from mother nature. The world is looking for a new beacon of light that would help us sail to a safe shore.