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Ismail al-Faruqi's Contribution to the Academic Study of Religion

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Islamic Studies 53:1-2 (2014) pp. 99–115 99

Ismail al-Faruqi’s Contribution to the Academic

Study of Religion
IMTIYAZ YUSUF

Think not of those, who are slain in the way of Allah, as dead. Nay, they are living.
With their Lord they have provision. Qur’┐n 3:169

Abstract
Today, there is a general absence of Muslim academics in the area of academic study of
religion. This paper surveys the contributions of Professor Ismail al-Faruqi as a rare
Muslim academic who pioneered modern age Muslim engagement in this field. His
contributions to phenomenology and history of religion remain largely unrecognised.
The globalising age requires the Muslim academics engage in the academic study of
religion in both confessional and academic ways at the same time. There is a need to
revisit the contributions of Ismail al-Faruqi to find leads and develop new Muslim
approaches to the academic study of religion and its areas of phenomenology and
history of religion, comparative theology and interreligious dialogue employing
philosophically critical and scientific tools without ideologising Islam.



In spite of the fact, that al-B┘run┘ [973–1048] and al-Shahrast┐n┘ [1086–1153] are
recognised as pioneer scholars of the history of religions who in their era
systemised world religions as far as China at a time when Western scholars
were nowhere on the scene. Today’s Muslims scholars do not feature
prominently in contemporary academic study of religion.1 The reasons that
oftenly cited are first, the popular Muslim theological view regards Islam as
the final religion and second, its politicisation.2
Modern academic study of religion began with the European
Enlightenment’s separation of the scientific study of religion from Christian

1
Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1986), 11.
2
Qur’┐n 3:19; Jean Jacques Wardenburg, Reflections on the Study of Religion (The Hague:
Mouton, 1978), 152.
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
100

theology seen in Friedrich Max Müller’s [1823–1900] reference to

Religionswissenschaft—“science of religion” in his 1870s lectures at the Royal
Institute of London.3 Since then there emerged two views about the study of
religion in the modern academia, one, in the social sciences driven by Social
Darwinist reductive or functionalist approaches which view religion as being a
byproduct of culture than an entity in itself and two, the phenomenology and
history of religion inspired by Edmund Husserl’s [1859–1938] philosophical
phenomenology as a academic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of
religion. It is identified with the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher [1768–
1834], Rudolf Otto [1869–1937], Max Müller [1823–1900], P. D. Chantepie de
la Saussaye [1848–1920], Geo Widengren [1907–1996], Åke Hultkrantz [1920–
2006], W. Brede Kristensen [1867–1953], Gerardus van der Leeuw [1890–1950],
Joachim Wach [1898–1955], C. Jouco Bleeker [1896–1983], Mircea Eliade
[1907–1986], Jacques Waardenburg [1930–2015], Max Scheler [1874–1928], Paul
Tillich [1886–1965], Ninian Smart [1927–2001], Jean-Luc Marion [1946],
Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1908–1961] and Paul Ricoeur [1913–2005], et cetera. 4
Ismail al-Faruqi [1921–1986] was the first and foremost Muslim scholar to
engage in the area of modern academic study, teaching and research of religion
in the modern age.
Today, there are only a handful Muslim academics trained in the modern
academic study of religion who engage in the modern and postmodern
philosophies theories of religion. The Majority of universities in the Muslim
world, shun or view modern approaches to the study of religion as well as
other religions, dangerous to the Muslim faith. Thus they teach Islam and
Comparative Religion through confessional, apologetical and exclusivist
modes. While on the other hand, the majority of Muslim social scientists
adopt reductive or functionalist approaches to study and research about
religion as cultural fact. This polorised Muslim approach to knowledge is
unable to offer scientific perspectives on social crisis that cause intra and
interreligious misunderstandings, conflicts and violence in different countries.
Moreover, this modern bifurcated approach to knowledge is unable to build
bridges between religions, cultures and communities nor it offers to carry out
systematic analysis hence failing to solve the social crisis. The divide between
the secularly modern and technically savvy religious nationalists currently

3
F. Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal
Institution in February and May 1870 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1872), 4; Mircea
Eliade and Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa, eds., The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 17–18.
4
Sumner B. Twiss and Walter H. Conser, eds., Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the
Phenomenology of Religion (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992).
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
101

present in all religions is rooted in the epistemology and ontology of violence

materialist philosophy of knowledge and its related worldviews in capitalism,
socialism and the new variant of communist-capitalism model in China.
Faruqi was the first Muslim academic to engage in study and contribute
to the phenomenological and history of religions approaches. He saw these
approaches positively as contributing to the appreciation of Islam: as the part
of the human religious history, enabling Muslim engagement in the modern
study of religion and as a participant in building understanding between
religions in the age of clash of ignorance. Faruqi’s contribution in the area of
modern historical and phenomenological approaches to the study of religion
stands along with the work of non-Eurocentric contributions to the
knowledge such as by Edward Said, Romila Thapar, Syed Hussein Alatas,
Annemarie Schimmel, Nurcholish Madjid, Asghar Ali Engineer, V. Y.
Mudimbe and Walter Mignolo etc.5

Professor Ismail al-Faruqi—The Muslim Trailblazer of Academic Study

of Religion
Faruqi was a trailblazer of what he called Islamics or Islamic Studies in the
modern age. Since the 1960s onwards, he, along with Fazlur Rahman of the
University of Chicago and Seyyed Hossein Nasr of the George Washington
University, each of them with their own perspectives on Islam and Islamic
Studies, were the first three prominent scholars of Islamics in the West. It was
the time when Islamics was making an appearance as a field of study, research,
and discourse at the universities. Each of them made their specialised
contributions to Islamic Studies in the United States; Fazlur Rahman in
Islamic thought and philosophy, Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Islamic mysticism,
and Ismail al-Faruqi towards the study of Islam in the areas of phenomenology
and history of religions and interreligious dialogue, though he is more well
known in the Muslim world for his theory of Islamisation of Knowledge
which is only one among his many intellectual contributions to relationship
between Islam and knowledge.6

5
Isma‘┘l R┐g┘ al-F┐r┴q┘ and David Edward Sopher, eds., Historical Atlas of the Religions of the
World (New York: Macmillan, 1975); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books,
1979); Romila Thapar, Interpreting Early India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Thomas
R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); V. Y.
Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988); Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden,
MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
6
Imtiyaz Yusuf, ed., Islam and Knowledge: Al Faruqi’s Concept of Religion in Islamic Thought
(London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012).
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
102

Al-Faruqi, went beyond that calling for the study of Islam or what he
called as Islamics by aligning it along with then contemporary approaches in
the study of Religion. He broadened the scope of Islamic Studies fit for the
modern age distinguished from the dominant confessional mode.
Trained in philosophy from Indiana University, he also studied Islam at
the al-Azhar University between 1954–1958. In 1958 he took up the position
of visiting fellow at the Faculty of Divinity at McGill University, where he
came into contact with Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Professor
Fazlur Rahman, who was then teaching at the Institute. The latter became his
friend and shared a common mission dedicated to raising the level of Islamic
Studies in the Muslim world. Between 1961 and 1963, al-Faruqi worked as a
visiting professor at the Central Institute of Islamic Research, Karachi,
Pakistan. In the years, 1964–1968 he was appointed as associate professor of
Islamic Studies at the Department of Religion, Syracuse University. In 1968,
he was appointed Professor of Islamics at the newly established Department of
Religion, Temple University, Philadelphia where he remained until his death
in 1986.
Professor Ismail al-Faruqi joined Temple University at the time when the
university changed its status from a private institution to semi-private
institution in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. During this era, the study
of world religions was just being initiated as a new area of academic study.
Temple University’s department of religion, then led by Professor Bernard
Phillips, was launching an ambitious programme in the study of Religion
where all world religions would be promoted as a foundational base for all
branches of knowledge.
Professor Phillips appointed al-Faruqi as a professor of Islamics at Temple
University after reading al-Faruqi’s first seminal article in the area of
interreligious dialogue, titled, “Islam and Christianity: Diatribe or Dialogue”
which was published in the department’s Journal of Ecumenical Studies.7 Al-
Faruqi’s academic and religious frankness expressed in this article landed him a
job at the Department of Religion. Al-Faruqi fitted in well with the general
academic ethos of the department in which

all or most of the players in the venture had previously been transmitting or
receiving their faith among fellow religionists based on the assumption of their
religious truth. Without abandoning their religious convictions, teachers and
students were alike examining long-held convictions in such a way as to help
outsiders to understand the various traditions and appreciate them. The

7
Isma’il Ragi A. Al-Faruqi, “Islam and Christianity: Diatribe or Dialogue,” Journal of
Ecumenical Studies 5, no. 1 (1968): 45–77.
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
103

inevitable result was an increased appreciation of one’s own tradition as it came

to be seen in a setting of others. But this was not the primary purpose of the
exercise. Like all that goes in university or graduate education, the purpose was
the diffusion of knowledge and the dispelling of ignorance. 8

In 1973, al-Faruqi established the Islamic Studies Group in the American

Academy of Religion (AAR) and chaired it for ten years. In other academic
capacities, he also served as vice-president of the Inter-Religious Peace
Colloquium, The Muslim-Jewish-Christian Conference, and was president of
the American Islamic College in Chicago, USA.9
Al-Faruqi brought a comprehensive and an interdisciplinary approach to
the study and research of Islam which combined in it an Islamic rationalist
approach to monotheism. From the perspective of the history of religion, he
located the emergence of Islam as a movement in the Arab monotheistic
tradition—a stream in the universal history of religions.
Al-Faruqi’s contribution lies in four academic areas: Islamics, history and
phenomenology of religion, interreligious dialogue, and Islamic educational
movement in the modern age. His contributions to academia played an
important role in the creation of Islamic Studies programmes at the university
level in the United States and the Muslim world.
Ismail along with his wife Lamya (Lois) al-Faruqi was inhumanly
murdered in their home on 18 Rama╔┐n, 1406/27 May, 1986, by an Afro-
American convert to Islam who had come to know him during his social work
activities with prisoners. After his release, this person used to attend Muslim
social events in Philadelphia which al-Faruqi joined occasionally. The deaths
of the al-Faruqis were unexpected and untimely for us but as willed by Allah.

Al-Faruqi’s Thought
Ismail al-Faruqi’s view of Islam was Arabist without being Arab nationalist.
His Arabism is religion based and is opposed to the race-based nationalism of
modern age. In this view, monotheism is a gift of Arab consciousness to
humanity. Of course, such a position stood opposite to an Orientalist view of
the Middle Eastern religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as separated
entities. For Faruqi, monotheistic-based Arabism is the essence of Semitism.

8
Gerard S. Sloyan, “The Years of Early Growth (Temple University, Department of Religion
1965–85),” (unpublished personal memoirs, in my possession). Professor Sloyan a Roman
Catholic priest and is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Temple University, he was one among
the early lecturers to join the Department of Religion, Temple University. He is now 95 years
old (in 2014).
9
Yusuf, Islam and Knowledge, 61–68.
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
104

He blended within himself the different intellectual Islamic trends of

rationalism, theological meticulousness, and historical criticism, with the goal
of illustrating his thesis that monotheism represents the Arab (Semitic) Stream
of Being made up of monotheistic moments, i.e., Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. He preferred to call this stream of being an Arab rather than Semitic,
for the latter name is an invention of Biblical scholars over the last two
hundred years. Faruqi saw his task as to prove through his and the works of
Biblical scholars who had earlier established the shared linguistic and ethnic
identity of Arabs/Semites; a shared stream of being the shared religious and
aesthetic unity of Arabic monotheism. This thesis came under strong criticism
of Western scholars of the Middle East and Islam. Professor T. Cuyler Young
[1900–1976] described it as, “totalitarian Arabism (which) swallows up all that
has been normally associated with Semitism.”10 Faruqi replied,

I am trying to establish in a scholarly and academic way, the identity of the

ideological or religious core of the ancient Near Eastern religions with that of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For the Semitic tradition is a unity, a stream of
being, which had many moments, each of which was a development of what
went before it, but never a repudiation or about-face. The later religions, i.e.,
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are just as moments as the religions of Assyria
and Babylonia, though they are the most mature and complex because of their
being the last stages of the developing stream.” 11

For Faruqi, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam constitute a monotheistic

unity of confessional diversities.12 Apart from the Western scholars, this
theory also came under strong criticism from non-Arab Muslim scholars, such
as Fazlur Rahman, who remarked that Faruqi was seen as an Arabo centric,
“angry young Muslim Palestinian” 13 and also “a guerilla scholar.”
Ismail al-Faruqi’s approach to the Qur’┐n is ideational, axiological and
aesthetical—three concepts which are central to the study of religion and
philosophy.
a) Ideational—in the sense that it highlights the centrality of taw╒┘d—
monotheism as the core idea of Arabian consciousness in contrast to other
civilisations.

10
Professor T. Cuyler Young’s letter to Dr. Ismail al-Faruqi, dated 5 November, 1963 in
“Isma‘il al-Faruqi Papers Collection” at the International Institute of Islamic Thought,
Herndon, VA, USA. Professor Young was Chairman, of the Department of Oriental Studies in
Princeton University, USA.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Loving America and Longing for Home: Isma’il al-Faruqi and the
Emergence of the Muslim Diaspora in North America,” International Migration 42, no. 2 (2004): 67.
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
105

b) Axiological—valuational adherence to Islam, i.e., it is faithfulness to

the values of monotheistic piety, ethics, and world affirmation. It is not
national, racial, or ideological (for these degenerate into fanaticism) adherence
to Islam.
c) Aesthetical—for Faruqi the Qur’┐n is an aesthetical revelation,
evident from the aesthetic character of its Arabic language which has been the
source of the aesthetical expressions found in Muslim arts of literature,
calligraphy, architecture, music, and painting.
Thus for al-Faruqi, the theological, moral and aesthetical dimensions of
Muslim life, thought, and action are infused with monotheistic consciousness,
which stresses a duality between creator and creature.
In the area of Islamic thought, Faruqi was much impressed by the Islamic
rationalism of the Mu‘tazil┘ theologians like al-Na╘╘┐m [775–845], Qa╔┘ ‘Abd
al-Jabb┐r [935–1025], the ethics of eleventh-century group of philosophers of
Ikhw┐n al-╗af┐’ or “Brethren of Purity” and the Taw╒id┘—unitarian theology
of Mu╒ammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahh┐b [1703–1792]. Two common themes which
run in the thought of these theologians and school of philosophy are Taw╒┘d—
God’s oneness and ‘adl—justice. Being a Muslim and a Palestinian these two
topics were of paramount importance for al-Faruqi. In fact, in the tradition of
classical Muslim theologians, al-Faruqi went on to write his own Kit┐b al-
Taw╒┘d in English for the sake of a new generation of Muslims, who are versed
in English. It presents his philosophical and ideational view of Islam.14

Ismail Al-Faruqi and the Study of Religion

Professor Bernard Phillips and his colleagues were clear in what they wanted
to teach and research; they called their department, the department of religion
and not the department religious studies or comparative religion. Their focus
was on the generic role that religion plays in human life, thought, and
practised before being labelled as a particular tradition. The use of the term
religion also meant distinguishing it from the approaches adopted in
theological seminaries and those in social science departments. Yet, the
students at the department were required to study at least three religious
traditions in detail plus courses in scripture, philosophy and religion, social
sciences, and ethics, et cetra. The aim was to offer students from different
religious or non-religious traditions and backgrounds a programme that would
cover the study of the phenomenon of religion in its whole gamut.

14
Ism┐‘┘l R┐j┘ al F┐r┴q┘, Al-Taw╒┘d: Its Implications for Thought and Life (Herndon, VA:
International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992).
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
106

Professor Ismail al-Faruqi has been described as a scholar-activist, but not

much has been written about his personality, thought, style, pedagogy, and
academic vision.15 This is largely because he has been viewed from an
ideological perspective and because of his views about his homeland Palestine.
He was criticised and threatened and also prejudiced against for holding this
political position; this anti-al-Faruqi stance did not even go away twenty-one
years after his death when in 2007, an attempt to establish an endowed Chair
in the department in his honour was aborted at the university level and came
to be well known as “the Islamic Chair issue.”16 The unfounded charges that
the Chair was being funded by those having ties with terrorist organisations
still remain fresh in the minds of the friends of al-Faruqi and the department.
Al-Faruqi’s pioneering contribution to the study of Islam as a religion in
what he would call as Arab, “stream of Being” is a rare area of study and
research in the Muslim world was not welcomed by both the Arab Muslim
nationalist and non-Arab Muslim scholars for whom is a historically specific
time event. That is why it is not surprising to learn that al-Faruqi’s
contributions when compared with the contributions of Fazlur Rahman and
Seyyed Hossein Nasr—both of them were specialists in Islamic Studies and not
the study of religion, appear less impressive.17
Over the recent decades, the Muslim academia has become fixated with al-
Faruqi’s only one contribution that of Islamisation of Knowledge. It has made
an ideological slogan and project. This is different from his perspective of
knowledge which, in my understanding, is a process of acquiring past
contributions and advancing beyond them just as the early Muslim scholastics,
philosophers, and scientists contributed to Islamic and world intellectual
history. It seems that al-Faruqi’s contribution got short-changed by those who
focused on his contributions from the view of their interests and disciplines
and with a piecemeal approach overlooking its objective in its entirety.
Islamisation of Knowledge has today boiled down to politics of knowledge
and contest for it between the different Muslims holding different views.
Ziauddin Sardar and the Afkar group sought development of new
disciplines rooted in a Muslim cultural context directed towards addressing

15
John L. Esposito, “F┐r┴q┘, Ism┐‘┘l R┐j┘ Al-” in John L. Esposito, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia
of the Modern Islamic World (New York:/ Oxford University Press, 1995), 2:3–4; “Ismail R. Al-
Faruqi: Muslim Scholar-Activist,” in The Muslims of America, ed., Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 65–79.
16
Lewis R. Gordon, “From the Editor: The Islamic Chair Controversy,” Temple University
Faculty Herald 38, no. 3 (2007), 1–6, available at www.temple.edu/herald accessed 29 March
2014.
17
Sulayman S. Nyang and Mumtaz Ahmad, “The Muslim Intellectual Emigre in the United
States,” Islamic Culture, 59 (1985): 289.
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
107

and solving problems specific to the Muslim condition, in other words,

starting from tabula rasa.18 Sardar criticises al-Faruqi’s approach as being
cosmetically Islamic but essentially Western approach and that al-Faruqi fails
to decipher Western political ambition to control the non-Westerners through
knowledge, for example, as in the case of rising of the anthropology of
religion, et cetera. At one occasion, Faruqi replied to Sardar by saying, “You,
want us to reinvent the wheel?” Al-Faruqi’s vision about knowledge was too
grand to engage in or favour politics of knowledge; for him, engagement in
knowledge process was not merely an ideological project but a
multidimensional civilisation undertaking.19
Today, thirty years after his death, al-Faruqi’s legacy which calls upon the
Muslim scholars and researchers to contribute to the process of knowledge in
which Islam is one among many of the streams of human understanding of
reality has been sidelined. Islamic worldview has been narrowed to that of a
legalistic or that of political ideology. It seems that Faruqi’s school of thought
with its focus on the place of religion at the core of being, as it illumes the
path to knowledge, died with him, while a replaced process continues under
the rubric of the Islamisation of Knowledge project.
While celebrated and applauded by Muslims academics who liked his
language or criticised by those who disliked his pro-Palestinian political stand,
al-Faruqi’s contribution to the study of Islam as part of the study of the
human history of religions and reality needs a revival and application along
with his inspired Islamisation of Knowledge programme adopted by the
International Islamic Universities around the world.

Al-Faruqi’s Contributions: Islamics and History of Religions

Ismail al-Faruqi’s contribution began first by his focusing on the connection
between religion and geography, he co-edited with his colleague David E.
Sopher the Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World.
This approach to the study of religion is called “cultural geography.” It
involves: (1) the influence of the environmental setting on the evolution of
religious systems and particular religious institutions; (2) the way religious
systems and institutions modify their environment; (3) the different ways
religious systems occupy and organise segments of earth space; (4) the
geographic distribution of religions and the way religious systems spread and
interact with each other.

18
Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (London: Granta
Books, 2004), 199–200.
19
Ibid., 200.
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
108

In the field of history of religions, al-Faruqi offered a Muslim perspective

of religion based on the study and knowledge of the historical-critical research
of the ancient Near Eastern history and texts.

It [religion] is not a thing; but a perspective with which everything is invested. It

is the highest and most important dimension; for it alone takes cognizance of the
act as personal, as standing within the religio-cultural context in which it has
taken place, as well as within the total context of space-time. For it, the act
includes all the inner determinations of the person as well as all its effects in
space-time. And it is this relation of the whole act to the whole space-time that
constitutes the religious dimension.20

Al-Faruqi saw the struggle between monotheism and polytheism as the

central theme of the religions of the Arabian theater. For al-Faruqi, a Muslim
holds a “monotheic” ethical vision rooted in the Qur’┐nic view of d┘n based on
the principles of monotheism, universalism, tolerance, and life-affirmation,
which will enable him/her to deal with contemporary challenges of
materialism and ethno-religious conflicts. It facilitates Muslim partnering in
the dialogue between religions, cultures, and civilisations. He contrasts such
religious worldview with “mythopoeic” religious worldview found in
polytheistic religion, which is not able to transcend to an abstracted religious
worldview.21
Faruqi is also the only Muslim professor in modern times who pleaded
for an inquiry and research into pre-Hijrah Islam, highlighting its
methodological importance for the study and research about Islam. He
stressed that the neglect of this aspect in Muslim studies of Comparative
Religions is the cause of the weak and marginalised state of Islamic Studies in
the arena of knowledge.

Islam is usually said to have begun with the Prophet Mu╒ammad (may God’s
peace and blessings be upon him). It is considered that it was he who received the
Holy Qur’┐n, who proclaimed God’s religion in the Divine ipsissima verba, who
launched the ummah on a glorious march in space-time. The institution of the
Islamic calendar and its establishment as starting on the day the Prophet had set
out to found the first Islamic community in Mad┘nah, is the expression of this
consciousness. Never before, so runs the implication, has Islam been a reality of
history. Never before has there been a community consciously committed to its
pursuit and realization. Pre-Hijrah was, therefore, bound to be a period of

20
Isma‘il Ragi A. al-Faruqi, “History of Religions: Its Nature and Significance for Christian
Education and the Muslim-Christian Dialogue,” Numen 12, no. 1 (1965): 37–38.
21
Al-Faruqi and Sopher, eds., Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World, 3–28.
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
109

“ignorance,” of immorality and generally, of evil of every sort—in short, a

genuine, all-round J┐hiliyyah [ignorance of divine guidance]. Pre-Hijrah was said
to be a time when Islam was not: that is a cause sufficient to indict anything!
Accordingly, our forefathers mu╒addith┴n, historians, literati or ‘ulam┐’—
deliberately applied themselves to the indictment of pre-Hijrah. Meccan pre-
Hijrah furnished them with an arsenal of arguments which they hurled, with no
mean relish, at all human pre-Hijrah history. The history of the Prophets was
reduced to the Prophets’ own, personal biographies, while the J┐hiliyyah of
Mecca became a fact of universal history. The darker the J┐hiliyyah was painted,
the brighter the advent of Islam through the Prophet Mu╒ammad was supposed
to be. Polytheism, stone worship, tribalism, war, licence, egoism,
commercialism, vanity, illustrated in the notorious annals of a Basus War, the
cynicism of an Imru’ al-Qays [pre-Islam Arab poet], the irresponsibility of ‘Abd
al-Mu══alib [pre-Islam Arab leader] in front of Abrahah, etc.?—all these were
projected on to the whole canvas of pre-Hijrah. How could there have been, in
this case, any reason to study pre-Hijrah ? . . .
Neither did our forefathers feel the need to study that aspect of pre-Hijrah
which constitutes the religious history of Judaism and Christianity. In the Holy
Qur’┐n, they read what seemed to them to be a ready-made answer to the
question of what both Judaism and Christianity were or will be. Since the Holy
Qur’┐n had given the news-events of those religions, the Muslims thought there
was no need to investigate their history. 22

This plea along with his other writings laid the theoretical and
methodological foundations of his Islamic approach to the history of
religions.23
Ismail al-Faruqi’s scholarship was a combination of being a trained
philosopher and historian of religion with a Muslim perspective. For him,
study and research of religion was not a detached inquiry but a critical
engagement directed towards a critical study of the place of religion including
Islam in human history.

Criticism of Faruqi’s Contribution to the Study of Religion as Being an

Islamic Theological Imposition
Faruqi’s contribution to the study of religion is a continuance of the historical
Muslim scholarship of the study of world religions in modern times—a missing
aspect of contemporary Islamic Studies both in the traditional and modern

22
Isma‘il R. al-Faruqi, “Towards a Historiography of pre-Hijrah Islam,” Islamic Studies 1, no. 2
(June, 1962): 65–66.
23
Ism┐‘┘l R. al F┐r┴q┘ and Lois Lamy┐’ al F┐r┴q┘, The Cultural Atlas of Islam (New York:
Macmillan, 1986), 80.
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
110

modes. Thus it is not surprising to see no reference being made to Ismail al-
Faruqi’s contribution to study of Islam as a topic in religion. On the other
hand, a recent criticism of al-Faruqi reduces his contribution to be Kantian
and that of a religious exclusivist.24
Abdulkader Tayob following Jacques Waardenburg is of the opinion that
Islamic theological position of seeing itself as the final and true religion along
with politicisation of Islam obstruct the development of neutral and objective
Muslim studies of other religions.25 Tayob’s survey of Muslim studies of other
religions beginning with the year 1967 ends with the contributions of Hasan
Hanafi, Muhammad Abid Jabiri, Nasr Abu Zayd. Tayob does not mention
Ismail al-Faruqi’s pioneering inclusivist contribution to the study of religion
which began in 1950s and continued until his death in 1986.
In another recently published article on al-Faruqi’s contribution to the
study of Religion, Abdulkader Tayob’s while appreciating the Marxian
anthropological Talal Asad approach to study Islam does not see much value
in al-Faruqi’s contribution to the study of religion.26 In my view, Talal Asad’s
reference to Islam as discourse is rooted in the Marxist reductive
anthropological study of religion and has not changed since his early Marxist
ideological critique of Clifford Geertz’s anthropology of religion. 27
Tayob accuses al-Faruqi of manipulating Kant to fit his Islamic
theological commitment.

Al F┐r┴q┘ declared his debt to Kant, but he also avoided the full critical apparatus
of critical reason. He accepted some of Kant’s critical analysis of perception that
often led to a misapprehension of religion, but he was not willing to accept the
full implication of his philosophy that rejected “transcendence and
fundamentalism” (al Faruqi 1962:218). Al F┐r┴q┘ only accepted Kant’s critical
apparatus to the extent that it accorded with an Islamic theology that he favored.
The knowledge of God’s essence (dh┐t) was unknowable, according to both
Kant’s critical reason and Muslim theology based on the Qur’anic verse (“there is
none like unto Him” [Qur’┐n 42:11]). However, Al Far┴q┘ also argued that there
was a direct connection between God’s attributes and the world. Like other

24
Abdulkader Tayob, Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009).
25
Abdulkader Tayob, “The Study of Religion and Social Crises: Arab-Islamic Discourse in Late
Twentieth Century,” in New Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Peter Antes, Armin W.
Geertz, and R. R. Warne, vol. 1 (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 102–4.
26
Abdulkader Tayob, “Al F┐r┴q┘ between the History of Religions and Islamic Theology,”
Numen 60, no. 2–3 (2013): 232.
27
Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18, no. 2
(1983): 237–59.
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
111

modernist Muslim thinkers, Al F┐r┴q┘ used Kant and modern critical thinking
only to a limited extent. 28

Tayob comes down heavily critical of al-Faruqi as seen in the below long
quote.

Al F┐r┴q┘’s theology also promoted the application of values in the context of

politics and society. It is, however, an approach that left very little space for
contemplation or relation with the divine in any other form (ritual, philosophy,
art). The study of religion became, then, a pretext for supporting and promoting
an activist approach to religion. This is most clearly evident in his study of Islam
which leaves little room for Sufism, its ritual formations and effects, and the
many mythological dimensions of Islamic religious life.
This focus on values, moreover, did not allow for understanding the
manipulation of religion for social and political purposes. For Al F┐r┴q┘, the
objective of religions was the fulfillment of values in space-time in both material
and non-material levels. His study of religion precluded the study of values
within tyrannical or oppressive states supported or promoted by religions. For
Al F┐r┴q┘, it would appear that these were not true religions worthy of serious
consideration. True religion, for example, would promote equality between all
men. The value of transcendence, according to Al F┐r┴q┘, did not permit social
hierarchies. The latter was explained as an aberration from a religious point of
view that was not worthy of serious study as an effect or mirror of religion.
Transcendence would guarantee egalitarianism, while its opposite was
unthinkable. . .
Using a language of values, he proposed a theology that placed exclusive
emphasis on the Will of God. In pursuit of intentionality as the ultimate relation
with the transcendent, Al F┐r┴q┘ delegitimized any other value. Intentionality
became the name of transcendence. Following Ibn Taymiyya, Al F┐r┴q┘ rejected
knowledge, love, and might as pre-eminent values emanating from the attributes
of God. Using Kant’s critical apparatus, he appeared to be on more secure
ground, but he had merely chosen one metaphysical value over others, and
rejected in the process the essence of the Kantian critique.
In conclusion, Al F┐r┴q┘ presented a comprehensive approach to the study of
religions. He questioned the scientific merit of working with personal experience
as the essence of a religious experience. Turning to values of religions, he pointed
to a more dependable source of data. However, his approach left too little room
for historical change and contingency. Even within specific religions, he
promoted a theology that excluded alternative values from being considered a
valid source of data for understanding such religions in both the past and the
present.29

28
Ibid., 246–7.
29
Ibid.
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
112

In Tayob’s view, al-Faruqi’s contribution to the study of religion is

directed towards challenging “existing approaches, but also provided a
language for a particular Islamic theology.” It seems that for Tayob, adherence
to a religion obstructs one’s ability to contribute to the study of religion freely
of faith and commitment be it those of prominent scholars of religion such as
Mircea Eliade, Charles Adams, Richard C. Martin, Arvind Sharma, K. N.
Jayatilikke, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Ninian Smart, Leonard Swidler, etc, all
of whom adhered to different world religions thus their, “presuppositions
could not be the basis of a study of religions . . . such approaches ignored the
social and political effects of religion in history.”30
Tayob overlooks the fact that al-Faruqi laid the groundwork for theory
and method for the study of religion for Muslim academics. Tayob, does not
recognise al-Faruqi’s academic struggle to seek a platform for Islam in the
domain of the academic study of religion and the poverty of the traditionalist
Muslim scholars in this realm of knowledge. In this venture, al-Faruqi was not
engaging in merely semantics, rhetoric or apologism for Islam but was
committed to develop an Islamically sound theory for the study of religion.
Thus, al-Faruqi was not theologically exclusivist rather a Muslim pluralist
scholar of religion. This is evident from al-Faruqi’s elaboration of the concept
of metareligion as presented in his book, Christian Ethics which promised to
elaborate upon further in his future works but did not do during his lifetime. 31
In his original conception of metareligion, al-Faruqi mentioned that it
comprises of belief in God or Ultimate Reality as the totally other. For al-
Faruqi, the study of religion is not about testing its validity by external or
functional tests as done by contemporary reductionist approaches like that of
cognitive science which reduces the origin and practice of religion to being
neural only32 nor a proselytising project. It is a study about the condition of
the homo religiosus.
Unfortunately, this Faruqian view of study and research in religion got
lost or waylaid in the Muslim academia for reasons other than academic.
Contemporary Muslim students and scholars of religion are largely attracted
to the popular trend of the anthropology of religion from the West. Thus

30
Ibid., 243–44.
31
In my view, al-Faruqi’s posthumously published article with the same title is a doctored piece,
see, Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, “Meta–Religion: Towards A Critical World Theology,” The American
Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (1986): 13–57.
32
See articles on cognition and cultural psychology by Armin W. Geertz; Justin L. Barrett and
David A. Warburton in New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Textual, Comparative,
Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches, Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and R. R. Warne, eds.
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 347–56.
ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
113

there is the lack of young Muslim scholars in the areas of history and
phenomenology of religion.
Faruqi while being concerned about politics of knowledge or power and
knowledge was not a politician in seeking knowledge and doing research. For
him, these have no limits and are not bound by time, space or sources. He
thought big, taught big and had bigger academic dreams for the status of Islam
in the world of knowledge and religion.

Al-Faruqi and Interreligious Dialogue

“Islam and Christianity: Diatribe or Dialogue” introduced al-Faruqi to Temple
University.33 During the late 1960s to 80s interreligious dialogue was a new
academic venture conducted largely amongst limited groups of specialists and
interested academicians. Professor Leonard Swidler, a pioneering role in this
venture at the world level from his position at Temple University. He also
engaged most of his colleagues in this task: al-Faruqi was one among them.
Al-Faruqi also engaged in Islam’s dialogue with other religions, especially
Christianity in the West.34 As a citizen and resident of the West, he actively
participated in interreligious dialogue since the 1960s during its infancy in the
West, following the dialogue initiatives of the World Council of Churches and
the Second Vatican Council. In this endeavour, he adapted Muslim
epistemology that there is a fundamental relationship between knowledge,
science and education—religious and general—to the changing times. He
enthusiastically joined in the dialogue with Christians, Jewish, Hindus,
Buddhists, and followers of other religions. Here is a representative excerpt of
his basic approach in interreligious dialogue.

Cragg: What you are saying, then, is that God has sent prophets everywhere, but
ex hypothesis these prophets must be consistent with Islam.
Al-Faruqi: Yes, Islam as religio naturalis, d┘n al-fi═rah.
Cragg: But that which in Buddhism is antithetical to Islam and to rationalism is
not simply chaff mixed with wheat, if I may put it that way; it is the very wheat
of Buddhism. By your analysis here it must then have been a false prophecy
which brought the Buddhist to that belief.
Al-Faruqi: I won’t say a false prophecy. I would say that a true revelation
through an authentic prophet has been thoroughly falsified.

33
Leonard Swidler (Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligions Dialogue and Temple
University) interview by the author, 25 March, 2010.
34
Ismail Raji Al-Faruqi, Islam and Other Faiths, ed. Ataullah Siddiqui (Leicester: The Islamic
Foundation, 1998).
 IMTIYAZ YUSUF
114

Fitzgerald: But by what historical criteria is the “true” prophet to be identified?

And where is the “true” prophecy of which you speak within Buddhism?
Al-Faruqi: I don’t know, but it can be researched; the fact that I assume it to be
there at the origin is at least a good step in the direction of ecumenical tolerance.
Ahmad: It is very possible that rudiments of the true prophecy are to be found
even in some pagan religions. 35

For al-Faruqi, the aim of dialogue is to unite the religion of God and
truth, bring about conversion to truth, and enable understanding of values and
meanings. He also remarked that the methodology of dialogue requires
criticism, internal coherence, historical perspective, noting the reality of
religions, not being dependent on absolutised scriptural figurisations which
have occurred in all religions, including Islam. He concluded that the potential
for the success of dialogue lies in the field of ethics.36

Regarding Islam-Christianity dialogue, al-Faruqi remarked that the

prospects for the exploration of common religious and moral ideas between
these two religions are limitless. But he was pessimistic about it in the light of
the Vatican II statement on Islam. He thought the document could have gone
further, for Muslims still continue to feel excluded from the salvation plan. In
Faruqi’s view, the interreligious dialogue between Christianity and Islam
should start with the Nicene creed. And it should also take into account the
ethical insights of modern humanity which holds life-affirming views, for
whom the notion of justification is insufficient and whose moral mission on
worldwide basis is still unfulfilled.37
Faruqi joined the dialogue enterprise at a time when a few Muslims were
engaged in it. He initiated Islam into interreligious dialogue in the
contemporary age and as time passed others joined in and this legacy of his
continues today in different ways.
From the Christian side it has been remarked that, “He has left much for
Christians to ponder, and his efforts stand as a monument to one person’s
vision of what we all would long to see: a world community working in
harmonious relationship to God and to each other.”38

35
Isma‘il al-Faruqi, “On the Nature Of Islamic Da‘wah,” International Review of Mission 65, no.
260 (1976), 391–400.
36
Al-Faruqi, “Islam and Christianity,” 45–77.
37
Ibid., 45–46, 71–77.
38
F. Peter Ford, Jr., “Isma’il al-Faruqi on Muslim-Christian Dialogue: An Analysis from a
Christian Perspective,” Islam and Christian Muslim Relations 4, no. 2 (1993): 279.
 ISMAIL AL-FARUQI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION
115

Conclusion
Al-Faruqi held that Islam was not opposed to the modern science and
technology, be it based in the past or modern paradigms. What mattered was
whether it was axiologically sound in terms of values in the areas of ethics,
aesthetics, and religion—as they impact our perceptions, decisions, and actions.
Faruqi was turned into a political ideologue of Islamisation of knowledge
which he as an educationist least expected. In his life time, he did make
comments on the state of politics and advised politicians, but there is more to
his contribution than that.
Faruqi presented Islam as a religion, a worldview and an integral part of
the knowledge process without engaging in apologetics but by developing new
theories about the role of Arabs and Islam in the religious stream of being in
non-nationalist terms. An Islamic theory of aesthetics rooted in Qur’┐nic
monotheism and Islamisation of knowledge are also included in his greatest
contributions.

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