Muslim-Christian Engagement in the Twentieth Century

The Principles of Inter-faith Dialogue and the Work of Ismail Al-Faruq

Charles Fletcher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848855090
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Christian-Muslim dialogue grows increasingly important, but little is known about individual Muslim dialogical thinkers. Born in Palestine in 1921, Ismail al-Faruqi was a leading figure in the development of conversation and debate across faiths in North America in the second half of the twentieth century, and was actively engaged in inter-faith study and dialogue. Al-Faruqi founded the Islamic Studies programme at Temple University, Pennsylvania where several distinguished Muslim intellectuals have taught, such as Seyyid Hossein Nasr, Mahmoud Ayoub and Hasan Hanafi. Along with Kenneth Cragg and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, al-Faruqi was an active participant in Muslim-Christian dialogues in the 1970s and the 1980s. Charles Fletcher here presents the first study dedicated to Ismail al-Faruqi's theory and practice of interfaith dialogue. Analysing al-Faruqi's sometimes provocative ideas on the comparative study of religion, dialogue and practical engagement, the author provides an illuminating study of the life and thought of this important scholar.
Tracing the development of al-Faruqi's ideas and practice of inter-faith dialogue, Fletcher shows how Muslim intellectuals engaged in such attempts viewed their role as representatives of the worldwide Muslim community. With perceptive insights into the history of contemporary Muslim-Christian dialogue, this book will be invaluable for all those interested in inter-faith relations, comparative religious studies, North American Muslims and Islamic studies.

PART ONE

THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF ISMAʿIL AL-FARUQI

1

A BIOGRAPHY OF ISMAʿIL AL-FARUQI

In order to understand the thought of al-Faruqi, the first task is to study his life. Since our broader objective is to grasp the development of his approach to non-Muslims and not just the approach itself, some effort needs to be spent to determine who al-Faruqi was as a man and a scholar. This is approached from two directions. First, in this chapter, his biography is presented in descriptive form summarizing what can be termed the ‘facts’ of his life. This entails a chronological account. It is not exhaustive, but is sufficiently detailed to allow for the necessary contextual background in which to situate his thought. Second, in the following chapter, we will try to answer who he thought he was and how he projected his identity to others. This is a difficult task, but the insights it can potentially provide will allow us to peer into his life in order to better understand his choices as a scholar, including the development of his ideas toward engaging non-Muslims. For example, during his life it was relatively rare to find a Muslim scholar who was so interested and devoted academically to the comparative study of Christianity and Judaism and who also sought to actively participate in various forms of dialogue. There must be reasons why this was so important to him. The answer begins with his biography.

Life in Palestine

Ismaʿil Raji Abu l-Huda al-Faruqi, born January 1^st 1921 in Jaffa, Palestine, was the son of ‘Abd al-Huda al-Faruqi, a qāḍī of the Sharīʿah court during the British Mandate.¹ The family was well-known and influential, with roots in the Ramleh region.² Ismaʿil al-Faruqi received his early education from his father and the local mosque school.³ In 1926, he entered the French Dominican College des Frères (St. Joseph) and received his high school diploma in 1936.⁴ By the time he was fifteen years old he was fluent in Arabic and French and had received his first exposure to Christianity.⁵ The following year he was admitted to the College of Arts and Sciences at the American University in Beirut (AUB), where he studied English and went on thereafter to complete a B.A. with a major in Philosophy.⁶ Stanley Brice Frost (1913-2013), in his foreword to al-Faruqi’s Christian Ethics, notes that Ismaʿil’s first year at university was unsuccessful. Frost writes:

Nothing is more indicative of his future career than the way in which he sat down to analyze his failure and to discover that his former method of learning – by rote – was of little use to him in the new strange world of the western university.⁷

Having completed his undergraduate degree in 1941, al-Faruqi received an appointment as Assistant to the Registrar of Arab Cooperative Societies under the British Mandate government in Jerusalem in 1942.⁸ Then he became an administrative officer and in 1945, at twenty-four years of age, he was promoted to the post of district magistrate (ḥākim) for the Galilee district.⁹ This came to an abrupt end with the creation of Israel in 1948 rendering him, according to Braibanti, the final Palestinian governor of the region.¹⁰ His family fled to Beirut and in due course al-Faruqi decided to pursue graduate studies in the United States.¹¹ Al-Faruqi himself, in a letter dated just prior to his death in 1986, writes of this time:

When the Rescue Army (Jaysh al-Inqādh) was set up, I was working as an administrative magistrate (ḥākim) in the northern regions which were occupied by the army until they fell into the enemy’s hands. By then I had gone to the U.S. for studies.¹²

Shafiq comments that when Israel was created in 1948, al-Faruqi joined the armed struggle against Israel:

Consumed with a desire for revenge, al Faruqi took up arms against the Israeli occupation and saw action in the field. Disappointed by Muslim disunity and internal division, he gradually made his way to the United States.¹³

This was a highly significant moment in his life and Hisham Altalib largely confirms the comments made by Shafiq.¹⁴ Al-Faruqi seems to indicate that he was present when the Rescue Army was set up, but by the time the region fell into enemy hands (the Israeli forces), he had left the area. Any armed involvement on his part must have preceded the establishment of the Rescue Army.

Life in North America and academia

In the fall semester of 1948, al-Faruqi entered the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University.¹⁵ Here he worked on a Master’s degree in Philosophy and also met and later married Lois Ibsen who was working on a Master’s degree in Music.¹⁶ In 1949, he graduated with a thesis entitled, The ethics of reason and the ethics of life (Kantian and Nietzchean ethics). Desiring further studies, he was accepted into Harvard in 1950 and after passing the preliminary written examination, the special topical exam in ethics and value theory and fulfilling the residence requirements, was forced to withdraw due to a lack of finances.¹⁷ For his efforts he was awarded an M.A. degree in Philosophy in 1951. Needing to support himself he managed to work as a translator for the American Council of Learned Societies where he received $1000 USD to translate three books from Arabic into English.¹⁸ He then turned to contract building where he prospered in his specialty of providing fully decorated and furnished homes for sale.¹⁹ Once he decided that he had earned sufficient funds, he left this potentially lucrative career in order to re-enter academia.²⁰ Enrolling in the Ph.D. programme at Indiana University he graduated in 1952 with a dissertation entitled, On Justifying the Good: Metaphysics and Epistemology of Value. John Esposito noted that during al-Faruqi’s academic years in the U.S., he struggled to support himself²¹ and there is some indication that even during his Ph.D. studies at Indiana he continued to work as a carpenter.²²

Once finished, like many recently graduated doctoral students, he found there was a scarcity of employment in his field.²³ So, he sought out opportunities for post-doctoral studies. He went to the Middle East with Lois in 1953 and received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study Islam and Islamic intellectual history at al-Azhar University in Cairo from 1954-1958.²⁴ Lois studied Arabic.²⁵ With the completion of this fellowship, he was invited by W. C. Smith to study at McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies (1958-1959). Fazlur Rahman, who was teaching at the Institute and met al-Faruqi for the first time in 1958, writes: “Professor W. C. Smith invited him [al-Faruqi] to McGill on a senior Fellowship hoping that he would apply his training in philosophic thought to Islamic materials.”²⁶ However, it appears that al-Faruqi demonstrated little interest in applying his intellectual training to classical Islamic texts.²⁷ He spent the year as a Research Associate involved in lecturing, studying and working on his theory of Arabism.²⁸ There is no support for the speculation offered by Quraishi that the reason W. C. Smith invited al-Faruqi to study at McGill was to persuade him to become a Christian.²⁹ This would certainly have been out character for either Smith or the Institute of Islamic Studies itself, which was founded to foster mutual understanding between Muslims and Christians.³⁰

Toward the end of his one-year fellowship, W. C. Smith thought to offer him “some kind of an indefinite job” such as “some sort of Associate Professorship”.³¹ In the end, a two-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship was arranged for him to become a fellow of the Faculty of Divinity at McGill.³² The Dean of Divinity at the time, Stanley Frost, who readily welcomed the idea, recollects:

It was while he [al-Faruqi] was in the Institute as a Research Associate that his breadth of understanding for western culture and his innate sympathy for Islamic thought, as well as his evident sincerity of religious concern, suggested to Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, then Director of the Institute, that Dr. Fārūqī should be attached for two years to the faculty of Divinity as a Research Associate, to have the experience of living in a Christian environment and of bringing a critical if friendly Muslim mind to bear upon current theological trends.³³

He spent these two years attending lectures, seminars, reading widely, and researching his book Christian Ethics.³⁴

During his time at McGill, he became close friends with Fazlur Rahman.³⁵ He would on many occasions drive Rahman to McGill University.³⁶ When the latter accepted a position at the Central Institute of Islamic Research (CIIR), newly created by the Pakistani government, he asked then director Dr. I. H. Qureshi to offer a two-year appointment to Dr. al-Faruqi.³⁷ Thus, from 1961-1963 al-Faruqi served as Professor of Islamic Studies in Karachi, Pakistan and was involved in the development of the Institute’s journal, Islamic Studies. Rahman commented that his motive in recruiting al-Faruqi was to allow him to see a large body of Muslims who were not Arabs.³⁸ However, al-Faruqi’s theory of Arabism drew strong criticism from inside and outside of the Institute.³⁹ For example, when he was invited to Egypt to deliver a series of lectures and perhaps in anticipation of the potentially negative response to his theory of Arabism, he encouraged Rahman to join him in Cairo. He writes: “Personally, I would not like at all to go without you, since your presence will give me a great support in advocating the thesis of Arabism to people whose thinking must needs be re-islamized.”⁴⁰ During this period, he represented his department through a number of lectures at Cairo’s Institute of Higher Arabic Studies (IHAS) (1962), al-Azhar (1962), and the University of Cairo (1963).⁴¹ It is interesting to note the types of lectures he was asked to present revolved around Islam and its place within the wider political and religious world. At the Institute of Higher Arabic Studies he was invited to give ten lectures on the relation of Islam to Nationalism, at al-Azhar twenty lectures on the history of religion in the Near East and ten lectures at the University of Cairo on comparative religion.⁴² He also joined Rahman in a lecture series on the relation of Islam to Nationalism at IHAS in 1963 and likewise presented on Zionism and universalism in the Old Testament.⁴³

By 1963, growing disillusioned with the direction of the CIIR, al-Faruqi tendered his resignation and sought a position back in the United States.⁴⁴ He was offered and accepted a one-year appointment for the academic year 1963-1964 as visiting Prof...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF ISMAI‘L AL-FARUQI
• 1. A Biography of Isma‘il al-Faruqi
• 2. The Development of His Life and Thought
• PART TWO: THE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF METHODOLOGY
• 3. Philosophical Foundations and Early Methodology (1948-1962)
• 4. Comparative, Meta-Religious and Dialogical Principles (1963-1968)
• 5. Methodological Applications and Responses (1969-1986)
• PART THREE: CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND CONTRIBUTIONS
• 6. A Critique and Analysis
• 7. Al-Faruqi’s Contributions to Dialogue
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography