Ismail Faruqi Online

Prof. John Voll delivers annual Isma’il Faruqi lecture

admin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:13:35 +0000

"Isma’il Faruqi is a good case of the modern intellectual who is a believer and provides a good example for thinking about what it means to be a ‘believing intellectual’ in the modern era," said Georgetown University’s history professor John Voll who presented the Annual Isma’il Faruqi Lecture at IIIT on August 26 to an audience of over 80 scholars, activists and community leaders. Speaking on "The Challenge of the Believing Intellectual: Religion and Modernity," Professor Voll, who is also associated with the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, reviewed how an understanding of what it means to be an intellectual has evolved over time.

Islam and the Problem of Israel: Zionism as Religion

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:30:08 +0000

Born out of Europe's Romantic lapse and anti-Jewish pogroms, Zionism might have occupied itself entirely with the question of Jewish security. At its genesis and for a long time afterwards, Zionism did little else besides seeking the real estate wherein to set up refuge from the dim future it foresaw. There is no evidence in early Zionist writing of any concern with the kind of problems faced by the Reform movement, and in search of a solution of which, the movement was born. The first leaders did not think in terms of the problems science and modernity posed to the application of the laws of the Shulhan Arukh, which dominated Jewish observance and living since its codification by Joseph Karo in 1567. The whole problem of "religion and modernity" did not occupy them at all. The Zionists were men and women nursed culturally and spiritually by a secular Europe which has been weaned away from religion. They were as immersed in romanticism and secularism as their fellow Christians; and a number of them were in fact leaders of the movement in Europe. It was therefore natural that, once renewed persecution blocked their self-identification as European, the Jews would seek their identity in their tradition, and that they would do so under the only categories they knew, namely, those of European romanticism.

Islam and the Problem of Israel: Jewish Universalism and Ethnocentrism

admin — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:45:35 +0000

From the standpoint of Islam, there can be no doubt that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon were all prophets whom God had sent forth with a divine message There can be no doubt that that message was always one and the same in its essential content which consisted, above all, of the recognition of God, of His unity and transcendence, of the Day of Judgment, of the purposiveness of history, and of man's responsibility to manage space-time as God has directed. That the prescriptive laws God had revealed to these prophets differed somewhat from the earlier revelations made to previous prophets, is granted; but it is understood as belonging to the "how" of obedience and fulfillment rather than to the essence. Equally, there can be no doubt that the Torah is God's revelation to Moses, that it had definitively summed up and crystallized the earlier revelations. To doubt these facts is kufr, or unbelief.

On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:52:28 +0000

Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, has commanded the Muslim: "Call men unto the path of your Lord by wisdom and goodly counsel. Present the cause to them through argument yet more sound" (Qur'an 16: 125). Da'wah is the fulfilment of this commandment "to call men unto the path of Allah." Besides, it is the effort by the Muslim to enable other men to share and benefit from the supreme vision, the religious truth, which he has appropriated. In this respect it is rationally necessary, for truth wants to be known. It exerts pressure on the knower to share his vision of it with his peers. Since religious truth is not only theoretical, but also axiological and practical, the man of religion is doubly urged to take his discovery to other men. His piety, his virtue and charity impose upon him the obligation to make common the good which has befallen him.

Appendix: Dialogue On The Nature of Islamic Da’wah

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:07:36 +0000

Khurshid Ahmad opened the discussion of Dr. al-Faruqi's paper with the following prepared response. Some parts of a background paper he circulated at the consultation have also been incorporated in this final version.

Islam and the Problem of Israel: Zionism, The European Jew’s Counsel of Despair

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:41:58 +0000

The Jews of Europe found themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century tossed on the horns of a terrible dilemma. If they pursued the gains of emancipation, they must assimilate; and the more they did so, the more their Judaism would have to be reformed, the more dilute it would become, the less Jewish they would finally turn out to be. If, on the other hand, they restricted their pursuit of the gains of emancipation and hence, the less they assimilated and lost thereby their Jewishness, the more they would stand out as strangers in a society bent on not granting them its identity. On either count, they stood to lose. But which loss was greater? Jewishness, or freedom, and often, life?

The Ismail Faruqi Award Presentation Ceremony

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:32:36 +0000

This bi-annual award to IIU scholars who produce outstanding, excellent and exemplary academic work was established in honour of the memory of al-marhum Professor Ismail Raji al-Faruqi who, during his lifetime, had made profound and invaluable contributions not only to Islamic scholarship but to learning as a whole. Indeed, I was most privileged to have been given the opportunity of knowing him personally, as a leading scholar of his generation and as a friend. To be sure, he exacted uncompromising intellectual standards and lived by a strict regiment of academic discipline. But, at the same time, he was never lost in mere philosophical abstractions. He was acutely conscious of the realities of the time and the condition of the contemporary ummah. In this regard, he exemplified the conjunction between theoretical learning, ilm, and the righteous deeds, amal salih. He devoted the best years of his life, before his death under tragic circumstances, to the upliftment of the ummah, in inspiring and guiding its youth especially.

Islam on Its Own Terms: The Contribution of Isma’il al-Faruqi

admin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:16:28 +0000

In his teaching of Islam the late Dr. Isma'il al-Faruqi had little patience with the anthropomorphic approach with which most comparative religion is taught. He believed there must be faith, belief, and commitment if the inner essence of Islam—and indeed of any religion—is to be appreciated. He deplored the fact that Islam in the West is taught predominately by non-Muslims, whereas Christianity and Judaism are taught by adherents to those faiths.

Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Romantic Relapse of Europe

admin — Sat, 16 May 2009 17:43:16 +0000

The prognosis of the last paragraph (Chapter III) was the reality on the American scene. Most of the rabbis ministering to the Jews of America were educated in the Reform seminaries of Europe, and the first seminary in America (Cincinnati, Ohio) belonged to the same group. The absence of persecution and of ghettos and the religious freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution promoted acculturation and assimilation of Jewish immigrants from Europe. In America, it was hard to be anything but a Reformed Jew. The voice of orthodoxy, of traditionalism, was certainly present; but it was overwhelmed by the universalism and secularism of American society in the matter of religion. The situation radically changed in the nineties when a wave of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe sent a flood ofjewish immigrants to America. The demography of American Jewry was turned upside down. In a decade, American Jewry became overwhelmingly orthodox and the voice of Reform Judaism became that of a minority. What happened in Russia to bring about this Jewish exodus happened in various degrees in the rest of Europe.

Review of “Islam: A Challenge to Religion” by Ghulam Ahmad Parwez

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 09:39:46 +0000

The author of this book is famous for his "Abandon of the Hadlth and return to the Qur'an," the central theme of the Association for the Reemergence of Islam (Tulu-e-Islam) of the last three decades, of which he is the founder. His call has appealed especially to the learned civil servants of Pakistan, who flocked to his durbar in Gulberg (Lahore) every Sunday to hear the teacher expose his views. Anxious, like all Muslim modernists, to break out from under the deposits of centuries of deadening conservatism and Sufism, Parwez sought an anchor for the creativity and dynamism of this generation and found it in the Qur'an if approached in abstraction from the Hadith, the base of most Islamic laws and popular beliefs. His views he elaborated in his 30-volume Qur'anic study, Mafhum-ul-Qur’an and a periodical carrying the name of the movement.