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Prof. John Voll delivers annual Isma’il Faruqi lecture
“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.
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Islam and the Problem of Israel: Zionism as Religion
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.
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Islam and the Problem of Israel: Jewish Universalism and Ethnocentrism
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.
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On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah
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.
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Appendix: Dialogue On The Nature of Islamic Da’wah
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.