Ismail Faruqi Online

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  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: Jewish Universalism and Ethnocentrism

    Reading Time: 13 minutes

    From Chapter 6: “Jewish Universalism and Ethnocentrism” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Distinguishing the Revelation from Its Text

    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.

    To acknowledge the divine source of the Torah, however, is not to assert that the book currently known as the ” Torah” is the exact and veritable text of the Torah revealed to Moses. For this, historical proof is needed; and critical history tells a completely different tale. It tells that the Torah was re-formed and re-written by scribes and priests under King Josiah in the seventh century B.C.; that it was recast by the Jewish priesthood over many centuries; that it was lost or destroyed during the Exile in the sixth century; that it was rewritten by Ezra, the scribe, in the fifth, etc. Although some early Christians, notably Marcion and his followers in the third century A.C., doubted the religious value of the Torah as handed down to them and called upon Christians to reject it, the majority of Christians accepted it and incorporated it as part of an “Old Testament” which they juxtaposed with a “New Testament” written by the apostles of Jesus. Christian thinkers then overcame the un-Christian message of the Torah by interpreting it allegorically. Marcion and his warning were forgotten; and the claim for the integrity of the Torah would have gone unchallenged were it not for God’s constant providence.

    B. Two New Disciplines

    It was al Qur’an al Karim, the revelation sent to the Prophet Muhammad (SAAW) which first questioned the veracity, not of the Torah as such, but of the Torahic text. By its persistent questioning, by its indictment that the rabbis were even then and there, still “reforming” and “rewriting” the Torah to suit their needs and wishes, al Qur’an has initiated a new discipline – textual criticism – and a new science — the scientific study of religion. Practically every Muslim thinker thereafter participated in the new intellectual endeavor, then given the title of al Milal wa al Nihal (“Studies of Religions and Para-Religions”). In time, the discipline produced a number of giants, Ibn Hazm, al Baghdad!, al Nawbakhti. Of Ibn Hazm, orientalist Alfred Guillaume said that he anticipated Western Biblical critics by a whole millennium, even in the most minute of his criticisms of the Torahic text. Indeed, Western Biblical criticism began with Wellhausen, Kiihnen and Graf, who were all Islamicists well acquainted with al Qur’an’s critique of the Biblical text.

    C. Universalist and Ethnocentrist Strands in Judaism

    Any objective historian’s examination of the Torah reveals that it is a text composed of many strata deriving from periods separated by hundreds of years; that its compilation must have been the work of centuries, thus repudiating once and for all the Jewish claim that the text of the Torah is verbatim revelation, as well as the Rabbinic claim, that that text is integrally the one given by Moses as revelation. Any unbiased reading of the text would also reveal that two main traditions have intertwined themselves in it, intercalating their precepts within its lines. Almost every Torahic narrative or exhortation speaks, as it were, with two mouths. These traditions can best be described as “universalist” and “ethnocentrist.” They have characterised almost every passage ofthe Torah as well as of the other books of the Old Testament. This observation casts doubt upon the theory that the whole Old Testament is verbatim revelation; but it does not disprove that a fair part of it is in fact revelation. Indeed, such a distinction saves the revealed part and places it beyond attack thus providing a first advantage. Secondly, the distinction accomodates the critical historian’s view that the scripture is a body of writings which came to be regarded by the adherent-interpreters as reflecting the living religious reality of their age, and hence were edited, rearranged, and refined under the influence of that reality. Thirdly, the distinction is wide enough to sustain the religious faith that working with a traditional text that is unquestionably revealed, reinterpretation and edition by later prophets and scribes constitute revelation, no less than the earlier phenomenon. This last advantage accommodates the most conservative view, which cannot escape the evidence of change in widely separated revelations through time, nor demand — religiously speaking – the total absence of change. Finally, the distinction narrows down the difference between the Jewish and Islamic views. Whereas Judaism claims revelation status for the earlier as well as the later texts, Islam affirms the earlier and rejects only the later.

    The universalist strand differs substantially from the ethnocentric in their conception of divinity, of revelation, of piety, of the covenant, of the people or nation, ofthe Day of Judgment, of morality, of the place of Jerusalem and Palestine in the religion.

    1. Divinity

    In the universalist strand, God is One and Transcendent. He is Creator of heaven and earth, Lord and Master, Sustainer and Judge of the universe. He is omniscient and omnipotent, and merciful to all His creatures. This is amply sup-i by dispersed texts running from Genesis to Malachi. It is not the case that in the ethnocentrist strand any of these predicates is denied. They are not. They are all asserted and acknowledged as true. But in addition to them, other contradictory predicates0 or predicates incompatible with the universalist conception of the deity, are ascribed. It is maintained that God be addressed as Elohim, a plural of “god”;The term is widely distributed throughout the whole Old Testament, pointing to an edition of the work wherein the references to God were changed to fit this appellation of the deity. that the Elohim, or many gods, have come to earth and copulated with daughters of men (Genesis 6:2); that “the gods” belong to men in such a way that Jacob could steal them away from Laban (Genesis 31:30) and Leah could cover them with her skirts and sit on them (Genesis 31:34—35). The ethnocentrist strand holds that God wrestled physically with a human and lost the battle (Genesis 32:24—30); that God is subject to passion and to pity (Genesis 9:21); that He acts unjustly and is biased in favor of a tiny segment of humanity, the Jews. The contrast is vividly painted between the universalist God Who is absolutely One and Transcendent, and the ethnocentrist god who is in every respect a “ghost” kind of god, a god of tribal animism. That is why Biblical scholars have reserved the name Judaism and Jewish religion to the later, post-Exilic manifestation, and “Hebrew religion” to the religion of the patriarchs as expressed in the Old Testament. Ethical monotheism, they claimed, is true of the later phenomenon, whereas monolatry is true of the earlier.

    2. Revelation

    The universalist strand maintains that God reveals His will to humankind that they may obey it; that revelation is the law of God equally incumbent upon all; that since the unity of God and the unity of truth are corollaries, revelation must be one and the same at least in essence; that differences in revelation from period to period or place to place always pertain to application rather than spirit of the law. Being from God, revelation is holy. Respect belongs to its spirit and letter, both of which are always public. This means that it is of the nature of revelation to proclaim and universalise itself. Its truths are never esoteric, and they can never be reached by mere eisegesis. Hence the text of revelation must be preserved along with the categories with which its meanings could be comprehended

    The ethnocentrist strand, per contra, conditions the revelation of God by the advantage it provides to the ethnic entir. Taking such relation as the raison d’etre of revelation, it understands its normativeness not as universal, but as pertaining tc the recipient ethnic entity alone, and hence, assumes the laws o: God to apply only to the members, not to outsiders. The latter ethnocentrism holds, may have their own revelation as it is possible for them to have their own god or gods. God is the “God of Israel,” “of Abraham,” “Isaac,” “Jacob” and of their descendants. If He reaches out to the others, He does so not for their own sake but in order to vindicate, defend or avenge “His own people.” Only they are “His sons,” object of His loving care and mercy. The others can enjoy His care and mercy by derivation from, or association with, “His people.” Obviously, for ethnocentrists, there can be in principle more than one revelation, that such revelations can be as radically varied as their recipients; for there are as many gods as there are ethnic entities. Even for an Isaiah, such other gods are weak, impotent, even nothing; but they are not not-gods. Certainly, they are lesser gods, but still gods, de jure (Isaiah 40:18ff; 41:22ff).

    The necessary relation to ethnic entity justifies eisegesis of revelation to the end of realising the advantage of that entity. In another dimension, the same relation has granted revelation status to those historical writings (Chronicles, Kings) whose sole message is the affirmation and promotion of the ethnic entity. Indeed, the relation to the ethnic entity is reciprocal: What the entity does collectively, what happens to it, the unfolding of its destiny — that is equally revelation! The ethnocentrist view does not find contradition between its stand on revelation and universalism. It asserts both and seeks to realise whatever advantage lies in each of them.

    The same necessary relationship to the ethnic identity affects the meaning of piety. Whereas the universalist view devotes all piety, all worship, and all majesty to God alone, and so orders human life as to make it possessed by the divine presence at every one of its moments, the ethnocentrist view raises the ethnic entity to the point of sharing the majesty of God, and the piety and worship of man. Thus, the religion itself is defined in terms of God, Law or Torah, and people. Devotion to “the people” becomes a corollary of devotion to God. The “Klal Israel” acquires a mystical halo because it becomes, in ethnocentrism, something numinous.

    3. Covenant

    Nothing illustrates this para-divine nature of the ethnic entity better than the understanding of the covenant in the two views. Under universalism, the covenant expresses the moral purpose of creation, the essence of human morality. It asserts that man, being created to the end ofobeying God and fulfilling His will in creation, is free and capable to do so; that whether he does or does not obey is the criterion of his moral merit. Obedience to the divine imperative will issue in success in this world and blessedness in the next; disobedience, in failure and damnation. God’s covenant, being moral, is universal and applies to all human beings. It is the “arrangement” or “pattern” by which God is pleased or displeased, the former when humans obey His laws, the latter when they are oblivious to them. The covenant of universalism is always a “two-way street”: Man’s moral obligation to God and the pattern of God’s disposal of men’s affairs. Under ethnocentrism, the covenant has lost its universal nature and consequently its moral character. It has become “the Promise” by which God has bound Himself to favor His People, and to continue to favor them regardless of their moral performance (Deuteronomy 7:6—8; Hosea 4:12). He chooses them and proffers His blessings upon them, vindicates and avenges them, defends and gives them victory, not for their morality, but simply because He has bound Himself to them, and so because they alone are His People. That they are “hard and stiff-necked,” that they have gone a-whoring after other gods, does not matter because, according to the “Prophet” Hosea, they are still the “sons” of God and God is their “Father” (Hosea 11:8-9). Where ethnocentrism is unable to explain the tragic facts of history, when God’s People have indeed suffered catastrophes, it acknowledges the event as a chastisement, a punishment inflicted for sins committed. But it can never countenance such option on the part of God as “And if the people turn away from this call, God will exchange: them for another people who will not…” (Qur’an 47:38). To this end, ethnocentrism has invented the doctrine of “the Remnant” (Isaiah 37:32), basing God’s continued election and favoritism to the Jewish people on the claim that a small remnant of Jews have kept their loyalty and morality and thus justified the necessary favoritism (Zechariah 8:12). In fact, the theory also holds that the remnant cannot go wrong, that its virtue is always necessary (II Kings 21:14: Zephaniah 3:13). Its purpose is hence to provide another leg on which the doctrine of election stands; in case of difficulty, to play the role of a deux ex machina.

    Confirming the inevitability of God’s blessing to the Jews, ethnocentrism has interpreted the covenant in material, biological and hence racist terms, and spoken of it as being “in the Flesh.” Its symbol is circumcision (Genesis 17:9-14). This is only a symbol. Its being in the flesh is understood as something innate and hereditary, utterly independent of morality. The whole moral struggle is irrelevant to it. A Jew is a beni berith (son of the covenant) even if he apostasises. As such, he remains entitled to God’s favor, to elect status. It is on this basis that the State of Israel regards every Jew in the world as its citizen, regardless of whether he has decided tojoin or not. Even Alfred Rosenberg had to admit, when cornered, that “race” was ultimately a question of culture and values, and only preparatorily a question of cephalic index, blondness, etc. And the modern South African apartheid advocates define “white,” “black” and “colored” in such a way as to include the Japanese in the white class, the Syrians and Egyptians in the “black,” and the Malaysians and Indonesians in the “colored.” Obviously their need is to find a base other than the physical on which to found their discrimination. Not so with Jewish election and covenant. Moreover, the obvious racial diversity of male parents during two millennia of ghetto existence and persecution has caused the Government of Israel to define Jewishness in terms of biological maternal descendence.

    4. The Jewish People, Morality and the Day of Judgment

    The universalist strand regards the Jewish People on a par with other creatures of God. If their history has been different, it is because God has chosen to send His messengers to teach and am them. Hence, they stand under greater obligation to be righteous. For those who know, who have been adequately taught and warned have far less excuse to do wrong, or even to err. They are, besides, God’s ambassadors to mankind, or to their neighbors or next of kin. They must therefore exemplify the morality they profess. Their ambassadorship would thus be actualised. The Day of Judgment, for them, is the Day on on which God would reckon with every human his past deeds, and judge mankind on a standard of absolute justice. Judgment is the keystone of morality, the logical consequence of freedom ind responsibility.

    On the other hand, ethnocentrism’s view of the people, nation, or ethnicity is the key which determines its view of everything else. The ethnic entity is elevated to the highest level, but it is not fused with the deity nor does it take its place. It becomes a prime associate of the deity, defining and channeling God’s relation to the People. In consequence, the ethnic entity becomes the principal category on which morality, culture, law and civilization depend, and God becomes a constitutional figurehead. The entity’s priesthood assumes the role of lawmaking, of governing, and of determining the life of the entity on earth. Being ethnic, the entity is necessarily earth-bound, and regards itself as eternal in time. It is not impressed by the Day of judgment or the hereafter. It interprets the Day of Judgment as the Day on which it will be vindicated, revenged, against its earthly enemies, rather than the Day on which God reckons with all men their moral and immoral works and passes a judgment of reward or punishment to each on the basis of his or her own works.

    5. Jerusalem, Palestine

    Finally, the universalist strand regards Jerusalem and Palestine as accidental to revelation. It acknowledges the previous revelations of God to the prophets inhabiting that spot of earth, and keeps a memory of joy and gratitude to God for having made the inhabitants of that spot of earth the recipient or first audience, of revelation. It knows that God might have placed His revelation anywhere else; and that, had He done so, His revelation would be as normative and binding and excellent as before (Qur’an 6:124). Hence, it sees no causal relation whatsoever between the “real estate” and revelation, between the rocks of the ground and the deity. The same is true of the Kingdom of David of history. That kingdom has no value other than that which history assigns to it. Some aspects of it may well be worth emulating, especially those in which it has proved its obedience to God and His commandments. But it is never confused with Paradise, the other kingdom which is spiritual, timeless and spaceless, a transcendent dependency of the transcendent God.

    In ethnocentrism, per contra, Jerusalem and Palestine are pieces of real estate whose religious value is intrinsic to the physical aspect of their being, in addition to the spiritual memorial being recognized by universalism. Halevy, who is often quoted by the Zionists as a medieval predecessor, saw a causal relationship between the physical earth, air and water of Palestine and the divine dispensation. Actually, it should not come as a surprise that God Who has chosen a people in the flesh to be His favorite through their biological generation, that He chose a piece of real estate to be His “dwelling place” forever. Ethnocentrism was bold enough to tie the divine presence to Jerusalem. In the mouth of one of its prophets, viz., Nathan, it laid down the law that God could not be reached except in Jerusalem, that the Jew cannot worship Him unless he stands on Jerusalem’s soil (II Samuel 7:4ff; I Kings 5:17; 8:27ff). Hence, all the attachment to the eretz or soil which made any amount of it desirable as a guarantee of the connection to the Deity. Having ethnicised God by associating Him with the ethnic entity, ethnocentrism en-landised Him and restricted Him to the physical historical frontiers of Jerusalem. For it, Jerusalem is not merely an expression of values to be remembered and observed, but a continuing physical reality to be possessed. Likewise, the Davidic Kingdom is a physical, political, social, military and economic kingdom reestablished on its own land. To the universalist formula that Judaism consists of God and His law or revelation, ethnocentrism adds “and His People” or the chosen ethnic entity, and “and the physical land.” Even a Martin Buber, perhaps the most spiritualised of modern Zionists, could not resist the ethnocentric appeal. He declared that between land and people, and hence land and God, there is a mysterious connection of timeless proportion. Apparently, God, in ethnocentrism is not only the god of a tribe, a god in whose nature a particular tribe is inextricably embedded. He is equally the god of a land from which He is inseparable and which is equally embedded within His nature in a mysterious way which passes understanding. Such is the logic of Jewish ethnocentrism.

    D. Alternating Dominance of the Two Strands

    Although the universalist and ethnocentrist strands have been present in Jewish consciousness, their history has known periods in which the one or the other was dominant. Certainly, the Exilic Age (609-500 B.C.), the age of Hellenistic ascendancy (200 B.C.-650 A.C.), the Islamic Period (650-1948), the West European Period of the Enlightenment (1650-1850), and the American Period (1650-1939), the Russian Communist period since 1918, are periods in which the universalising view dominated the thinking of the overwhelming majority of Jews in the territory in question. These periods had their own leaders who stand out prominently as advocates of universalism; namely, Jeremiah and Isaiah; Philo; practically all Jewish thinkers and leaders in the realm of Islam but notably Ibn Maymun, Sa’adiah and Hayyuy ibn Zakariyya; Spinoza, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Geiger; Isaac Wise, David Kaufman, Einhorn and Kohler, etc., in respective order. Equally certain, the period of David’s monarchy (990-922 B.C.), of Ezra and Nehemiah (549-440 B.C.), of the Maccabees (330 B.C.-70 A.C.), of Europe’s pre-Enlightenment ghetto-age (300-1650 A.C.), and of modern Zionism (1933 to the present are the periods in which ethnocentrism was the dominant view. Coming on the heels of the Enlightenment and in an age in which the Western world seems to have replaced God with ethnic entity, the present rise of Jewish ethnocentrism is the strongest of all previous periods. Its phenomenon is worldwide and, so far at least, it has enjoyed the understanding and blessing of the Western nations as a sister movement whose nature is very much like their own.

  • Appendix: Dialogue On The Nature of Islamic Da’wah

    Reading Time: 18 minutes

    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.

    Ahmad: First of all I would like to compliment Professor Isma’il al-Faruqi on his short but brilliant exposition of Islamic da’wah. This paper brings to sharp focus the real nature of the Islamic da’wah and some of its salient features. Another significant aspect of this exposition is that it also emphasizes, albeit indirectly, some important elements of the modus vivendi of the Islamic da’wah. I fully agree with the substance of Professor al-Faruqi’s argument as well as with his formulation of the issues involved.

    After this introductory observation, I would like to say a few words about three aspects of Islamic da’wah, that is, its what, why and how.

    The central issue, according to Islam, is not man’s need to know the person of God and to extricate himself from his vicarious predicament by seeking the grace of a saviour, but his need for hidayah (divine guidance) to enable him to know the will of God and to try to live in obedience to it. Islam means complete submission to the Divine Will and it is this harmonization of man’s will with the Divine Will that leads to real peace — peace within man’s soul, between man and man, between man and the creation and finally between man and God.

    The human situation, according to the Islamic view, is exemplified in the Qur’anic narration about the creation of man. He was created to play a positive and dynamic role — that of God’s khalifah, His deputy, representative and vice-gerent on earth. He was endowed with free will, with the capacity to make moral decisions, and was given the knowledge of things, so as to make such decisions properly. He was given the opportunity to make moral decisions for himself and to show whether he can behave responsibly, fulfilling the trust put in him. The experience he had with this freedom before he came to the earth brings to light his potentialities as well as his weaknesses — his exposure to evil and the dangers of his succumbing to it, as also his innate goodness to realize his mistakes and to strive to rectify them. It is because of this human situation that man needs divine guidance — as a reminder, a protector and a guide to make the right moral decision and remain steadfast in this respect. The critical question is man’s relationship with God and in the light of that his relationship with himself, with other human beings, with the entire creation and with history.

    The strategy of the hidayah is to start with giving to man the iman, that is, faith and conviction in the unity of God — in tawhid with all its ramifications. God is One. He is the Creator, the Lord, the Mercy-Giving, the Sustainer, the Nourisher, the Perfector, the Truth, the Guide, the Law-Giver, the Sovereign, the Judge, the One to whom is man’s return. God and man represent two categories and man’s success and salvation lies in accepting God as his God, as Ma’bud (the object of worship, reverence, loyalty and obedience).

    God’s will is not something mysterious, unknown or vague. It is revealed in the hidayah which provides the code for human conduct, the Law, the shari’ah. Islam is a complete way of life — al-din. Acceptance of God and His hidayah results in the emergence of a community of faith. Social institutions are reared on the foundations of iman. Muslim community is an ideological entity and represents a social movement to actualize in space and time the demands of the hidayah.

    Islam is not merely a metaphysical doctrine or a theology; in it emphasis is on iman as the starting point, that is a conviction and a commitment to accept God as the Lord and to submit to His Will completely. This produces a particular outlook on life. Islam also provides a complete way of life; a system with explicit criteria for right and wrong and a set of clear injunctions as to how to regulate major institutions of human society. Finally, Islam inculcates the spirit of living in God’s presence as symbolized in the Islamic value of ihsan.

    In this scheme, the prophets of God were not merely passive recipients and simple communicators of divine guidance but were also assigned the responsibility of presenting before man a living model of that guidance, a model that could be followed and emulated by divine sanction. All prophets of God fulfilled this function and Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) represents the last expression of this model. The Qur’an contains the Word of God as it was revealed to the Prophet, and his sunnah provides the living model which we as Muslims try to follow and to approximate to.

    This being the framework, we are now in a position to answer briefly the three questions we posed at the outset. The what of the Islamic da’wah means invitation to Islam as a faith and as a way of life, as al-din. This is an invitation to all human beings and the invitation becomes more pressing for those who respond to this call, for they have to engage themselves in an unceasing struggle to transform their own lives, individual and social, in accordance with this code of guidance. It is an invitation not only to a new iman, a new outlook in life, but also to a new order, the Islamic way of life. It is an invitation, not merely to the acceptance of a certain historical event, but to engage in a dynamic and unceasing process of understanding, training and social action, towards the transformation of human life through tarbiyah and tazkiyah, to suggest the relevant Islamic values.

    The why of the da’wah can be understood by reflecting upon the framework we have discussed. Man is not self-sufficient and needs divine guidance. As Muhammad (peace be upon him) is the last Prophet, how does the mechanism for guidance operate after him? The Islamic position is that this is ensured first by the preservation of the divine guidance in its pure and pristine form in the Qur’an and secondly by making the Muslim ummah — every Muslim and all Muslims — the witness of Truth before mankind in the same way as the Prophet was a witness of the Truth unto them.1 This has also been enjoined upon the Muslims in a number of places in the Qur’an as also by the Prophet.2

    Now a word about the how. Da’wah is presented primarily through conveying the message, preaching you may call it, and by practising it and as such presenting before the world its living example. Islam has ruled out techniques of coercion as instruments of da’wah. The methods it has enjoined and actualized in history are methods of communication, discussion and persuasion on the one hand, and the gravitational pull of godliness as exemplified in the lives of the people and realized in the social order. There is no professional class of priests or preachers in Islam. Every Muslim is responsible for the da’wah whatever be his vocation in life.

    Fitzgerald: I would like to ask for clarification of Dr al-Faruqi’s statement that Islamic da’wah is ecumenical par excellence, by virtue of its comprehensive recognition of all the religions as de jure. In fact, what is meant by all religions? Having recourse to Apollo and other gods and goddesses is a kind of religion, but would Islam recognize this as well as all other religions as de jure.

    al-Faruqi: Islam recognizes all religions as de jure, and then it invites the adherents of these religions to begin the task of criticism. No religion is ruled out by the Muslim a priori. In other words, if I meet someone who has never heard of Islam and who worships, for example, an “X” or “Y”, whatever that may be, I as a Muslim am not free to call him a pagan, or to regard him as condemned by God; rather, I must talk with him in order to discover what his religion is, in the belief that God must in His mercy have sent a prophet to him, for the Qur’an says: “And there is no people unto whom God has not sent a prophet” (Q. 35: 24).

    Believing then that God in His mercy must have told him something, I meet with him with a view to being instructed about his faith, and then I invite him to research his own tradition in order to discover the essential message that God has given him. And if, in relation to that central revealed core, the rest of the beliefs and practices of that religion as developed through history turn out to be a pack of lies, that would be an empirical discovery for me. But for the Muslim this must never be an a priori decision which condemns a man because he doesn’t believe “in my God my way”!

    However, if I discover that another man’s religion has been corrupted and falsified beyond recognition, then I have a duty to tell him about the Qur’an, God’s final revelation, to present it to him as rational truth, and invite his consideration. If he says, “I don’t want to listen”, then either he is malevolent or a fool.

    Cragg: What you are saying, then, is that God has sent prophets everywhere, but ex hypothesi these prophets must be consistent with Islam.

    al-Faruqi: Yes, Islam as religio naturalis, din al-fitrah.

    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.

    Fitzeragld: 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.

    Cragg: It seems rather an escape hatch of a theory, because if a prophet is really a prophet then his message becomes known, it is balagh, communication; and if it has not survived historically it must be mythical.

    al-Faruqi: No. At one time it was known. But then later on it became falsified as the Hebrew message became falsified, and the Christian message was falsified.

    Cragg: But from an historical point of view that would be entirely conjectural.

    The discussion then turned to Dr al-Faruqi’s point that Islamic da’wah is “rational intellection”.

    Cragg: Going back to your exegesis of the verse in Surat al-Ahzab, we take the point that there is a kind of natural Islam of nature — that is, islam with a small “i”, as it were — and there is a volitional Islam, on the part of man. But in the conclusion of that verse, after man has accepted the trust, the Qur’an says: “Indeed he is a wrong doer and rebellious” — which is what the Psalms describe when they speak of the “froward”, i.e. both ill-advised and obstinate. It is this area that I am so deeply concerned about in your paper because, if I may put it this way, there is a certain naivete about principles of reason, and about your alternative of the world being either full of fools or of people who are prepared to be persuaded. Is there not a third possibility that there is a kind of quality of … perverseness? — for which law, exhortation, argument, do not suffice. Indeed they may provoke the very disobedience they condemn. Could it not be that it is this perversity of man which is implied in that particular verse in the Qur’an? There seems to be a real emphasis upon man as being in trust and at the same time distorting the trust he was given; the trust, if you like, is simply the context of the distortion. Your paper, in its very real concern which we all share for a right and true humanism, neglects this dimension which, perhaps in some emphases exaggeratedly, nevertheless essentially has been at the core of the Christian tradition about man, and the sense of the divine responsibility which Christians understand in terms of that saving intervention which you say is psychotropic folly…or whatever.

    al-Faruqi: Since we understand the purport of this verse as being to stress the moral aspect of the will of God, it stands to reason that the violation of it is mentioned in the verse rather than its realization. But the realization is mentioned in many other verses in the Qur’an. The concern here is not really with man’s violation as something necessary, but with man’s violation as something real. Nobody can deny that men sin and do evil. They are not angels. In the other verse of the Qur’an which I quoted, the angels actually argue with God that men will sin. But God says that He has a motive in creating man which the angels do not know. The difference between Islam and Christianity is still very great here. Islam recognizes the universality of sin, and God deals with it by sending down the Qur’an. He commands the Muslims to continue to deal with it by da’wah. But the concept of the necessity of sin, the fallenness of man, has nothing to do with Islam. To read in this verse any such meaning would be contrary to the meaning intended and the unanimous wisdom of fourteen centuries of Islamic thought.

    Fitzgerald: Does the term “rational intellection” refer only to the da’wah itself or does it include also the response to da’wah? And of what nature is this response? Is it in any way comparable to “conversion”? In certain Christian religious philosophies, for example Thomism or Neo-Thomism, there is something similar to the idea of din al-fitrah. Man is said to be capable of the infinite; he does not have a limited horizon, but is always striving to surpass the horizon. But he is faced by a fundamental choice — he has to choose the good which is outside himself, and this is an option which has to be confirmed throughout the whole of life. If a man stops, and turns in on himself, then he is refusing his own nature. Now this sense of conversion has been described by C. S. Lewis in his autobiography as “joy”, which includes an element of ecstasy. It is not therefore entirely rational, but this does not mean to say that it is irrational, rather that it is non-rational.

    Bishop Rudvin took the discussion back to Dr. al-Faruqi’s comments about the Christian idea of sin.

    Rudvin: Comment has recently been made on the dogma of original sin. Now I was brought up in the Christian denomination — Lutheran — which has probably been the most emphatic in its insistence upon the dogma of original sin, and I would say that Dr al-Faruqi’s understanding of it is not really correct. He infers that it is a necessary trait of creation, but this is exactly what it is not. The whole conception of original sin, or the fall, in Christianity is an insistence that man’s empirical situation today, which is hopeless and sinful, is not a part of creation. The dogma about original sin means that we see man as he is empirically, and we emphatically deny that he was created that way.

    al-Faruqi: But you define the state of innocence as Adam before the fall —well, that is not history, and what troubles me is that Christianity declares all men to be sinful in essence throughout the entire history of creation. The fall in Christian thought means that all men are by nature sinful, not just that all men sin in the same way as we might say that all men have noses! The fall means guilt, crime, and Christianity seems to condemn all men as being necessarily criminals, necessarily guilty.

    Rudvin: But here you are presenting your own conclusions as the substance of Christian doctrine. I would summarize the whole doctrine of original sin like this: we recognize that empirical and practical man is in an awful mess, and all men are in the same mess, and have been throughout history, but we deny — or we insist, we cry out — that this is not what man was created to be. Man is not a sinner of necessity, but by his own will.

    Sanneh: I would like to approach this issue from another direction —from the angle of revelation. The problem of revelation is not just the question of divine initiative — God willing and wanting to reveal himself to man in the form of a code of laws — but it is also intertwined with the problem of human volition and how man has resisted, indeed rebelled against, and sometimes persecuted the spokesmen of God, the prophets. Muhammad came as a reminder, certainly, which underscores the idea of Islam as din al-fitrah; but he came also as a warner — a warner because man is recalcitrant, a disputatious being who will argue with the divine initiative and struggle against it. The Qur’an itself accepts the problem that to secure man’s obedience is itself a highly ambiguous and problematic issue, because the intent to seek man’s obedience carries with it the risk of man’s refusing to give his obedience.

    In answer to Dr Sanneh, Dr al-Faruqi opened up an area of fascinating discussion:

    al-Faruqi: You spoke of God “willing and wanting to reveal Himself to man”. God does not reveal Himself. He does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. God reveals only His will. Remember one of the prophets asked God to reveal Himself and God told him, “No, it is not possible for Me to reveal Myself to anyone.”

    Cragg: Do you make this distinction absolute? Is not the will expressive of the nature?

    al-Faruqi: Only the nature in percipe. In other words, the will of God is God in percipe — the nature of God in so far as I can know anything about Him.

    This is God’s will and that is all we have — and we have it in perfection in the Qur’an. But Islam does not equate the Qur’an with the nature or essence of God. It is the Word of God, the Commandment of God, the Will of God. But God does not reveal Himself to anyone. Christians talk about the revelation of God Himself—by God of God — but that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam. God is transcendent, and once you talk about self-revelation you have hierophancy and immanence, and then the transcendence of God is compromised. You may not have complete transcendence and self-revelation at the same time.

    Cragg: But no more can you have complete transcendence and creation.

    al-Faruqi: Yes, you can. Because creation is, in the Qur’an’s words, kun fa yaqun, “be and it is”. Creation is a commandment of God (Q. 3:41 et. al.).

    Cragg: Yes, but the creation of man is an involvement of the divine will with the human answer, as Dr Sanneh has been arguing. And therefore it is possible to say that to some extent the transcendent is now in the custody of man.

    al-Faruqi: But God created creation by His command. I as a creature have no right to inflate myself and the rest of creation to such a degree as to say that without His creation God would flounder.

    Cragg: But if I may say so modestly, you proceed into an extravagance. The point we are trying to get at is whether in Islam there is a divine responsibility — as I believe there is — and I believe this binds Christians and Muslims very closely together — a divine responsibility relating to this creation and to man in particular. This is, I believe, the proper corollary of a belief in creation, and of a belief in revelation and the succession of prophets. God cares about being obeyed and seeks the obedience through the sequence of prophets. Now we on the Christian side are going to go further and say: Yes, God seeks this obedience in redemptive terms. But I’ll leave that aside for the moment. The principle must surely be established that the will of God is involved in the creation, and therefore involved in man the creature, offering him the trust (amanah) and giving him the vice-gerency (khilafah). God, so to speak, has gone out on a limb. The omnipotence of God is, we could say, in a certain sense compromised, to the extent that an element of what this omnipotence is seeking is now squarely entrusted to man.

    al-Faruqi: Not really. I as a human being can create a computer or an automaton to do certain things and not to do other things, but the existence of the automaton is certainly no compromise of my own inventive power or my superior mind.

    Cragg: But your analogy breaks down. Man is not a computer. As you yourself said in an earlier session, he is a volitional being and what is required of him is a volitional Islam. This cannot be automatic, for it must always turn upon the will of man.

    Ahmad: I do not see the logic of saying that because God has created man as a volitional being His Omnipotence and Sovereignty are in any way compromised. God can be caring. God is caring. But that doesn’t mean that He abandons part of His Sovereignty or Transcendence. On the one hand, as we find in the Qur’an, God is caring and loving — Rahman, Rahim, Wadud— and He desires man’s obedience and worship; but on the other hand the Qur’an also makes it clear that God is in no way dependent or in need of man’s worship. If men refuse to worship God and to obey Him, God is not affected. It is not God Who seeks completion in our worship, but rather we who seek completion through worshipping Him.

    Cragg: Now we have really come to something which is crucial. In my view if you want an unmitigated transcendence, then you have got to go to Buddhism where the absolute is totally dissociated from the immanent and historical. But unmitigated transcendence for me is a contradiction in terms. I have introduced the term “compromise”, which is an unfortunate term because it suggests bargaining with truth. But if we are going to use this word, then it would seem to me that an indifferent transcendence would be the compromise. It is not that God cares and comes that compromises him. The abeyance of this would compromise him because it would be a kind of abdication.

    If I may say so, it seems to me that what we have to try to do is to think more deeply about what we mean by omnipotence. Omnipotence is not the ability to do all things, but rather the ability to be undefeated. It means that God will subdue all things unto himself. It means a final competence. But having said this, I as a Christian am of the conviction that there are certain things about which we can say: “God ought”. I find it a terribly desolating and finally contradictory concept to believe in unobligated deity. That is deism. Theism, to which we here are all committed, must mean divine involvement for this, as I have said, is implicit in creation itself. You cannot create and be as if you hadn’t. You cannot have law and be indifferent to what happens to it. You cannot educate and be indifferent to what is happening in education. The whole succession of prophets seems to argue a divine solicitude; jahiliyyah matters. If you have a false God it matters. Now this is not a fiction; it is not a play on words. God is involved in wrong that jahiliyyah does to him. I would say that this is where, if we are open together, Islam has to be open at a deep level to what Christians are saying, just as we Christians want to be open to what you are saying. Can we think of the Allahu akbar as a genuine accountability and responsibility to the human situation? Is not that within the meaning of transcendence?

    al-Faruqi: No. Allah is not responsible for our misdeeds.

    Cragg: … If he isn’t, quite simply I would prefer to be an atheist. An indifferent or a silent heaven…

    al-Faruqi: I would deny accountability or responsibility on the part of God for my misdeeds. I do not mean to say that God is indifferent, that God is a cynic. Of course He cares. But God has given me freedom and moral responsibility. He has given me all the equipment needed for knowing His will, and even if I am lethargic of mind He has given me the quick rule of thumb by which to know His will — the shari’ah, the law, which I can read easily in books. Now if it is my will, despite all this, to disobey Him, then I am responsible and I have to bear the burden — not God. How can the Judge, how can the Source of the law, how can the King be responsible for the misdeeds of the subject? But of course if His citizenry turns out to be gangsters, He will use His authority as Judge and King. Men do fail in their responsibilities — this is an incontrovertible, empirical fact — and Islam recognizes it fully. The Qur’an tells us that God is Merciful, and that it is out of His mercy and grace that He has given us revelation through the prophets in order to correct us.

    Cragg: Well, I think that we are agreed that transcendence is not non-involvement. What is at issue is the degree of this involvement…

    al-Faruqi: The kind of involvement…not the degree. The nature of involvement.

    Cragg: But the Qur’an says kataba ‘aid nafsihi al-rahmah — “He has written the mercy upon his soul” (Q. 6: 12). Now that is a verse which takes the will of God into the nature of God. Let’s take the metaphor of a shepherd, for example. What is the degree of his responsibility? We think of shepherd-hood as requiring the utmost of exposure, search, compassion, concern, and would not think a shepherd responsible if he were to say: “Here I have got a fold, and I will sit in it folding my hands.” However, whatever a shepherd does under the constraint of his nature is not limitation: it is fulfilment. It would be the repudiation of this which would constitute limitation.

    Here we are talking about the degree of the divine relationship to the human predicament. On the one hand you say there is a divine involvement because God cares about man, but his relationship is didactic, hortatory, educational — revelatory in terms of propositions. But is there the possibility of a relationship more tragic, more compassionate? We are not wanting to say that God is less great but differently greater. Now let God be God. It is possible that you can be found forbidding things to God in the interest of what you think is his dignity, and we ought to beware of this.

    al-Faruqi: I am forbidding man, not forbidding God.

    Cragg: But you are forbidding God, implicitly at least, for you say there are things that it is not appropriate for God to do. You are forbidding God the sovereign freedom of manifesting his transcendence in whatever way he choose — which may be to condescend to man’s condition in terms of incarnation. What I am saying is, let God himself be the arbiter of what is appropriate to transcendence. This is all I am pleading for.

    al-Faruqi: What does this mean, “Let God be the arbiter of his transcendence”? After all there is this revealed text in the Qur’an which says: laisa kamithlihishay — “there is nothing like unto Him” (Q. 42: 11). It is we who must beware of what is appropriate when talking about God and about transcendence.

    Rudvin: If care means that you are really involved, then what you care for affects you…it may even hurt you and cause you to suffer.

    Ahmad: Again you are treating God at a human level.

    al-Faruqi: In no way can God be hurt. If you want to use the word “hurt” poetically, maybe I will wink my eye and let it go…with plenty of poetry! But if you start saying that something hurts God, therefore He has to take action, then I say that you are putting a condition upon the divinity of God.

    Cragg: But if you say anything about God, if you use any human description of him, then you are by implication making God share in humanness. So you are involved in the paradox if you are to use the divine names at all. This is not at stake between us. Once again, the question is the degree to which one can interpret the status of the divine self-spending, which is the heart of the Christian faith — “Being in the form of God he took upon himself the form of a servant”. You mentioned kingship a moment ago. We have a marvelous example of kingship in Shakespeare in Henry V, when the king lays the crown aside and shows a simple concern to get alongside the common soldier in a dire situation. Is this less kingly than sitting in the palace on a throne? I think most of us would agree that it is not.

    Al-Faruqi: No, it is not less kingly but the how of it needs to be specified. If you are saying that the king next started polishing the soldier’s shoes and carrying his ordinance box, then this is not kingly. But remember that a Muslim believes that God is nearer to him than his jugular vein, and that our success is dependent upon Him. But to interpret this as a specific reduction of God’s transcendence is not permissible.

    Cragg: Reduction is not permissible certainly, but this is not reductionist. This is the whole point.

    Published in the International Review of Mission, Vol. LXV, No. 260 (October 1976), pp. 391-406

    [cite]

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Emancipation and its Aftermath

    Reading Time: 9 minutesFrom Chapter 3: “The Emancipation and its Aftermath” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Revelation vs. Reason

    The revelation which came to Muhammad (SAAW) summoned reason to prove the thesis of Islam. It never asserted its truths in defiance of reason, nor did it ever seek to overwhelm the noetic function of the mind. On the contrary, it always sought to convince its audience in harmony and unity with reason. When the Mu’tazilah sought to give reason an edge over revelation, or the Murji’ah to give revelation an edge over reason, the Muslim mind demurred and held its original position tenaciously, namely, that no contradiction between reason and revelation is final; that no disparity between them is beyond overarching and composition by reconsidering the meanings of revelation which might have been misunderstood, or the conclusions of reason which might have gone astray. From al Ma’mun to al Mutawakkil (197-232 A.H./813-847 A.C.), the three decades of Mu’tazilah ascendency, the problem acquired crisis proportions and was then solved forever.

    Unlike Islam, Christianity was deeply committed to one side. Jesus’ cool argumentation with his disciples quickly gave way to Paul’s outcry that Athens had nothing to do with Jerusalem. “The Greeks seek after wisdom. But we teach Christ crucified unto the Jews a scandalon and unto the Greeks foolishness . . . God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; .. . the weak . .. the base … despised things … things which are not to bring to naught the things which are” (I Corinthians, 1). Islam’s rational wind had to blow on Christian Europe a long time before it awakened her gradually from her dogmatic slumber. Thomas of Aquinas had to be excommunicated for his rationalist “Averroism” before he regained acceptance; and Bruno, Galileo and countless others had to suffer persecution or death for daring to oppose reason to revelation. In Islam, revelation stood alone and had no institution divinely appointed to guard it. It had to speak for itself, to convince its audience and safeguard its truth by its sheer power to win the assent of the free mind. In Christianity, the Church was the guardian of its revelation by divine appointment, and it fought ferociously to save its domain against attack by reason and its stepdaughter, natural science. However detracted or resisted, the forces of reason gradually won. The magisterium of the Church was slowly but surely ignored, and her prestige in the circles of learning and science suffered terrible blows, as any history of science in the West would show.

    B. The Enlightenment

    The Enlightenment, which animated intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served as basis for much of science and culture in the West. It was a movement which adopted the standpoint of reason in reordering the worldview of Christian man. Priority was taken away from faith and the Church and restored to reason. Reason was declared a public prerogative of everyone who cared to cultivate it. No one could be excommunicated from its realm. It could not be combated by authority, but by itself and under its own rules. Its cultivation and use became the criteria of truth, of virtue and merit, not one’s affiliation to the Church. Human beings came to be recognised as rational by nature; and it is this nature, rather than revelation or the teaching of the Church, that became the basis of human association, of government and social order. “Religious tutelage,” the most degrading of all, as Kant had called it, was replaced by a new freedom in which rules were self-imposed and where all men — Jews included — were recognised as possessing an innate right to participate. Overnight, the Jews who had hitherto existed on sufferance, as aliens in the land, became equal citizens of a universal community of humans based on their participation in the realm of reason. Their actual enfranchisement however had to await the political reconstitution of Europe.

    C. Emancipation, at Last!

    This did not tarry. France, where the new rationalist spirit had been fermenting since and even before Descartes, burst into the new era under the war cry of the Revolution: Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite! It exported the new ideology to Europe as its revolutionary (later, imperial) army swept away one European monarchy after another. As French soldiers entered a city, the walls of its Jewish ghetto came tumbling down. The Jews emerged as equal citizens of the new regime everywhere. Laying aside all their legal and social incapacities, the Jews of Europe plunged headlong into the new paradise whose gates were now flung wide open before them. It was a genuine “emancipation.”

    As they entered into their new lives, they first had to learn the vernacular language of the land. This they did with such vehemence that in one generation their masses in Central and Western Europe forgot Hebrew or Yiddish, their own ghetto language, and appropriated the vernacular languages of Europe as their own. Their sons could now enter the universities, join the national army, or serve in public office. Every section of society was now open to them. Their previous inexperience in agriculture prompted them to live in the cities, and to invest their efforts in industry, trade, finance, the profess¬ions, communications and city development. Their social recovery was amazingly strong and swift. By 1797, they began to find their place even in the elected legislative bodies of Europe. Rather than a tolerated stranger, the Jew found himself perfectly at home in the expanding, industrialising, nation-states of Europe. His religious difference from the rest lost its importance in the new wave of secularism in all matters. In traditional normative Christian doctrine, no relevance of religion to civic life was claimed. This was the “realm of Caesar.” If in actual practice this was not the case, and the Church did interfere and oft dominated, its power had been shaken by the Reformation and completely swept away by the nationalising British monarchy, the rationalising Englightenment, and finally, the secularising French Revolution. Now, reason alone — hence national utilitarianism — in which all men participate in degrees independently of their religious affiliation, was declared the basis of all civic decisions. Therefore, it was reasoned, the Jew may freely join in the new life of Europe on equal par with the Christian.

    D. Assimilation and Reform

    The greatest advocate of Jewish assimilation in Europe was Moses Mendelssohn, who lived before the French Revolution and helped to spread the “Enlightenment” mentality in Germany. He translated the Talmud into German for the double purpose of acquainting the Germans with Judaism, and the Jews who had already forgotten Hebrew, with their own faith. His classic counsel to his fellow Jews was to Germanise themselves in every respect and remain loyal to the Jewish faith which he conceived as something applicable to the religious sphere, a realm reduced to the internal relation of self to God, not unlike Christianity. However, Mendelssohn insisted that whereas Judaism is not a creed – the mind of a Jew being free to accept any conclusion of reason – the Jew ought to follow Jewish law. This was easier said than done. Mendelssohn founded a periodical in Hebrew to bring assimilation and the new culture to the conservatives who still lingered and hesitated.

    How to apply Jewish law to the external deed and, at the same time, to observe European custom and social ethic was never solved. The Europeans, for their part, expected the Jews to obliterate all that distinguished them from Christians. When the Jews resisted, the Christians compelled them to do so, no more in the name of religion, but in that of nationalism and national culture. Even their names, the Jews had to change or have them arbitrarily changed for them.

    Assimilation generated its own momentum. The Jews’ exposure to the cultural and religious life of Europe produced in them an inferiority complex towards their Christian neighbors which they began to emulate even in the religious field. This emulation is the foundation of Reform Judaism, a new sect whose very name is indicative of the Christianised Jewish outlook. “Reform” has changed the liturgy, legitimised liturgical use of the vernacular languages instead of Hebrew, eliminated the long recitation of piyyutim and Torah, introduced the choir and playing of musical instruments in the synagogues. Some of these reforms were introduced into the Adat Jeshurun Synagogue in Amsterdam in 1796, and they were adopted in toto by the synagogues of Seesen in 1810, and of Hamburg in 1818. Slowly but surely, the new “Reform” spread to most other synagogues of Western Europe.

    Emancipation and its consequence, assimilation, continued to produce problems for Judaism. Above all, it exposed Judaism to the same rending strains to which Christianity was already exposed, especially, Biblical criticism. Detached, objective examination of scripture had previously exploded the claim that the Pentateuch was the writing of Moses, or that any part of the Hebrew scripture was revealed by God verbatim. Historical textual analysis had established that the scripture had come from widely different traditions and disparate periods of time. It uncovered many discrepancies and mistakes in the Biblical text. All of this had forced the Christians to alter their theory of revelation. Partly, they recoursed to allegorical interpretation to fit the text into Christian doctrine; and partly, since the whole ofjewish history was for them a propadeutic to the incarnation, they began to regard the scripture as a profane history of a profane people, a text whose holiness lies not in every word or page, or in every event or statement it recorded, but in the general movement of history it expressed, the movement which culminated in the advent of Jesus.

    For the Jews, this posed a terrible dilemma. To hold their old view of scripture as revealed verbatim to and written by Moses is to go counter to science, history and reason. To accept the findings of science and history is to sack the foundation of the Jewish faith. None of the luminaries of the period — Isaac Jost, Leppold Zunz, Solomon Steinheim, Samuel Holdheim — could find a way out. The inevitable conclusion pressed itself upon the minds of Jews: If the law of Judaism is the work of men — talented but human — of different times and places, it could not escape the relativity of history. Its validity, therefore, is relative too, and hence, restricted. Indeed, there is little or no reason why its cumbersomeness may not be removed and its provisions altered to fit the new situation. The whole normativeness of the law fell into question and the law was altered or violated with impunity.

    With Abraham Geiger, the greatest of Reform thinkers, the last step was taken when he raised the question of the relation of Judaism to the ethnic entity of the Jews. His Hegelianism suggested to him that universalism and ethnocentrism were two contradictory theses whose dialectical opposition was necessary for human progress. Ethnocentrism, he reasoned, had fulfilled its purpose in the past. In modern times, it should have no place in the Jewish heart. Therefore, Geiger counselled, all references in the Bible to the election, distinctiveness or particularism of the Jews, must be excised and repudiated. He reinterpreted Jewish messianism as referring not to a national saviour but to an age where all humans would cooperate together for their greater happiness and felicity.

    To the question, what course should a Reform congregation pursue, Samuel Adler, noted American Reform Jew, answered: “The first and most important step … is to free its service of shocking lies, to remove from it . . . things and wishes which we would not utter if it had to be done in an intelligible manner. Such are the lamentations about oppression and persecution, the prayer for the restoration of the sacrificial cult, for the return of Israel to Palestine, the hope for a personal messiah, and for the resurrection of the body. . .” (David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism, New York, Mac-millan, 1907, p. 483). All the above-mentioned recommendations of Reform leaders the Pittsburgh Conference of 1885 enacted as a constitution for Reform Judaism; notably, legitimising the Jew’s rejection of verbatim revelation of the Bible, of all Jewish laws not adapted to modern civilisation, dietary laws, laws concerning priestly purity, and of Jewish exclusivism on the religious, cultural and social levels.

    It is not surprising that Reform thinking reached its most daring level in America where there was no “ghetto” tradition. It was hence unavoidable that American Jews would assimilate most, that assimilation would continue to corrode Jewish identity until hardly anything of it is left. As one American rabbi observant of the scene put it: “America is a terrible drain on Jewish identity; but the American university is for it a dis¬aster area.” The fact is that under the corrosive influence of secularism and assimilation, Judaism became in America little more than the arbitrary decision of the Jew to be different, not in fact to be different, but only to think of himself as different.

    Reaction to the Reform line of thinking was strong but had little to offer besides conservatism, or the will to preserve the tradition. Intellectually this is not a happy alternative; for the contradiction essential to the nature of Judaism and that of modernity is not solved, but an attempt is made to live with it in complacency. Modernity, with its scientific objectivity and relativism of all history, has brought an irreversible orientation to the mind of the Jew. For him to hold to the letter of scripture as well as to the gains of modernity constitutes an insoluble dilemma. Max Lilienthal, David Einhorn and Bernard Felsenthal have all put it most aptly, in a language reminiscent of Theodore Parker, the father of unitarianism. Law, they held, has a spirit and a body. The former is the decalogue, or the moral law innate to man’s consciousness. The rest is the body. The Talmud is that body. It can be only buried once the spirit has left it. Furthermore, if we ought to deny the divine laws themselves once they have lost their spirit and effectiveness, we ought to deny, a fortiori, the Talmudic laws which we know to have been the dated – and hence dead – works of human rabbis of bygone ages.

    Had this trend continued to develop in Europe and America without interruption, Judaism might well have become a religious movement little distinguishable from the numerous other forms of pietism engendered by the “Radical Reformers” of Christianity. As it might be expected, there would have always remained some conservatives who could live with the contradiction. But with the overwhelming majority of Jews in West Europe and America subscribing to Reform thinking, the major currents of Jewish life and thought would have followed the same course. The Russian Revolution of 1918 would have given this movement tremendous impetus because the goals of Reform Judaism would have accorded beautifully with the total assimilation objective of Russia, as well as with its goal of secular revolutionary progress.

    History, however, had other goals.

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: Apercu of Jewish History in the Christian West Prior to the Emancipation

    Reading Time: 8 minutesFrom Chapter 2: “Apercu of Jewish History in the Christian West Prior to the Emancipation” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    The Christians understood, or misunderstood, the career of Jesus as one of a god sent down to earth to suffer the most ignominious death as an atonement and oblation for the sins of man. In consequence, they reinterpreted the whole history of the Jews as a propadeutic for this great event. If there is to be a crucifixion of a god, there had to be a historical situation in which a savior-god could be expected, accused to be the false savior, and then crucified. There had to be a religion, Judaism, which develops so as to reach the fossilized state of literal legalism, in which rabbis had plunged their faith in the “fullness of time,” and into the context of which the god to be crucified could enact his reform and be prosecuted and condemned in the process. The whole of the Jewish past and present was reduced to the status of an instrument, complex and winding, but still an instrument, for the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus.

    The Christians did not, in the main, reject or chastise the Jews on account of that pre-crucifixion history. On the contrary, they adopted it wholesale as their own and, through eisegesis, interpreted it as the gradual unfolding of the divine purpose in history. This adoption however broke down at the very crux of that history. The vilification, calumniation, false accusation, condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus, the Christians could not perceive as steps necessary for consummation of the divine drama. Their conscience could not absolve the Jews for their active instrumentality in these events. Instead of thanking them for their role, as the logic of their claim would require, they indicted them with the supreme sin, that of deicide. As they remembered the passion of Jesus at every Easter — indeed at every mass and communion, at the mere sight of the ubiquitous crucifixes which stood ever-ready to remind them of the death of their savior-god – their hearts seethed with hatred and resentment for the Jews as evil perpetrators of deicide.

    Had the Jews all converted to Christianity, the Christian conscience would have been satisfied to ascribe deicide to a people that once was. The Christians would have vented their vengeance and resentment against beings present only in their imagination. But as it turned out, the Jews continued to exist, to reject the Christians’ claim concerning Jesus — nay, to denounce Jesus as an impostor. Obviously, their existence as Jews was a blaring challenge to the Christian claim that Jesus was Messiah and God. Their survival was for the Christians a constant and living reminder of the passion of Christ.
    Two more elements pressured the Christian mind to jump from the living Jewish presence as a reminder of Christ’s passion, to indicting that presence as itself guilty of that hideous crime. The first was supplied by scripture which reported that the prosecutors of Jesus acknowledged the indictment of Jesus as their deliberate work and accepted responsibility for it (Matthew 27:1,12, 20, 22). It reported them as willing and ready to assume that responsibility then, in their own persons, as well as on behalf of all their future generations (Matthew 27:25). The Jews may deny that they have ever rendered such confession. Since the source is Christian, another prior element in the Christian mind must have made such futuristic indictment possible. That is the Christian doctrine of vicariousness of guilt, of suffering and of merit. Vicariousness is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. First, the sin of Adam, it is claimed, has passed to all his descendants and his guilt has vicariously become theirs, in the flesh. All men are necessarily and universally sinful, fallen and guilty; and no effort or moral striving on their part will ever save any of them. Original sin, Christianity holds, is in the flesh, innate and in¬evitable. Because it is so, it took God Himself to pull man out of his predicament of doom. That is why God had to send His only son to ransom man from this necessary despair. Ta’ala Allahu ‘amma yasifun (Glorified be Allah above their descriptions of Him)!

    Secondly, the suffering of Jesus is vicarious too. As agony and merit, it too passes mysteriously from Jesus to all men. Because Jesus died on the cross, so their argument claims, this or that Christian man living two thousand years later is personally deserving of Jesus’ merit; for that merit has passed vicariously to him. It took a mind governed by such category of vicariousness on the moral level to jump to the conclusion that the contemporary Jewish neighbor is personally guilty of deicide, of rejection of Christ, of continuing “perfidy,” as the contemporary Christian is personally saved, because he has personally deserved the merit Jesus had incurred in his atonement.

    Indeed, it was the Pope himself who assumed official responsibility for protecting the Jew as a specie of satanicness, a living example of perfidy and unfaith, an archetype of the deicidal crime, as an antichrist. He established a special quarter for the Jews in Rome as a kind of horror museum in which to keep and show off these specimens of ungodliness for the enlightenment and education of the Christian community.

    The list of social, legal and religious incapacities of the Jews of Christian Europe was long, and practically every Christian monarch added to it. Its highlights are that the Jews may not employ Christians, own Christian slaves, disinherit their children who convert to Christianity; that they must convert to Christianity if they marry a Christian; that they shall be ruled by Roman law rather than Torahic law; that they shall not criticise Christian doctrine nor give evidence against Christians; that they shall not celebrate Jewish feasts, practice circumcision, refrain from eating pork; that they must submit to baptism and refrain from reading the Torah in Hebrew or listening to its interpretation by their rabbis; that Jews shall refrain from practicing their customs, from preparing unleavened bread; that they be punished if they work on Sunday and not on Saturday; that they should marry according to Christian custom; that their children be brought up by Christian teachers; that Jews must pay special taxes, not appear in public between Holy Thursday and Easter, not hold any public office, not practice medicine on the Christians, etc. etc. Justinian ordered all Jews to be forced to listen to Christian teaching, their synagogues destroyed, and he prohibited them to read the Mishnah. Indeed, he prohibited the Jew under penalty of death “to raise his impious voice to contradict the evident purpose of God… the resurrection … the judgment … the work of God”.E. A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages. New York, Macmillan, 1965, p. 17ff

    The Jews lived under such conditions in Europe for nearly two millenia. Often, they were banished from their cities for no crime other than being Jewish or for practicing Judaism. Following the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, they were forcefully evicted from those countries or baptized and counted as Christians. They were also evicted from Britain and were not readmitted until Oliver Cromwell, though with great restrictions to their civil rights. When the Crusades were launched, the Christian armies fell upon the Jewish population of every Christian city on their way, robbing, terrorizing and slaughtering them as helpless prey while the monarchs and lords of the land looked on.
    Naturally, there was no one to receive them except the Muslim World. The Jews of Spain poured into North Africa where they found their fellow Jews free and prospering. They were admitted on equal par with the Muslims banished from Spain. Muslim countries from Morocco to Egypt did their utmost to welcome and rehabilitate these refugees from Christendom. To this day there are whole villages in North Africa composed of the descendants of these refugees, Muslim and Jewish.

    Under such limitations, it was natural that the Jews of Europe would at least live together in the same quarter to provide themselves with a measure of security. Since they were prohibited to employ Christians, agriculture was impossible for them; and so was public office. They had to make a living in trade and moneylending and, where possible, in medicine, pharmacy, astronomy and “magic.” Individually, the Jew was an outlaw whenever he ventured outside of his ghetto. He was an un-citizen because the king or government of the land never recognized him as individual. Only as a member of his ghetto community did he exist legally, or did he pay any taxes. To an ignorant and superstitious people as the Europeans were in the Middle Ages, the Jew’s medical practice, astronomy and other sciences which they preserved from antiquity or learned from the Muslims, were regarded by the Christians as “black magic.” Their money-lending operation was abominable usury. Since the ghetto could not grow in area, the natural increase of population aggravated the health hazards and made the situation still more repulsing. Extortion, secret dealings, blackmail, pawnbrokerage and moneylending, persecutive and repressive measures which could be lifted only through bribery, blackmail or prostitution, made the quality of human life in the ghetto sordid and ugly.

    The religious base of this Christian hatred was only to be reinforced by the Jews’ success as pawnbrokers, traders and moneylenders. The Jews quickly became the moneyed middle class of Christian cities, living parasitically on the production or consumption of Christians. Naturally, their wealth was envied, often forcefully confiscated, but they managed on the whole to emerge from every crisis stronger and richer. Many a pope and many a prince dealt with them, borrowed their money, used their trade connections or benefited from their medical knowledge. The Jew’s contacts with the gentiles increased noticeably as the cities grew and trade and communications developed. As early as the Renaissance, these contacts with Christians were to influence and help Europeanise the Jews, as the diaries and letters of Rabbi Leon da Modena testify. However, many Jews could not resist the temptation to migrate to the Muslim World, if migration were at all possible. More often the only way out of their misery was conversion to the faith of their enemies.

    Those that resisted the temptation to convert and persisted in their Judaism, became still more attached to their faith and to one another in the process. From their terrible fate, the Jews derived a great advantage, namely, increase in communal awareness which diaspora conditions had first nearly dissipated. Christian persecution, denial of civil rights and incarceration within the bounds of the ghettos, could not but help reinforce the Jews’ ethnic solidarity. The local governments did not deal with the Jews singly, as legal persons, but collectively. In consequence, Jewish rabbis acquired increased authority, and set up among themselves the essential rudiments of a ghetto government, of public and social services. Thus a sort of “state within the state” gradually emerged, the former assuming responsibility for enforcement of Jewish law and representation of Jews before the officials of the latter. Taxes were imposed upon the Jews as a collective and the rabbis took upon themselves to portion out the levy among individuals. This arrangement consolidated and buttressed their authority and disciplined the individual Jew into communal loyalty. Outside the collective, the individual Jew was by and large an outlaw whom any powerful Christian could legitimately overcome, kill or dispossess of his property. Any false accusation of blasphemy or of merely following a Jewish custom could only bring up the Christian neighborhood or countryside against him.

    Envy for the Jews’ accumulated wealth, or for his secret wisdom and knowledge, was not only common, but the rule. However it may have contributed to the Christian’s hatred for and persecution of the Jews, it cannot serve as explanation of the Western phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Religious hatred is certainly prior and it, rather than envy, is the source which constantly replenished the Christians’ resentment. What the Christians took to be ultimate reality or God was not only denied, but declared an “impostor.” What they regarded as summum bonum or salvation was scoffed at as hallucination. The ignominous crucifixion of their “God” was declared fully deserved by a pretender who denied the holiness of “the Law.” Moreover, the Christians had a mind bent on sacramentalism and vicariousness, naive enough to believe the Church’s claims for ontological passage of guilt, suffering and merit. It would seem as if all the ingredients were there to produce the most violent religious hatred; for Christian consciousness to vent itself against the only helpless scapegoat in their midst.

  • Towards An Islamic Theory of Meta-Religion

    Reading Time: 27 minutesThe relation of Islam to the other religions has been established by God in His revelation, the Qur’an. No Muslim therefore may deny it; since for him the Qur’an is the ultimate religious authority. Muslims regard the Qur’an as God’s own word verbatim, the final and definitive revelation of His will for all space and time, for all mankind.On this point Muslim scholarship is unanimously in agreement. To those who are not familiar with this longstanding tradition, suffice it to warn that the situation of hermeneutical despair and confusion which exists in the case of Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and other scriptures has absolutely no parallel in Islam.

    The only kind of contention possible for the Muslim is that of exegetical variation. But in this realm, the scope of variation is limited in two directions. First, continuity of Muslim practice throughout the centuries constitutes an irrefutable testament to the meanings attributed to the Qur’anic verses. Second, the methodology of Muslim orthodoxy in exegesis rests on the principle that Arabic lexicography, grammar, and syntax, which have remained frozen and in perpetual use by the millions ever since their crystallization in the Qur’an leave no contention without solution. These facts explain the universality with which the Qur’anic principles were understood and observed, despite the widest possible variety of ethnic cultures, languages, races, and customs characterizing the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, and from Russia and the Balkans to the heart of Africa.

    As for the non-Muslims, they may contest the principles of Islam. They must know, however, that Islam does not present its principles dogmatically, for those who believe or wish to believe, exclusively. It does so rationally, critically. It comes to us armed with logical and coherent arguments, and expects our acquiescence on rational, and hence necessary, grounds. It is not legitimate for us to disagree on the relativist basis of personal taste, or that of subjective experience.

    We propose to analyze Islam’s ideational relation in three stages: that which pertains to Judaism and Christianity, that which pertains to the other religions, and that which pertains to religion as such, and hence to all humans, whether they belong to any or no religion.

    A. Judaism and Christianity

    Islam accords to these two religions special status. First, each of them is the religion of God. Their founders on earth, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, are the prophets of God. What they have conveyed — the Torah, the Psalms, the Evangel (gospels) — are revelations from God. To believe in these prophets, in the revelations they have brought, is integral to the very faith of Islam.Qur’an 20:88, 29:46, and 42:15 To disbelieve in them, nay to discriminate among them, is apostasy. “Our Lord and your Lord is indeed God, the One and Only God.” God described His Prophet Muhammad and his followers as “believing all that has been revealed from God”; as “believing in God, in His angels, in His revelations and Prophets”; as not-distinguishing among the Prophets of God.Qur’an 2:285

    Arguing with Jews and Christians who object to this self-identification and claim an exclusivist monopoly on the former prophets, the Qur’an says: “You claim that Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and their tribes were Jews or Christians [and God claims otherwise]. Would you claim knowledge in these matters superior to God’s?”Qur’an 2:140 “Say, [Muhammad], We believe in God, in what has been revealed by Him to us, what has been revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the tribes; in what has been conveyed to Moses, to Jesus, and all the prophets from their Lord.”Qur’an 3:84 “We have revealed [Our revelation) to you [Muhammad] as We did to Noah and the Prophets after him, to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the tribes, to Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, Solomon, and David.”Qur’an 3:24 “It is God indeed, the living and eternal One, that revealed to you [Muhammad] the Book [i.e., the Qur’an confirming the previous revelations. For it is He Who revealed the Torah and the Gospels as His guidance to mankind. … Who revealed the Psalms to David.”Qur’an 3:2-4 “Those who have attained to faith [in this divine writ], those who follow the Jewish [scriptures], and the Sabians and the Christians — all those who believe in God and in the Day of Judgment, and have done good work — will receive their due reward from God. They have no cause to fear, nor shall they grieve.”Qur’an 5:69

    The honor with which Islam regards Judaism and Christianity, their founders and scriptures, is not courtesy but acknowledgment of religious truth. Islam sees them in the world not as “other views” which it has to tolerate, but as standing de jure, as truly revealed religions from God. Moreover, their legitimate status is neither sociopolitical, nor cultural or civilizational, but religious. In this, Islam is unique. For no religion in the world has yet made belief in the truth of other religions a necessary condition of its own faith and witness.

    Consistently, Islam pursues this acknowledgment of religious truth in Judaism and Christianity to its logical conclusion, namely, self-identification with them. Identity of God, the source of revelation in the three religions, necessarily leads to identity of the revelations and of the religions. Islam does not see itself as coming to the religious scene ex nihilo but as reaffirmation of the same truth presented by all the preceding prophets of Judaism and Christianity. It regards them all as Muslims, and their revelations as one and the same as its own. Together with Hanifism, the monotheistic and ethical religion of pre-Islamic Arabia, Judaism, Christianity and Islam constitute crystallizations of one and the same religious consciousness whose essence and core is one and the same.Qur’an 3:67 and 21:71-94 The unity of this religious consciousness can easily be seen by the historian of civilization concerned with the ancient Near East.An analysis of ancient Near Eastern religious consciousness may be read in this author’s Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1974), pp. 3-34 It is traceable in the literature of these ancient peoples and is supported by the unity of their physical theater or geography, in their languages (for which they are called “Semitic”), and in the unity of artistic expression.

    This unity of the religious consciousness of the Near East consists of five dominant principles that characterize the known literatures of the peoples of this region. They are: 1) the ontic disparateness of God, the Creator, from His creatures, unlike the attitudes of ancient Egyptians, Indians, or Chinese, according to which God or the Absolute is immanently His own creatures; 2) the purpose of man’s creation is neither God’s self-contemplation nor man’s enjoyment, but unconditional service to God on earth, His own “manor”; 3) the relevance of Creator to creature, or the will of God, is the content of revelation and is expressed in terms of law, of oughts and moral imperatives; 4) man, the servant, is master of the manor under God, capable of transforming it through his own efficacious action into what God desires it to be; and 5) man’s obedience to and fulfillment of the divine command results in happiness and felicity, and its opposite in suffering and damnation, thus coalescing worldly and cosmic justice together.

    The unity of “Semitic” religious and cultural consciousness was not affected by intrusion of the EgyptiansThe evidence of Tall al Amarnah (Akhetaten) is the very opposite. The Egyptian colonial governors in Palestine communicated with the Pharaoh not in Egyptian but in Akkadian. in the days of their empire (1465-1165 B.C.), nor by the Philistines from Caphtor (Crete?), nor by the Hittites, Kassites, or “People of the Mountains” (the Aryan tribes?), who were all semiticized and assimilated, despite their military conquests.Regarding the latter, Sabatino Moscati wrote: “In the course of establishing themselves, the new peoples thoroughly absorbed the great cultural tradition already existing. In this process of absorption, Mesopotamia seems to prevail. Like Rome in the Middle Ages, despite its political decadence, Mesopotamia celebrates the triumph of its culture (over its enemies).” The Face of the Ancient Orient (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1962), p. 164 Islam has taken all this for granted. It has called the central religious tradition of the Semitic peoples “Hanifism” and identified itself with it. Unfortunately for the early Muslim scholars who benefited from this insight as they labored, the language, histories, and literature furnished by archeology and the disciplines of the ancient Near East were not yet available. Hence they scrambled after the smallest bits of oral tradition, which they systematized for us under the tide of “History of the Prophets.” In reading their materials, we must remember, however, that the accurate-knowledge (Abraham, of Julius Caesar, of Amr ibn al AsLeader of the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 19 A.H I 641 A.C. and late Governor., and of Napoleon) about the Sphinx or the pyramids of Egypt, for instance, was equal i.e., nil.

    The Islamic concept of “Hanif” should not be compared to Ka Rahner’s “anonymous Christians.” “Hanif” is a Qur’anic category not the invention of a modern theologian embarrassed by his church’s exclusivist claim to divine grace. It has been operating within the Islamic ideational system for fourteen centuries. Those to whom it is attributed are the paradigms of faith and greatness the most honored representatives of religious life, not the despised though tolerated approximators of the religious ideal. Islam’s honoring of the ancient prophets and their followers is to be maintained even if the Jews and Christians stop or diminish their loyalty to them. “Worthier of Abraham are those who really follow him, this Prophet and those who believe in him.”Qur’an 3:68 In the Qur’an the Christians are exalted for their self-discipline and humility, and they are declared the closest of all believers to the Muslims. “[O Muhammad], you and the believers will find closest in love and friendship those who say ‘We are Christians,’ for many of them are ministers and priests who are truly humble?”Qur’an 5:82 If despite all this commendation of them, of their prophets, and of their scriptures, Jews and Christians would persist in opposing and rejecting the Prophet and his followers, God commanded all Muslims to call the Jews and Christians in these words: “O People of the Book, come now with us to rally around a fair and noble principle common to both of us, that all of us shall worship and serve none but God, that we shall associate naught with Him, and that we shall not take one another as lords beside God. But if they still persist in their opposition, then warn them that We shall persist in our affirmation.”Qur’an 3:63-64

    Evidently, Islam has given the maximum that can ever be given to another religion. It has acknowledged as true the other religion’s prophets and founders, their scriptures and teaching. Islam has declared its God and the God of the religions of Jews and Christians as One and the same. It has declared the Muslims the assistants, friends, and supporters of the adherents of the other religions, under God. If, after all this, differences persist, Islam holds them to be of no consequence. Such differences must not be substantial. They can be surmounted and resolved through more knowledge, good will, and wisdom. Islam treats them as domestic disputes within one and the same religious family. And as long as we both recognize that God alone is Lord to each and every one of us, no difference and no disagreement is beyond solution. Our religious, cultural, social, economic, and political differences may all be composed under the principle that God alone – not any one of us, not our passions, our egos, or our prejudices – is God.

    B. The Other Religions

    Islam teaches that the phenomenon of prophecy is universal; that it has taken place throughout all space and time. “Every human,” the Qur’an affirms, “is responsible for his own personal deeds. On the Day of Judgment, We shall produce publicly the record of such deeds and ask everyone to examine it, because it alone will be the basis of reckoning. Whoever is rightly guided so to his own credit; whoever errs does so to his own discredit. There is no vicarious guilt; and We shall not condemn [i.e., We shall not judge] until We had sent a prophet.”Qur’an 17:13-15 It follows from God’s absolute justice that He would hold nobody responsible unless His law has been conveyed, promulgated, and is known. Such conveyance and/or promulgation are precisely the phenomenon of prophecy. The same principle was operative in the ancient Near East, where the states carved their laws in stone stelae that they erected everywhere for people to read. Ignorance of the divine law is indeed an argument when it is not the effect of unconcern or neglect; and it is always an attenuating factor. Being absolutely just, as well as absolutely merciful and forgiving, God, Islam holds, left no people without a prophet to teach them the divine law. “There is no people,” the Qur’an asserts, “but a warner/prophet has been sent to them.”Qur’an 35:24 Some of these prophets are widely known; others are not. So neither the Jewish nor the Christian nor the Muslim ignorance of them implies the non-existence. “We have indeed sent prophets before you [Muhammad]. About some of them We have informed you. About others We have not.”Qur’an 40:78 and 4:163 Thus the whole of mankind, past and present, is capable of religious merit and felicity as well as demerit and damnation, because of the universality of prophecy.

    As Islam conceives it, the divine system is one of perfect justice. Universalism and absolute egalitarianism are constitutive of it. Hence, the phenomenon of prophecy not only must needs be universally present but also its content must be absolutely the same. If different in each case, the universalism of the phenomenon would have little effect. Therefore Islam teaches that the prophets of all times and places have taught one and the same lesson; that God has not differentiated among His messengers. “We have sent to every people a messenger,” the Qur’an affirms, “to teach them that worship and service are due to God alone; that evil must be avoided [and the good pursued].”Qur’an 6:36 “We have sent no messenger except to convey [the divine message] in the tongue of his own people, to make it [the content] clearly comprehensible to them.”Qur’an 14:4 With this reassurance, no human has any excuse for failing to acknowledge God, or to obey His law. “[We have sent to every people] prophets to preach and to warn, so that no human may have an argument against God’s judgment of that individual’s deeds].”Qur’an 4:165

    Islam thus lays the ground for a relation with all peoples, not only with Jews and Christians whose prophets are confirmed in the Qur’an. Having once been the recipients of revelation, and of a revelation that is identical to that of Islam, the whole of mankind may be recognized by Muslims as equally honored, as they are, by virtue of revelation and also as equally responsible, as they are, to acknowledge God as the only God and to offer Him worship, service, and obedience to His eternal laws.

    If, as Islam holds, all prophets have conveyed one and the same message, whence the tremendous variety of the historical religions of mankind? To this question, Islam furnishes a theoretical answer and a practical one.

    1) Islam holds that the messages of all prophets had but one essence and core composed of two elements. First is tawhid, or the acknowledgment that God alone is God and that all worship, service, and obedience are due to Him alone. Second is morality, which the Qur’an defines as service to God, doing good, and avoiding evil.

    Each revelation had come figurized in a code of behavior particularly applicable to its people, and hence relevant to their historical situation and conditions. This particularization does not affect the essence or core of the revelation. If it did, God’s justice would not be absolute and the claims of universalism and egalitarianism would fall to the ground. Particularization in the divine law must therefore affect the “how” of service, not its purpose or “what,” the latter being always the good, righteousness, justice, and obedience to God. If it ever affects the “what,” it must do so only in those areas that are non-constitutive and hence unimportant and accidental. This principle has the special merit of rallying humanity, whether potentially or actually, around common principles of religion and morality, and of removing such principles from contention, and from relativism and subjectivism.It should be added here that Islam holds its revelation to be mainly a revelation of a “what” that can become a “how” befitting any historical situation. Thus, the “how”‘ or prescriptive form of the law may and does change in substance as well as in application, but not its spirit, purpose, or “what.” Usul al Fiqh discipline has devised and institutionalized a system to govern the process of evolution of the law.

    There is therefore a legitimate ground for the religious variety in history. In His mercy, God has taken due account of the particular conditions of each people. He has revealed to them all a message that is the same in essence; but He has conveyed to each one of them His law in a prescriptive form relevant to their particular conditions, to their own grade of development on the human scale. And we may conclude that such differences are de jure because they do not affect the essence.

    2) The second cause of religious diversity is not as benevolent as the first. The first, we have seen, is divine; the second, human. To acknowledge and do the will of God conveyed through revelation is not always welcomed by all people. Some with vested interests may not agree with the divine dispensations, and numerous circumstances favor such disagreement.

    First, divine revelation has practically always and everywhere advocated charity and altruism, ministering by the rich to the material needs of the poor. The rich do not always acquiesce in this moral imperative and may incline against it.

    Second, divine revelation is nearly always in favor of ordered social living. It would counsel obedience of the ruled to the law and self-discipline. But it always does so under the assumption of a rule of justice, which may not always be agreeable to rulers and kings who seek to have their own way. Their will power may incline them against the social ethic of revelation.

    Third, divine revelation always reminds man to measure himself by reference to God and His law, not by reference to himself. But man is vain; and self-adoration is for him a constant temptation.

    Fourth, revelation demands of humans that they discipline their instincts and keep their emotions under control. Humans, however, are inclined to indulgence. Orgies of instinct-satisfaction and emotional excitement have punctuated human life. Often, this inclination militates against revelation.

    Fifth, where the contents of revelation are not judiciously and meticulously remembered, taught, and observed publicly and by the greatest numbers, they tend to be forgotten. When they are transmitted from generation to generation and are not embodied in public customs observed by all, the divine imperatives may suffer dilution, shift of emphasis, or change.

    Finally, when the divine revelation is moved across linguistic, ethnic, and cultural frontiers – indeed, even to generations within the same people but fa removed from its original recipients in time – it may well change through interpretation. Any or all of these circumstances may bring about a corruption of the original revelation.

    This is why God has seen fit to repeat the phenomenon of prophecy, to send forth prophets to reconvey the divine message and reestablish it in the minds and hearts of humans. This divine injection into history is an act of sheer mercy. It is continual, always ad hoc, unpredictable. To those who inquire, What was the rationale behind sending Muhammad at that time and place, the Qur’an answers: “God knows better where and when to send prophets to convey His message.”Qur’an 6:124

    C. lslam’s Relation to all Humans

    Islam has related itself, equally, to all other religions, whether recognized, historical, or otherwise. Indeed, even to the a-religionists and atheists – whatever their color – Islam has related itself in a constructive manner, its purpose being to rehabilitate them as integral members of society.

    This relation constitutes Islam’s humanism. At its root stand the reason for creation, man’s raison d’etre. The first mention of the divine plan to create mankind occurs in a conversation with the angels. “I plan to place on earth a vicegerent. The angel responded: Would you place on earth a being who would also do evil and shed blood while we always praise and glorify and obey You? God said: I have another purpose unknown to you.”Qur’an 2:30 The angels, evidently, are beings created by God to act as His messengers and/or instruments. By nature, they are incapable of acting otherwise than as God instructs them to act, and hence they are incapable of morality. Their necessary predicament, always to do God’s bidding, differentiates them from the human creature God was about to place on earth.

    In another dramatic and eloquent passage, the Qur’an reports: “We [God] offered the trust to heaven and earth and mountain. They refused to undertake it out of fear. But man did undertake it.”Qur’an 33:72 In the heavens, on earth, and in the mountains, God’s will is fulfilled with the necessity of natural law. Creation therefore, to the exclusion of man, is incapable of fulfilling the higher part of God’s will, namely, the moral law. Only man is so empowered; for morality requires that its fulfillment be free; that its opposite or alternative, that which is amoral or immoral, be possible of fulfillment by the same person at the same time and in the same respect. It is of the nature of the moral deed that it be done when the agent could do otherwise. Without that option or possibility, morality would not be morality. If done unconsciously or under coercion, the moral deed might have utilitarian but no moral value.

    Vicegerency of God on earth means man’s transformation of creation — including above all himself – into the patterns of God. It means obedient fulfillment of His command, which includes all values, all ethical imperatives. The highest of imperatives are the moral. Since man alone is capable of moral action, only he can carry the “divine trust” from which “heaven and earth and mountain” shied away. Man therefore has cosmic significance. He is the only creature through whom the higher part of the divine will can be realized in space and time.

    To clarify the raison d’etreof man, the Qur’an has rhetorically asked mankind: “Would you then think that We have created you in vain?”Qur’an 23:115 The Qur’an further praises “men of understanding” who affirm: “O God! Certainly You have not created all this [creation] in vain!”Qur’an 3:191 As to the deniers of such a purpose for creation, the Qur’?turns to an assertive, even offensive tone. “Indeed We have not created heaven and earth and all that is between in vain. That is the presumption of unbelievers. Woe and Fire to them.”Qur’an 38:27 As to the content of the divine purpose, the Qur’an asserts: “And I have not created men and jinn except to worship/serve Me.”Qur’an 51:56 The verb `abada means worship as well as serve. It has been used in this double sense in all Semitic languages. In the Qur’an, it is given further elaboration by the more specific answers given to the same questions of why creation? Why man? “It is He Who created heaven and earth…that you [mankind] may prove yourselves in His eye the worthier in conduct.” “And it is He Who made you His vicegerents on earth…so that you may prove yourselves worthy of all that He has bestowed upon you.”“We have not created heaven and earth but … for you to prove yourselves worthier in your deeds….All that is on earth and all the worldly ornaments we have made thereof are to the purpose of men proving themselves worthier in the deed.” (Qur’an 11:7, 6:165, and 18:7)

    In order to enable man to fulfill his raison d’etre, God has created him capable, and “in the best of forms.”Qur’an 95:4 He has given him all the equipment necessary to achieve fulfillment of the divine imperatives. Above all, “God, Who created everything perfect…created man out of earth…and perfected and breathed into him of His own spirit.”Qur’an 32:7-8 He has bestowed upon him “his hearing, his sight, and his heart [the cognitive faculties].” Above all, God has given man his mind, his reason, and understanding, with which to discover and use the world in which he lives. He has made the earth and all that is in it — indeed, the whole of creation including the human self — malleable, that is, capable of change and of transformation by man’s action, of engineering designed to fulfill man’s purposes.

    In religious language, God has made nature “subservient” to man. He has granted mankind “lordship” over nature. This is also the meaning of man’s khilafah or vicegerency of God in the world. The Qur’an is quite emphatic in this regard: “God has made the ships [the winds which drive them] subject to you….And the rivers … the sun and moon, day and night.”Qur’an 14:32-33 “He has made the seas subservient to you … camels and cattle … all that is on earth and in heaven.”Qur’an 16:14, 22:36-37, 22:65, 31:20, and 45:12, 60 God has planted man on earth precisely to “reconstruct and use it as a usufruct“Qur’an 11:61 and to this purpose made him “lord of the earth.”Qur’an 67:15 In order to make this engineering of nature and its usufruct possible, God has embedded in it His sunan or “patterns”Qur’an 30:30 and 48:23, the so-called laws of nature which we know to be permanent and immutable solely through our faith that He is not a malicious but a beneficent God. Reading God’s patterns in nature or creation is equally possible in psychic or social natureOn the philosophical uncertainty of the laws of nature, see Clarence Irving Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuaton (Lasalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1946) and George Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 1923). Their position, which is that of contemporary science, is epistemologically identical to that held by al Ghazali (d. 504/1111) in his controversy with the philosophers (see his Tahafit al Falasifah or Refutation of the Philosophers, tr. by Sabih Kamali (Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963). , thus opening nearly all areas of creation to human observation and cognition, as well as a fair portion of the divine purpose or will.Qur’an 51:21, 33:62, and 35:43

    Besides all this, God has revealed His will through the prophets directly and immediately, and commanded them to proclaim it to their peoples in their own tongues. He has sent the Prophet Muhammad with a final version which He covenanted to guard against tampering and corruptionQur’an 15:9, and which has been preserved intact, along with Arabic grammar and syntax, lexicography, etymology, and philology all the linguistic apparatus required to understand it exactly as it was revealed.Qur’an 30:30 Certainly this was a gratuitous gesture, an act of pure charity and mercy, on the part of the benevolent God. Its purpose is to make man’s knowledge and fulfillment of the divine will easier and more accessible.Qur’an 3:18

    Every human being, Islam affirms, stands to benefit from these divine dispensations. The road to felicity is a free and open highway that anyone may tread of his own accord. Everybody is innately endowed with all these rights and privileges. God has granted them to all without discrimination. “Nature,” “the earth,” “the heavens” – all belong to each and every human.

    Indeed, God has done all this and even more! He has implanted His own religion into every human at birth. The true religion is innate, a religio naturalis, with which all humans are equipped. Dazzling religious of mankind stands an innate religion inseparable from human nature. This is the primordial religion, the Ur-Religion, the one and only true religion. Everyone possesses it unless acculturation and indoctrination, misguidance, corruption, or dissuasion has taught him otherwise.This is the substance of the Hadith, “Every man is born with natural religion – i.e. as a Muslim. It is his parents that make him a Jew, a Magian, or a Christian.” All men, therefore, possess a faculty, a “sixth sense,” a sensus communis with which they can perceive God as God. Rudolph Otto called it “the sense of the numinous,”Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) and phenomenologists of religion have recognized it as the faculty that perceives the religious as “religious,” as “sacred,” autonomous and sui generis, without reductionism.Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, Ltd., undated) and The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper and Row, 1961).

    Finally, Islam entertains no idea of “the fall of man”, no concept of “original sin”. It holds no man to stand in an innate, necessary predicament out of which he cannot pull himself. Man, it holds, is innocent. He is born with his innocence. Indeed, he is born with a thousand perfections, with faculties of understanding and an innate sense with which to know God. In this all men are equal, since it follows from their very existence, from their creatureliness. This is the basis for Islamic universalism.

    Concerning morality and piety, man’s career on earth, Islam countenances no distinction among humans, no division of them into races or nations, castes or classes. All men, it holds, “issued from a single pair,” their division into peoples and tribes being a convention designed for mutual acquaintance.Qur’an 49:13 Nobler among you,” the Qur’an asserts, “is only the more righteous.”Ibid. And the Prophet added, in his farewell sermon: “No Arab may have any distinction over a non-Arab, no white over non-white, except in righteousness.”Ishaq ibn Hisham, Sirat Rasul Allah (The Life of Muhammad), tr. by Alfred Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) Thomas Arnold, The Preaching of Islam (London: 1906; Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf Publications, 1961). Al Kufi, Shah-Namah, tr., by H. M. Elliott in his The History of lndia As Told by Its Own Historians (London: 1867-77), vol 1, pp. 184-97

    Islamic Meta-Religion in History

    Under these precepts, whether explicitly revealed in the ipsissima verba of God or implied therein, the Prophet Muhammad worked out and proclaimed the constitution of the first Islamic state. He had barely arrived in Madina (July, 622 A.C.) when he brought together all the inhabitants of Madina and its environs and promulgated with them the Islamic state and its constitution. This event was of capital importance for the relation of Islam to the other religions, and of non-Muslims to Muslims of all times and places. Four years after the Prophet’s demise in 10/632, Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph, ordered that the date of promulgation of this constitution was so crucial for Islam as a world movement that it should be considered the beginning of Islamic history.

    The constitution was a covenant, whose guarantor was Allah, between the Prophet, the Muslims, and the Jews. It abolished the tribal system of Arabia under which the Arab defined himself and by which society was governed. Henceforth, the Arab was to be defined by Islam; his personal and social life was to be governed by Islamic law, the shari’ah. The old tribal loyalties gave way to a new social bond that tied every Muslim to all other Muslims across tribal lines, to form the ummah. The ummah is an organic body whose constituents mutually sustain and protect one another. Their personal, reciprocal, and collective responsibilities are all defined by law. The Prophet was to be its chief political and juristic authority; and, as long as he lived, he exercised this power. After his death, his khulafa(pl. of khalifah, “successor”) exercised political authority, while juristic authority devolved exclusively upon the ‘ulama (the jurists) who had by then developed a methodology for interpretation, renewal, and expansion of the shari’ah.

    A. The Jewish Ummah

    Alongside this ummah of Muslims stood the ummah of the Jews. Their old tribalist loyalties to the Arab Aws and Khazraj tribes were to be supplanted by the bond of Judaism. Instead of their citizenship being a function of their clientship to this or that Arab tribe, it was hence to be a function of their Jewishness. Their life was to be structured around Jewish institutions and governed by the Torah, their revealed law. Political authority was vested in the chief rabbi who was also known as Resh Galut, while juristic authority rested with the system of rabbinic courts. Overarching both ummahs was a third organization, also called al ummah, or al dawlah al Islamiyyah (the Islamic polity, government, or “state”) whose constituents were the two ummahs and whose raison d’etre was the protection of the polity, the conduct of its external affairs, and the carrying out of Islam’s universal mission. The “state” could conscript the ummah of Muslims in its services, whether for peace or for war, but not the ummah of Jews. Jews, however, could volunteer their services to it if they wished. Neither the Muslim nor the Jewish ummah was free to conduct any relation with a foreign power, much less to declare war or peace with any other state or foreign nation. This remained the exclusive jurisdiction of the Islamic state.

    The Jews, who entered freely into this covenant with the Prophet, and whose status the new constitution raised from tribal clients on sufferance to citizens de lure of the state, later betrayed it. The sad consequence was, first, the fining of one group, followed by the expulsion of another group found guilty of greater offense, and finally the execution of a third group that plotted with the enemy to destroy the Islamic state and the Islamic movement. Although these judgments were made by the Prophet himself , or, in the case of the third group, by an arbiter agre upon by the parties concerned, the Muslims did not understand them as directed against the Jews as such, but against the guilty individuals only. Islam recognizes no vicarious guilt. Hence when the Islamic state later expanded to include northern Arab Palestine, Jordan and Syria, Persia, and Egypt, where numero Jews lived, they were automatically treated as innocent constituents of the Jewish ummah within the Islamic state. This explains the harmony and cooperation that characterized Muslim-Jewish relations throughout the succeeding centuries.

    For the first time in history since the Babylonian invasion 586 B.C., and as citizens of the Islamic state, the Jew could model his life after the Torah and do so legitimately, supported by the public laws of the state where he resided. For the first time, a non-Jewish state put its executive power at the service of a rabbinic court. For the first time, the state-institution assumed responsibility for the maintenance of Jewishness, and declared itself ready to use its power to defend the Jewishness of Jews against the enemies of Jewishness, be they Jews or non-Jews.

    After centuries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine (Christian) oppression and persecution, the Jews of the Near East, of North Africa, of Spain, and Persia, looked upon the Islamic state as liberator. Many of them readily helped its armies in th conquests and co-operated enthusiastically with the Islamic state administration. This cooperation was followed by acculturation into Arabic and Islamic culture, which produced a dazzling blossoming of Jewish arts, letters, sciences, and medicine. It brought affluence and prestige to the Jews, some of whom became ministers and advisers to the caliphs. Indeed, Judaism and its Hebrew language developed their “golden age” under the aegis of Islam Hebrew acquired its first grammar, the Torah its most highly developed jurisprudence, Hebrew letters their lyrical poetry; and Hebrew philosophy found its first Aristotelian, Musa ibn Maymun (Maimonides), whose thirteen precepts, couched in Arabic first, defined the Jewish creed and identity. Judaism developed its first mystical thinker as well, Ibn Gabirol, whose “Sufi” thought brought reconciliation and inner peace to Jews throughout Europe. Under Abd al Rahman III in Cordoba, the Jewish prime minister, Hasdai ben Shapirut, managed to effect reconciliation between Christian monarchs whom even the Catholic Church could not bring together. All this was possible because of one Islamic principle on which it all rested, namely, the recognition of the Torah as revelation and of Judaism as God’s religion, which the Qur’an attested and proclaimed.

    B. The Christian Ummah

    Shortly after the conquest of Makka by Muslim forces in 8/630, the Christians of Najran in Yeman sent a delegation of chieftains to meet the Prophet in Madinah. Their purpose was to clarify their position vis-a-vis the Islamic state, and that of the state vis-a-vis them. The conquest of Makka had made the Islamic state a power to reckon with in the region. The delegates were the guests of the Prophet , and he received them in his house and entertained them in his mosque. He explained Islam to them and called them to convert to his faith and cause. Some of them did and instantly became members of the Muslim ummah. Others did not. They chose to remain Christian, and to join the Islamic state as Christians. The Prophet constituted them as a Christian ummah, alongside the Jewish and Muslim ummahs, within the Islamic state. He sent with them one of his companions, Mu’adh ibn Jabal, to represent the Islamic state in their midst. They converted to Islam in the period of the second Caliph (2-14 A.H. / 634-646 A.C.), but the Christian ummah in the Islamic state continued to grow by the expansion of its frontiers to the north and west. Indeed, for the greater part of a century, the majority of the citizens of the Islamic polity were Christians, enjoying respect, liberty, and a new dignity they had not enjoyed under either Christian Rome or Byzantium. Both these powers were imperialist and racist and they tyrannized their subjects as they colonized the territories of the Near East.

    An objective account of the conversion of the Christians of the Near East to Islam should be required reading for all, especially for those still laboring under the Crusades-old prejudice that Islam was spread among Christians by the sword. Christians lived in peace and prospered under Islam for centuries, during which time the Islamic state saw righteous as well as tyrannic sultans and caliphs. Had it been a part of Islamic sentiment to do away with the Christian presence, it could have been done without a ripple in the world or history.Thomas Arnold, The Preaching of Islam (London: 1906; Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf Publications, 1961). But it was Islam’s respect for and acknowledgment of Jesus as Prophet of God and of his Evangel (Gospel) as revelation that safeguarded that presence. The same is true of Abyssinia, a neighboring Christian state, which harbored the first Muslim emigrants from the wrath of Makka and maintained with the Islamic polity at the time of the Prophet a covenant of peace and friendship. The expansive designs of the Islamic state never included Abyssinia precisely on that account.

    C. Ummah of Other Religions

    Persia’s incursion into Arabia had left behind it some, though very few, Arab converts to the Zoroastrian faith. A larger number of these lived in the buffer desert zone between Persia and Byzantium, and in Shatt al Arab, the lower region of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, where Arabia and Persia overlapped. Notable among the Persian Zoroastrians in Arabia was Salman al-Farsi , who converted to Islam before the Hijrah and became one of the illustrious companions of the Prophet.

    According to some traditions, it was the Prophet himself who, in the “Year of Delegations” (8-9/630-631), the year that saw the tribes and regions of Arabia sending delegations to Madina to pledge their fealty to the Islamic state, recognized the Zoroastrians as another ummah within the Islamic state. Very soon afterward, the Islamic state conquered Persia and included all its millions within its citizenry. Those who converted to Islam joined the ummah of Muslims, and the millions of others who chose to remain Zoroastrian were accorded the same privileges and duties accorded by the constitution to the Jews. The Prophet had already extended their application to the Christians eight years after the constitution was enacted. They were extended to apply to the Zoroastrians in 14/636, following the conquest of Persia by the Prophet’s companions, if not sooner by the Prophet himself.

    Following the conquest of India by Muhammad bin Qasim in 91/711, the Muslims faced new religions that they had never known before, Buddhism and Hinduism. Both religions co-existed in Sind and the Punjab, the regions conquered by Muslims and joined to the Islamic state. Muhammad bin Qasim sought instruction from the caliph in Damascus on how to treat Hindus and Buddhists. They appeared to worship idols, and their doctrines were at the farthest remove from Islam. Their founders were unheard of by Muslims. The Caliph called a council of ulama and asked them to render judgment on the basis of the governor’s report. The judgment was that as long as Hindus and Buddhists did not fight the Islamic state, as long as they paid the jizyah or tax due, they must be free to worship their gods as they please, to maintain their temples, and to determine their lives by the precepts of their faith. Thus, the same status as that of the Jews and Christians was accorded to them.Al Kufi, Shah-Namah, tr., by H. M. Elliott in his The History of lndia As Told by Its Own Historians (London: 1867-77), vol 1, pp. 184-97

    The principle governing Islam and Islamic governmental relations with other religions and their adherents had thus been established. It was implemented as the Islamic state entered into relations with those adherents, a process that took place either during the Prophet’s life or very soon after it. When the shari’ah crystallized in prescriptive form, the status, rights, and obligations of Muslim and non-Muslim citizens were already included. For fourteen centuries in many places, or less because of a later arrival of Islam or the imposition of Western law by colonial administrations, the shari’ah successfully governed Muslim non-Muslim relations. It created a modus vivendi which enabled the non-Muslims to perpetuate themselves – hence their continuing presence in the Muslim world – and to achieve felicity as defined by their own faiths.

    The atmosphere of the Islamic state was one replete with respect and honor to religion, piety, and virtue, unlike the tolerance of modern times in the West born out of skepticism regarding the truth of religious claims, and of cynicism and unconcern for religious values. The Islamic shari’ah is otherwise known as the millah or millet system (meaning “religious communities”), or the Dhimmah or Zimmi system (meaning the covenant of peace whose dhimmah or guarantor is God).

    Evil rulers cannot be denied to have existed in the Muslim world any more than in any other empire. Where they existed, Muslims suffered as well as non-Muslims. Nowhere in Islamic history, however, were non-Muslims singled out for prosecution or persecution. The constitution that protected them was taken by Muslims to be God-inspired, God-protected. The Prophet had already warned: “If anyone oppresses any dhimmi, I shall be his prosecutor on the Day of Judgment.” No other religion or societal system has ever regarded the religious minority in better light, integrated it into the stream of the majority with as little damage to either party, or treated it without injustice or unfairness as Islam did. Indeed, none could. Islam succeeded in a field where all other religions failed because of its unique theology, which recognized the true, one, and only religion of God to be innate in every person, the primordial base of all religions, identical with Sabianism, Judaism, and Christianity.

    Evidently, far from being a national state, the Islamic polity is a world order in which numerous religious communities, national or transnational, co-exist in peace. The universal Pax Islamica recognizes the legitimacy of every religious community, and grants it the right to order its life in accordance with its own religious genius. It is superior to the United Nations because, instead of national sovereignty as the principle of membership, it has taken the principle of religious identity. Its constitution is divine law, valid for all, and may be invoked in any Muslim court by anyone, be he a simple Muslim or non-Muslim individual or the chief of the largest religious community.

    Conclusion: The Critical Methodology of Islam

    Let us, in conclusion, review the characteristics of meta-religion according to Islam, those characteristics that make it rational and critical.

    1) Islamic meta-religion does not a priori condemn any religion. Indeed, it gives every religion the benefit of the doubt and more. Islamic meta-religion assumes that every religion is God-revealed and God-ordained, until it is historically proven beyond doubt that the constitutive elements of that religion are human made.

    2) Islamic meta-religion readily links the religions of history with the divine source on the ground that there is no people or group but God had sent them a prophet to teach them the same lesson of religion, of piety and virtue.

    3) Islamic meta-religion grants ready accreditation to all humans in their religious attempts to formulate and express religious truth. For it acknowledges all humans to have been born with all that is necessary to know God and His will, the moral law, so as to discriminate between good and evil.

    4) Islamic meta-religion is painfully aware of human passions, prejudices, and deficiencies and of their sinister influence upon what was revealed or discovered to be primordial religion (din al fitrah) or primordial truth. Thus, it calls upon all humans, especially the ulama of each religion, to subject their religious traditions to rational, critical examination, and to discard those elements that are proven to be human additions, emendations, or falsifications. In this task of historical criticism of all the religions of history, all humans are brothers and must cooperate to establish the primordial truth underlying all the religions.

    5) Islamic meta-religion honors human reason to the point of making it equivalent to revelation in the sense that neither can discard the other without imperiling itself. That is why in Islamic methodology, no contradiction, or non-correspondence with reality, can be final or ultimate. The Islamic scholar of religion is therefore ever tolerant, ever open to evidence, ever critical.

    6) Islamic meta-religion is humanistic par excellence, in that it assumes all men to be innocent, not fallen or vitiated at birth, capable of discerning good and evil, free to choose according to their reason, conscience, or best knowledge, and personally, that is, individually, responsible for their own deeds.

    7) Islamic meta-religion is world — and life — affirmative, in that it assumes creation, life, and history not to be in vain, not the work of a blind force, or of a trickster-god, but ordered to lead to value. It acknowledges the critical principle that nature is incapable by itself to produce critical self-consciousness, but man’s role is to do precisely that. A trickster-god would be in foolish self-contradiction, to create man and endow him with his critical faculties.

    8) Finally, Islamic meta-religion is an institution, not a mere theory, tested by fourteen centuries of continuous application, of success against tremendous odds. It alone among the religions and ideologies of the world was large enough in heart, in spirit as well as in letter, to give mankind the gift of a pluralism of laws with which to govern their lives under the aegis of its own meta-religious principles and laws. It alone acknowledged such plurality of laws as religiously and politically de jure, while it called their adherents with wisdom and fair argument to consider rationally, critically, and freely why they should not unite under the banner of the one religion that is the one and only meta-religion.

  • Why Islam?

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    Within Islam, it is both legitimate and right to ask the question: “Why Islam?” Every tenet of Islam is subject to analysis and contention. No other religion is willing to subject its basic fundamentals of faith to such questioning.

    For example, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most rational of Christian theologians, stopped the use of reason when it came to the basic fundamentals of the Christian faith. He then tried to justify faith. So to ask “Why Christianity?” is an illegitimate question. However, Allah invites the question, “why Islam?”.

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