Ismail Faruqi Online

Tag: christianity

  • Review of “Islam and Other Faiths” by Isma’il Raji Al-Faruqi

    Reading Time: 8 minutes

    Islam and Other Faiths

    Ataullah Siddiqui (ed.), “Islam and Other Faiths” by Isma’il Raji Al-Faruqi.
    Leicester: The Islamic Foundation and IIIT, 1999, ISBN: 8603-7276-6
    Review by Anne Sofie Roald

    The very first glimpse of “Islam and Other Faiths” by the late Isma’il Raji Faruqi filled me with excitement and curiosity. Here was an outstanding Muslim scholar venturing into a field that is at once virgin and full of intellectual promise. I had read only two books by him before: “Tawhid: Its Relevance for Thought and Life” and “The Islamization of Knowledge”. The contents of the former are in tune with the tenor of the papers which comprise the present book, being, inter alia, a philosophical statements of the unity of God and its implications. The Muslims in the western countries are truly in great need of studies such as the present one that would help them deconstruct and subsequently reconstruct the role they should play as minorities.

    My study of the present collection of papers, which have been painstakingly selected and edited by Ataullah Siddiqui, reinforced the already positive impression that I had of the author. Faruqi stands out as one of the very few Muslim philosophers and scholars who earnestly attempted to interact with Islam’s two sister faiths, Judaism and Christianity, and articulated the theoretical foundations of such interaction.

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  • Da’wah in the West: Promise and Trial

    Reading Time: 38 minutes

    I. The Marvel of the Spread of Islam

    Nobody who observed the spread of Islam in the non-Muslim World, especially in the West, and still more especially in America, the United Kingdom and Western Europe during the last thirty years, can fail to wonder at the marvel, or to discern the hand of the Almighty (may He be Glorified and Exalted) at work, The configuration of so many diverse forces, arising in such disparate corners of the earth, determined by such varied chains of historical conditions, all focusing upon the aforesaid Western countries is too much for any kind of planning except the divine. The causes of Muslim immigration up to that time are themselves the result of a tremendously complex development within the Muslim World. But, had these causes been restricted to the Muslim World, the Muslims seeking to immigrate world never have arrived in the West. They were inextricably interwoven with the relations those Muslims had with the West (colonialism, studentship and training, tourism, visits to relatives, fortune-seeking) , as well as dependent upon the West’s rise as industrial and political world leader, relating itself to the Muslim world in a variety of ways.

    On the other hand, the causes of the conversion of native Westerners to Islam have to do with the whole intellectual and spiritual development of the West, a development which in the last three or four decades seems to have prepared large segments of the population to be receptive to the Islamic message. The erosion of religious feeling, whether Christian or Jewish, the rise of the sciences of nature and technology under the aegis of a philosophy defiant of God and of everything supernatural; and the nihilism to which industry, urbanism and the whole structure of modern life had led all these seem like the unfolding of real salvation plans for a Heilsgeschichte aimed at the West. Another “fullness of time” seems to be in full bloom before our eyes, awaiting only the disposition of Islam to bring it to fulfillment. That is exactly the sort of grand design which only the divine Designer can bring about.

    Two main forces are jointly responsible for this marvelous spread of Islam in the West: the spiritual bankruptcy of the west and Muslim hijrah or emigration.

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