Ismail Faruqi Online

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  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: Zionism as Religion

    Reading Time: 8 minutes

    From CHAPTER VII:: “Zionism as Religion” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. The Romantic Base of all Zionists

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

    A return by the West European Jew to the letter of the Bible was forever closed by the ravages to the text of revelation which Biblical criticism had brought about. Based on feeling and will, romanticism provided easy escape. With ease and readiness, it combined itself with the tendency to secularise to which most educated Europeans were prone, and it provided a stance from which even the letter of scripture could be reinstated as religiously significant. This stance – the romantic interpretation of religion and history – was buttressed by a modernist epistemology of relativist cultural intuitionism. All history, romanticism held, was a reflective mirror in which the author and his ethnic entity read themselves, their wishes and hopes; and there is no historical reality to be sought or established outside this figuration. History, in short, is a moment of self-reflection in the stream-of-the-manifold of group consciousness. Its products, the books of history, are interpretations, as it were by definition, whose veracity depends not on their correspondence with the past itself, but on the adequacy of their rendering of the blik of the generation in which they are written. Every generation, indeed every writer, may have his own blik from which to view the past, and every blik is legitimate. In accord with this theory, Zionism could afford to be literalist, accommodating the fundamentalist orthodoxy’s position by adhering to the verbatim validity of scripture while rejecting the doctrine of verbatim revelation in favor of the vague and woozy theory of the “God Who Acts in History.” Christian Protestant theologians had previously done so for the same reason. The Biblical scribe, the theory holds, was not a recorder of revealed text but the “redactor” of a vision experienced by his contemporaries and ineffably felt by them to be the truth ofthe moment of history in question. Hence, Zionists agree with the naive that every letter of scripture is true; but, unlike the naive, they hold its truth derivable from the reality ofthe feeling of those whose feeling it expressed.

    This romanticism goes beyond the dispute between the religious Zionists such as Yehiel Pines and Abraham Kook, and the secular Zionists, such as Herzl, Jacob Klatzkin, Ahad Ha’am, Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Indeed it is the common ground on which all ofthem stand. For all ofthem are, properly speaking, romantics. Their vision envelops the whole past and future of the Jewish people. It is refined by the lessons they learned from Romantic Europe. The function of history, the relativism of truth, the roles of feeling and will, the Weltanschauung and its comprehensiveness; Volkstum and its place in culture, the Lebensraum and Blut und Boden mystique, the here-now populist salvation, the idealisation of nature – ail these lessons the Zionists have learnt only too well, for the insights they provided were to be utilised as a filter screen through which Jewish history and religion are to be seen and apprehended.

    The “religious Zionists” looked upon Zionism as a program of socio-political, economic and military action designed for the purpose of actualising an essence which is the religious content of Judaism. Monotheism, the Law, justice and peace, a world order based upon them symbolically expressed by the restoration of the Jews within that world order but at its center, is their ultimate goal. The conservative orthodox Jews who rejected Zionism, did so not because they did not share the goal, but because they regarded it as eschatological, as something to be brought about by God alone, at His desire as well as by His efficiency, not those of men. The religious Zionists agreed with this, but held what appeared blasphemous to the non-Zionists, viz., that the miracle of God needed man’s work for it to happen. Religious Zionism is really religious nationalism, the will to preserve and promote the ethnic entity for the sake of the content of Judaism. Nationalism here remains the means; spiritual content of the religion, the end. Romanticism cemented the two, and made them interdependent. Its guilt in Islamic religious terms is exactly what the Qur’an has meant by “shirk,” or associationism, i.e. the associating of other beings with God as Ruler of Creation and hence, Maker of History.

    B. Secular Zionism

    Secular Zionism defined the religion in terms of nationalism, claiming that the religion is merely an expression of the nationalist spirit. “Judaism is nationalism,” it exclaimed, and it sought to reduce the religious dimension of Judaism to phenomena of a subjective group consciousness determined by its own vision of itself. As the living condition of a subjective consciousness, Jewish nationalism does not depend upon sharing of the content of religion. It is perfectly possible even among committed atheists. It rests on the objective fact — consciousness predetermined by past Jewish history — and an act of willing to continue to be part of the Jewish People. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are at the same time its twin bases, and both have nothing to do with religion except a loose, accidental and severable association. Jewishness, according to the secular Zionists, depends upon “form,” not “content;” not whether God is worshipped and what law is observed, but how religion is practiced. “Form” as a constitutive modality is of the essence of romanticism. Secular Zionism agrees fully because under this modality it can give priority and preeminence to the political will, and relegate to unimportance the God and Torah of Israel in which it does not believe anyway, but to which it can nonetheless assign a useful function. Repudiating the classical content-definition of Jewishness as belief in God and observance of His Torah (law), secular Zionism redefined it in terms of “form.” What makes a Jew Jewish, it maintained, is neither his belief in God nor observance of His law, but how he lives his Jewishness. The only “how” secular Zionism recognises as fulfilling its ideology is the “territorial-political definition of Jewish nationalism” by which it does not mean the possession of a base for national life, but the be-all and end-all of nationalism, for “living on the land is ipso facto the national life”.Jacob Klatzkin, “Boundaries” in The Zionist Idea, pp. 318-319

    Obviously, God and Torah are superfluous here and can be dispensed with, though they can do no harm if they exist. The masses, always naive and “religious” may even need them. Henceforth, they are to become symbols expressing the only facta romanticism holds dear: soil, blood, and the feeling of community and destiny. Obviously, too, God and His law are here dethroned and the ethnic entity has replaced them. It is to the thought of Martin Buber that Zionism owes this theological transformation. In his view, revelation is not what God has given, but what an individual man has experienced and communicated to his fellows who have understood and appreciated. This makes revelation equivalent to lived group experience in which God, the prophet and the revealed content are all instruments of an ethnic entity’s coming into self-consciousness. Indeed, for Buber, revelation is history and history is revelation. But he has the Hegelian temerity to call this “humanity touched by the divine.” Indeed, he regarded the ethnic identity convertible with God Himself (subhanahu wa ta’ala ‘amma yushrikun!. The “Song of Deborah” he regarded as the perfect mirror of this thought of his because it “expresses a fundamental reality by repeatedly alternating the name of this God with the name of Israel, like a refrain.” To make things still worse, i.e., to dispel any spiritual understanding of the concept “Israel” so as to make it in any way include all the righteous members of humankind besides the Jews, Martin Buber, the most “spiritual” of the Zionists, claims that Israel is itself impossible without the rocks, sand and water that are Palestine. For, he asserts, the very “being” of Israel lies in “the holy matrimony of land and people.” With still greater bravado, Buber goes on to claim for this connection of “real estate” with Israel “a unique category…touching the universally human, the cosmic and even of Being itself”.Israel and Palestine, p. x

    Buber’s case is not one of simple shirk or association of other beings with God. It is a sin unknown to the pre-Islamic Arabs, a sin condemned so vehemently by the Old Testament itself, namely, the identification of God with nature, of the Creator with the creature; the predication of transcendence to nature. The Ancient Egyptians, the Philistines, Canaanites, Assyrians and Babylonians, and finally the Greeks and Romans, were condemned by Judaism, its prophets, or scripture for doing precisely this. Modern time is witness to the Zionist Jews perpetrating identically the same sin a la Georg Friedrich Hegel.

    C. Zionism: A Strictly European Experience

    Evidently, both the religious and the secular Zionists share the Romantic Weltanschauung and do not differ from each other except in degree. Both of them equally hold to the view that feeling, or subjective consciousness, is the ultimate determiner of reality, that the ultimate category in this determination of reality is the ethnic entity, whether dis-enlandised but in process or re-enlandisement, as in religious Zionism, or imperfect and inexistent until enlandised, as in the secular variety.

    Evidently Zionism, the consequence of European persecution and European romanticism is an experience of European Jews alone. Only reluctantly one might yet accept the claim that American and Russian Jews are heirs to European history and share in it, though the former have known no persecution But one cannot accept this predication of Russian Jews. For. they have known neither real enlightenment nor extensive emancipation until the Communist Revolution. In another direction, no one in his senses would accept predication of such experience to non-Western Jews, whose history and experience have known neither persecution, nor mass pogroms, neither enlightenment nor romanticism, neither the French Revolution nor Hegel. Of these, the Jews of the Muslim World who have produced the Golden Age of Jewish thought and philosophy, of Hebrew literature and linguistics, and did so under the aegis of Islam, are especially remarkable. That Zionism had by agitatation, luring appeal or subversion, attracted two million of these Oriental Jews, uprooted them from their traditional homes and brought them as refugees to Palestine, can in no way be ever condoned. For, the experience out of which Zionism was born, and to which it came as answer; the Romantic cultural phenomenon under the aegis of which it was conceived, and under which the Zionist reinterpretation of Jewish religion, culture and identity has taken place – all this is foreign to them. It is anything but justice to impose this “Europeanism” upon them. And it is a sinister crime to “re-educate” and “acculturate” — or better, to “Westernise” — them into it. It contains all the important elements of a spiritual genocide. The wonder is all the greater that this is happening under the guise of “restoration”, of “religious messianism.” If Western Jews may be entitled to their own disease, a fortiori Oriental Jews must be entitled to their own sanity. The Islamic atmosphere in which they have lived for centuries which encouraged and helped nourish their notion of divine transcendence and of election as morality and righteousness, should continue to do so if Judaism is to remain a member of the Semitic family of religions.

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

    Reading Time: 13 minutesFrom 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.

  • On the Nature of Islamic Da’wah

    Reading Time: 16 minutes

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

    I. Da’wah Methodology

    A. Da’wah is not coercive

    “Calling” is certainly not coercing. Allah (s.w.t.) has commanded: “No coercion in religion (2: 256).” It is an invitation whose objective can be fulfilled only with the free consent of the called. Since the objective is an exercise by the called of his own judgement that Allah is his Creator, Master, Lord and Judge, a forced judgement is a contradictio in adjecto and hence punishable with jahannam. Humanistic ethics regards coerced da’wah as a grave violation of the human person, second only to homicide, if not equal to it. That is why the Holy Qur’an specified the means of persuasion to be used. “Argue the cause with them [the non-Muslims] with the more comely arguments” (16: 125). If they are not convinced, they must be left alone (5: 108; 3 : 176-177; 47 : 32). Certainly, the Muslim is to try again and never give up that God may guide his fellow-man to the truth. The example of his own life, his commitment to the values he professes, and his engagement, constitute his final argument. If the non-Muslim is still not convinced, the Muslim is to rest his case with God. The Prophet himself allowed those Christians who were not convinced by his own presentation of Islam to keep their faith and return home with dignity.

    From this, it follows that the societal order desired by Islam is one where men are free to present and argue their religious causes with one another. It is a kind of academic seminar on a large scale where he who knows better is free to tell and to convince, and the others are free to listen and be convinced. Islam puts its trust in man’s rational power to discriminate between the true and the false. “Truth is now manifest from error. Whoever believes [i.e. accepts the truth] does so for his own good. Whoever does not believe [i.e. does not accept the truth] does so to his own peril” (39: 41). Islamic da’wah is, therefore, an invitation to think, to debate and argue. It cannot be met with indifference except by the cynic nor with rejection except by the fool or the malevolent. If it is met by silencing force, then that force must be met by superior force. The right to think is innate and belongs to all men. No man may preemptively deny it to any human. Islamic da’wah operates only under these principles. Thomas Arnold’s The Preaching of Islam is a standing monument to da’wah written by a Christian missionary and colonialist.

    The principle that Islamic da’wah is non-coercive is based upon the Qur’an’s dramatization of the justification for the creation of man. The Qur’an represents God as addressing the angels in Surat al-Baqarah, verse 30, with the words: “Lo! I am about to place a khalifah (vicegerent) on earth. The angels replied: Will You place therein one who will do harm and will shed blood, while we sing Your praise and sanctify You? He said: Surely I know that which you know not.” In another verse of the Qur’an, Surat al-Ahzab, 72, we read: “Lo! We offered Our trust to heaven and earth. They shrank from bearing it and were afraid of it. But man assumed it…” Both these statements are understood by Muslims as defining the purpose of man’s existence, namely, that he is God’s khalifah, the carrier of the responsibility entrusted to him for the fulfilment of the divine will. That will is already fulfilled in part, within nature as natural law, and not yet fulfilled in another part, by man as moral law. This constitutes man’s distinction from all other creatures. Only he acts freely and thus enables himself to actualize the moral part of the divine will. His essence is his capacity for responsible moral action. Coercion is a violation of this freedom and responsibility and is utterly inconsistent with man’s relation to the divine will.

    B. Da’wah is not a psychotropic induction

    It follows from the nature of the judgement that da’wah cannot have for objective anything but a conscientious acquiescence to its contents on the part of the called. This means that if the consciousness of the called is in any way vitiated by any of the common defaults or defects of consciousness, the da’wah is itself equally vitiated. Thus a da’wah that is fulfilled through, or whose fulfilment involves in any way, a lapse of consciousness, a lapse of forgetfulness, a lapse in ta’aqqul or the intellectual binding of ideas and facts so as to make a cohesive and consistent whole, or a transport of emotion and enthusiasm, a sort of “trip”, is not Islamic da’wah. Da’wah, therefore, is not the work of magic, of illusion, of excitement, or any kind of psychotropia. In such work, the subject is not in control of his power of judgement, and hence, his judgement cannot be properly said to be his “personal free judgement”.

    The presence of God, that is as Ultimate Reality, Creator and Lord of the Universe, Judge and Master of all men, is a fact that can indeed enter common consciousness. Indeed, Islam holds that were consciousness to be tampered with, the object perceived would not be God, but something else. Under the tremendous impact of revelation itself, the Prophet’s consciousness neither lapsed nor became vague as in a mystical experience, but continued to function normally and was even enhanced in its clarity and perception. That is why Islamic law does not recognize the conversion to Islam of the minor child; for his consciousness is presumed immature until he comes of age.

    The principle that da’wah has nothing to do with psychotropic induction preserves the freedom and consciousness of choice which cannot be affirmed in case of dilation of consciousness by chemical or mystifying means. It protects the da’wah from being conducted for pleasure, happiness, freedom from care, eudaemonia — indeed, for anything but the sake of Allah. Any ulterior motive would vitiate it in both the giver and the recipient. On the other hand, the unconscious conversion of any person who has been tricked into entering Islam is evil; more evil, of course, is the trickster.

    C. Da’wah is directed to Muslims as well as non-Muslims

    It follows from the divine commandment that da’wah must be the end product of a critical process of intellection. Its content cannot be the only content known, the only content presented. For there is no judgement without consideration of alternatives, without comparison and contrast, without tests of inner consistency, of general consistency with all other knowledge, without tests of correspondence with reality. It is this aspect of da’wah that earns for the called who responds affirmatively to its content the grace of Hikmah or wisdom. Allah (s.w.t.) described His prophets and saints as “Men of Hikmah” precisely because their Islam was a learned thing, not a narrow-minded addiction to a single track of thought, certainly not a “pre-judgement”. That is why da’wah in Islam has never been thought of as exclusively addressed to non-Muslims. It is as much intended for the benefit of Muslims as of non-Muslims.

    Besides stemming from the fact of all men’s equal creatureliness in front of God, this universalism of da’wah rests on the identity of imperative arising out of conversion to Islam. All men stand under the obligation to actualize the divine pattern in space and time. This task is never complete for any individual. The Muslim is supposedly the person who, having accepted the burden, has set himself on the road of actualization. The non-Muslim still has to accept the charge. Hence, da’wah is necessarily addressed to both, to the Muslim to press forward toward actualization and to the non-Muslim to join the ranks of those who make the pursuit of God’s pattern supreme.

    The directing of da’wah to Muslim as much as non-Muslims is indicative of the fact that, unlike Christianity, Islamicity is never a fait accompli. Islamicity is a process. It grows, and it is sometimes reduced. There is no time at which the Muslim may carry his title to paradise, as it were, in his pocket. Instead of “salvation”, the Muslim is to achieve felicity through unceasing effort.

    D. Da’wah is rational intellection

    Since da’wah is a critical process of intellection, it is of its nature never to be dogmatic, never to stand by its contents as if by its own authority, or that of its mouthpiece, or that of its tradition. For it to be critical means that it should keep itself always open to new evidence, to new alternatives; that it continually cast and recast itself in new forms, in cognizance of the new discoveries of human science, of the new needs of human situation. In making the da’wah, the da’iyah labours not as the ambassador of an authoritarian system, but as the co-thinker who is co-operating with the mad’u (the called) in the understanding and appreciation of Allah’s double revelation, in creation and through His Prophets. So much for the standpoint of the da’iyah.

    From the standpoint of the mad’u, his process of intellection should never stop. His man should be dynamic and always growing in intensity, clarity of vision and comprehensiveness. Moreover, conversion to Islam is not a sacrament which, once it takes place, becomes an eternal fait accompli. Islam knows of no “justification by faith”, certainly of no “justification” in the sense of justi facti. If lethargic and stagnant, iman degenerates into narrow-mindedness and gradually impoverishes its subject. On the other hand, its dynamism — its openness to new knowledge, new evidence and new life-situations, new data, problems, as well as creative solutions which may or may not be derived from the tradition — makes it a source of enrichment for the subject. Fortunate is he whose iman increases in “yaqin-ness” (certitude) with every new day.

    As rational intellection, da’wah shows that in Islam, faith has to do with knowledge and conviction, whereas in Christianity it is, as Pascal found out, a blind wager. The Arabic word iman does not mean “faith” as Christians use the term. Rather, it means “conviction”. It does not involve the functioning of a sacrament. There is no ex opere operata principle in Islam.

    E. Da’wah is rationally necessary

    Islamic da’wah is therefore the presentation of rational, i.e. critical, truth. It is not the proclamation of an event, or even of a truth (idea), but the presentation, for critical assessment as to truth value, of a proposition, a factum, which has theoretical (metaphysical) and practical (ethical) relevance for man. As to the recalcitrant will, Islam recognized it for what it is, namely, recalcitrant and delinquent, and left the subject of that will to himself until God guides him to the truth. It respected his will and his judgement and, indeed, it extended to him its protections and Pax Islamica. But it asked him to respond equally with peace and not to interfere with his neighbor’s right to listen and be convinced. Moreover, the Muslim of history has always presented his case in the open, never entered or practiced his Islam in secret. His da’wah preceded his entry onto any international or inter-religious scene. In consequence, he interpreted the killing of the da’iyah, the silencing of his da’wah, as a hostile act, a rejection of the peaceful call to reason and argument, and not merely the opposition of a recalcitrant will. That is also why, once his call is answered not with conversion but merely with “yea, I will think”, the Muslim of history has spared absolutely nothing in so presenting his argument as to make it convincing; above all, by embodying it forth in its universalism, justice and brotherhood.

    That da’wah is rationally necessary is implied by the fact that in presenting its case, Islam presents it as natural or rational truth. “Rational” here means “critical”. Men differ in their use of reason but there would be no point to our dialogue unless we assume the truth to be knowable, that is, unless we believe it possible to arrive at principles which overarch our differences. Therefore, the standpoint of Islam is not an “act of faith”, but one of “conviction”. It is one of knowledge, of trust in the human power to know.

    F. Da’wah is anamnesis

    In commanding the Muslim to call men to the path of Allah, He (s.w.t.) did not ask him to call men to anything new, to something which is foreign or unknown to them. Islam is din al-fitrah (religio naturalis) which is already present in its fullness in man by nature. It is innate, as it were, a natural constituent of humanity. The man who is not homo religiosus, and hence homo Islamicus, is not a man. This is Allah’s branding of His creation, namely, that He has endowed all men, as His creatures, with a sensus numinus, a fitrah, with which to recognize Him as Allah (God), Transcendent Creator, Ultimate Master, and One. It is history which confirms this natural faculty with its primeval perceptions and intellections, cultivates and enriches it or warps it and diverts it from its natural goal.

    Da’wah is the call of man to return to himself, to what is innate in him, to “objective” or “phenemenological” (i.e. with suspension of the indoctrinations and inculcations of history) reexamination of facts which are already given, and so in him. It is the nearest thing to Platonic anamnesis without the absurdity of reincarnation or transmigration of souls. As such, the claims of da’wah are necessarily moderate, nay humble! For the da’iyah is to do no more than the “midwife”, to stir the intellect of the mad’u to rediscover what he already knows, the innate knowledge which God has implanted in him at birth.

    As anamnesis, da’wah is based upon the Islamic assertion that primeval religion or monotheism is found in every man (din al-fitrah), and that all he needs is to be reminded of it. The function of the prophets is to remind people of what is already in them. Christianity has approached this position in the literature of the Apostolic Fathers and particularly in the Enlightenment. But it receded from this position in the nineteenth century because western man was too deeply committed to his ethno-centrism to accept the universalism implied in that position. Let us remember that Immanuel Kant, the prince of the Enlightenment, held that “to be black is an argument”, and categorized the world’s races in order of ascendancy with the Europeans on top. This was a failure of nerve on the part of Christendom.

    G. Da’wah is ecumenical par excellence

    Islam’s discovery of din al-fitrah and its vision of it as base of all historical religion is a breakthrough of tremendous importance in inter-religious relations. For the first time it has become possible to hold adherents of all other religions as equal members of a universal religious brotherhood. All religious traditions are de jure, for they have all issued from and are based upon a common source, the religion of God which He has implanted equally in all men, upon din al-fitrah. The problem is to find out how far the religious traditions agree with din al-fitrah, the original and first religion; the problem is to trace the historical development of religions and determine precisely how and when and where each has followed and fulfilled, or transcended and deviated from, din al-fitrah. Holy writ as well as all other religious texts must be examined in order to discover what change has befallen them, or been reflected in them, in history. Islam’s breakthrough is thus the first call to scholarship in religion, to critical analysis of religious texts, of the claim of such texts to revelation status. It is the first call to the discipline of “history of religions” because it was the first to assume that all religions had a history, that each religion has undergone a development.

    Islam does not claim for itself, therefore, the status of a novelty, but of a fact and dispensation at least as old as creation. The religious life of man, with all its variety across the ages is rehabilitated under this view not as a series of vagaries, but as attempts at true religion. Monotheism is said to be as old as creation.

    Islamic da’wah begins by reaffirming this ultimate base as genuine and true. It seeks to complete the critical task of sifting in the accumulated traditions the wheat from the chaff. We are not impressed by the claim of latter-day ecumenists, advocates of inter-religious dialogue, toleration and co-existence, who assert the ultimacy of any religious system because it is religious. For such a claim is the absolutization of every religion’s propositions, which is nothing short of cultural relativism. Indeed, such ecumenism is non-representative of the religions which claim that what they propose is the truth, and not merely a claim to the truth among many claims. And it is rationally inconsequential because it counsels the juxtaposition in consciousness of contrary claims to the truth without the demand for a solution of their contradiction. By avoiding all these pitfalls and shortcomings, Islamic da’wah is ecumenical, if ecumenicity is to have any meaning besides kitchen cooperation among the churches.

    Da’wah is ecumenical par excellence because it regards any kind of intercourse between the Muslim and the non-Muslim as a domestic relationship between kin. The Muslim comes to the non-Muslim and says “we are one; we are one family under Allah, and Allah has given you the truth not only inside yourself but inside your religious tradition which is de jure because its source is in God.”. The task of dialogue, or mission, is thus transformed into one of sifting the history of the religion in question. Da’wah thus becomes an ecumenical cooperative critique of the other religion rather than its invasion by a new truth.

    II. Da’wah Content

    Islam’s view of other faiths flows from the essence of its religious experience. This essence is critically knowable. It is not the subject of “paradox”, nor of “continuing revelation”, nor the object of construction or reconstruction by Muslims. It is crystallized in the Holy Qur’an for all men to read. It is clearly comprehensible to the man of today as it was to that of Arabia of the Prophet’s day (570-632 A.C.) because the categories of grammar, lexicography, syntax and redaction of the Qur’anic text, and those of Arabic consciousness embedded in the Arabic language, have not changed through the centuries. This phenomenon is indeed unique; for Arabic is the only language which remained the same for nearly two millennia, the last fourteen centuries of which being certainly due to the Holy Qur’an.Controversies have arisen, as they certainly may, in the interpretation of the Qur’anic text. What is being affirmed here is the fact that the Qur’anic text is not bedevilled by a hermeneutical problem. Differences of interpretation are apodictically soluble in terms of the very same categories of understanding in force at the time of revelation of the text (611632 A. C.), all of which have continued the same because of the freezing of the language and the daily intercourse of countless millions of people with it and with the text of the Holy Qur’an. For Muslims, this essence has been on every lip and in every mind, every hour of every day.

    The essence of Islam is tawhid or the witnessing that there is no god but God. Brief as it is, this witness packs into itself four principles which constitute the whole essence and ultimate foundation of the religion.

    First, that there is no god but God means that reality is dual, consisting of a natural realm, the realm of creation, and a transcendent realm, the Creator. This principle distinguishes Islam from trinitarian Christianity where the dualism of creator and creature is maintained but where it is combined with a divine immanentism in human nature in justification of the incarnation. Tawhid requires that neither nature be apotheosized nor transcendent God be objectified, the two realities ever-remaining ontologically disparate.

    Second, tawhid means that God is related to what is not God as its God, that is, as its creator or ultimate cause, its master or ultimate end. Creator and creature, therefore, tawhid asserts, are relevant to each other regardless of their ontological disparateness which is not affected by the relation. The transcendent Creator, being cause and final end of the natural creature, is the ultimate Master Whose will is the religious and moral imperative. The divine will is commandment and law, the “ought” of all that is, knowable by the direct means of revelation, or the indirect means of rational and/or empirical analysis of what is. Without a knowable content, the divine will would not be normative or imperative, and hence would not be the final end of the natural; for if the transcendent Creator is not the final end of His own creature, creation must be not the purposive event consonant with divine nature but a meaningless happening to Him, a threat to His own ultimacy and transcendence.

    Thirdly, tawhid means that man is capable of action, that creation is malleable or capable of receiving man’s action, and that human action on malleable nature, resulting in a transformed creation, is the purpose of religion. Contrary to the claims of other religions, nature is neither fallen or evil, nor a sort of Untergang of the absolute, nor is the absolute an apotheosis of it. Both are real, and both are good — the Creator being the summum bonum and the creature being intrinsically good and potentially better as it is transformed by human action into the pattern the Creator has willed for it. We have already seen that knowledge of the divine will is possible for man; and through revelation and science such knowledge is actual. The prerequisites of the transformation of creation into the likeness of the divine pattern are hence all, but for human resolve and execution, fulfilled and complete.

    Fourthly, tawhid means that man, alone among all the creatures, is capable of action as well as free to act or not to act. This freedom vests him with a distinguishing quality, namely responsibility. It casts upon his action its moral character; for the moral is precisely that which is done in freedom, i.e., done by an agent who is capable of doing, as well as of not doing, it. This kind of action, moral action, is the greater portion of the divine will. Being alone capable of it, man is a higher creature, endowed with the cosmic significance of that through whose agency alone is the higher part of the divine will to be actualized in space and time. Man’s life on earth, therefore, is especially meaningful and cosmically significant. As Allah has put it in the Holy Qur’an, man is God’s khalifah, or vicegerent on earth.Qur’an 2:30; 6:165; 10:14, 73; 35:39; 7:68, 73; 27:62.It is of the nature of moral action that its fulfillment be not equivalent to its non-fulfillment, that man’s exercise of his freedom in actualizing the divine imperative be not without difference. Hence, another principle is necessary, whereby successful moral action would meet with happiness and its opposite with unhappiness. Otherwise it would be all one for man whether he acts, or does not act, morally. Indeed, this consideration makes judgement necessary, in which the total effect of one’s lifetime activity is assessed and its contribution to the total value of the cosmos is acknowledged, imbalances in the individual’s life are redressed and his achievement is distinguished from the non-achievement of others. This is what “The Day of Judgement” and “Paradise and Hell” are meant to express in religious language.

    Fifthly, tawhid means the commitment of man to enter into the nexus of nature and history, there to actualize the divine will. It understands that will as pro-world and pro-life and hence, it mobilizes all human energies in the service of culture and civilization. Indeed, it is of its essence to be a civilizing force. In consequence, Islamic da’wah is not based upon a condemnation of the world.

    It does not justify itself as a call to man to relieve himself from the predicament of an existence which it regards as suffering and misery. Its urgency is not an assumed “need for salvation” or for compassion and deliverance from anything. In this, as in the preceding aspects, Islamic da’wah differs from that of Christianity. Assuming all men necessarily to be “fallen”, to stand in the predicament of “original sin”, of “alienation from God”, of self-contradiction, self-centeredness, or of “falling short of the perfection of God”, Christian mission seeks to ransom and save. Islam holds man to be not in need of any salvation. Instead of assuming him to be religiously and ethically fallen, Islamic da’wah acclaims him as the khalifah of Allah, perfect in form, and endowed with all that is necessary to fulfill the divine will indeed, even loaded with the grace of revelation! “Salvation” is hence not in the vocabulary of Islam. Falah, or the positive achievement in space and time of the divine will, is the Islamic counterpart of Christian “deliverance” and “redemption”.

    The Islamic da’wah does not, therefore, call man to a phantasmagoric second or other kingdom which is an alternative to this one, but to assume his natural birthright, his place as the maker of history, as the remolder and refashioner of creation. Equally, his joys and pleasures are all his to enjoy, his life to live and his will to exercise, since the content of the divine will is not “not-of-this-world”, but “of it”. World-denial and life-abnegation, asceticism and monasticism, isolationism and individualism, subjectivism and relativism are not virtues in Islam but dalal (misguidance). Islam stands squarely within the Mesopotamian religious tradition where religion is civilization and civilization is religion.

    Finally, tawhid restores to man a dignity which some religions have denied by their representation of him as “fallen”, as existentially miserable. By calling him to exercise his God-given prerogatives, Islamic da’wah rehabilitates him and reestablishes his sanity, innocence and dignity. His moral vocation is the road to his falah. Certainly the Muslim is called to a new theocentrism; but it is one in which man’s cosmic dignity is applauded by Allah and His Angels. Christianity calls man to respond with faith to the salvific act of God and seeks to rehabilitate man by convincing him that it is he for whom God has shed His own blood. Man, it asserts, is certainly great because he is God’s partner whom God would not allow to destroy himself. This is indeed greatness, but it is the greatness of a helpless puppet. Islam understands itself as man’s assumption of his cosmic role as the one for whose sake creation was created. He is its innocent, perfect and moral master; and every part of it is his to have and to enjoy. He is called to obey, i.e. to fulfill the will of Allah. But this fulfillment is in and of space and time precisely because Allah is the source of space and time and the moral law.

    Man, as Islam defines him, is not an object of salvation, but its subject. Through his agency alone the moral part, which is the higher part of the will of God, enters, and is fulfilled in creation. In a sense, therefore, man is God’s partner, but a partner worthy of God because he is trustworthy as His khalifa, not because he is pitifully helpless and needs to be “saved”.

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

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  • The Ismail Faruqi Award Presentation Ceremony

    Reading Time: 4 minutesAnwar Ibrahim

    This bi-annual award to IIU scholars who produce outstanding, excellent and exemplary academic work was established in honour of the memory of al-marhum Professor Ismail Raji al-Faruqi who, during his lifetime, had made profound and invaluable contributions not only to Islamic scholarship but to learning as a whole.

    Indeed, I was most privileged to have been given the opportunity of knowing him personally, as a leading scholar of his generation and as a friend. To be sure, he exacted uncompromising intellectual standards and lived by a strict regiment of academic discipline. But, at the same time, he was never lost in mere philosophical abstractions. He was acutely conscious of the realities of the time and the condition of the contemporary ummah. In this regard, he exemplified the conjunction between theoretical learning, ilm, and the righteous deeds, amal salih. He devoted the best years of his life, before his death under tragic circumstances, to the upliftment of the ummah, in inspiring and guiding its youth especially.

    Perhaps his greatest legacy is the establishment of the International Institute of Islamic Thought. It was born out of his concern to revive the culture of learning in the hearts and the minds of the ummah. Through this institution he had enabled the mobilization of the intellectual resources of Muslims worldwide, bringing together scholars who had had Western education and those who had undergone the traditional Islamic disciplines.

    In conferring these awards, we are recognizing scholars who have contributed towards the realization of al-marhum al-Faruqi’s vision.

    It is our conviction that the continuing crisis of the ummah cannot be resolved without a genuine revitalization of the culture of learning at all levels. Most of the problems afflicting Muslim societies in this day and age can be attributed to illiteracy, ignorance and narrow-mindedness. For instance, the highest rates of illiteracy in the world are in Muslim societies. So is the incidence of gender discrimination and denial of the opportunity of women to receive an education. In fact, one can go on reciting a litany of the ills of the ummah, all of which would have prevented had we lived up to the imperatives of the Quran and Sunnah to acquire and disseminate knowledge.

    However, the mere acquisition of knowledge without exercising discernment and the exertion of one’s intellectual faculties can sometimes be even more dangerous than plain ignorance. In this connection, there is a general misconception among Muslims, be they laymen or jurists, that the application of the Shariah is a very simple and straightforward matter: all we need to do is to look at the established or classical texts on Islamic fiqh and the answers are to be found there. There is no need to really exert one’s intellectual faculties in order to derive the fiqh as regards the diverse problems we encounter daily in our contemporary situation. In other words, according to this thinking, present-day Muslims need only to consult the voluminous compendiums of legal rules established centuries ago during the classical period of the great jurists. Such a thinking also implies that anyone who does not apply, or finds difficulty in actually applying those existing rules, can only be either ignorant of them, or worse, perverse and impious.

    As we know surely, this conception of Islamic law is not only myopic but wholly untenable. The very fact of the growth and establishment of the four major sunni schools of law testifies to the dynamism of the Shariah via the doctrine of ijtihad.

    Unfortunately after the crystallization of the Madhahib, intellectual inertia set in which finally led to the closing of the door of ijtihad and it is no exaggeration to say that this condition of juristic malaise has persisted till today, give and take the occasional attempts by more forward- looking scholars and jurists to advocate the revival of Islamic juristic rethinking.

    This basic misconception together with this taqlid predisposition has also given rise to a literalist, legalistic and narrow approach to the application of the Shariah rules as expounded by the classical jurist themselves. In the process, there is a preoccupation more with the rules of the Shariah per se rather than its objectives or maqasid, such as the general establishment of peace and security, the promotion of societal welfare, the eradication of poverty, basically the establishment of a civil society. In the process, we have missed the forest for the trees.

    In the context of Malaysia today, this misconception is further compounded by the problem posed by those who, in their desire to gain political mileage, have called for the implementation of the hudud. It did not matter that the hudud laws they have drafted were not based strictly on established methodology of Islamic jurisprudence. Naturally the resultant Bill that was drafted contains serious contradictions and glaring defects in respect of such crucial matters as the scope of the crime, the nature of the evidence required as well as the punishment to be meted out. And worst, they have completely disregarded the paramount objectives of the Shariah itself. This is indeed a most retrograde move.

    Fortunately enough, recent developments in the Muslim world indicate a trend to refer to the intellectual tradition of the classical period of the great jurists. Although this is still more the exception than the rule, some ulama and writers of modern works alike are now attempting to relate the classical formulations of usul al-fiqh to modern socio-legal conditions. The chasm between theory and practice has developed a rather alarming degree. Perhaps this is what prompted Allama Muhammad Iqbal in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam to call for the transfer of the power of ijtihad from individuals to a duly constituted collective body with the power to legislate. It is noteworthy that the late Shaykh al-Azhar Mahmud Shaltut went even further by placing greater emphasis on the maslahah (policy based on public or common interest) advocating that, since the maslahah is bound to vary according to circumstances, jurists should be able to take into consideration changed circumstances and review previous consensus in order to realise the maslahah.

    The award recipient, Prof. Hashim Kamali, is one of the few contemporary scholars who have advocated an approach towards Islamic jurisprudence departing from the purely legalistic and literalist position. I believe he has taken the stand that the scope for the reinterpretation of the Shariah principles is wide and ever-expanding. He has called for a comprehensive and well-defined programme for prospective mujtahids which would combine training in both the traditional and modern legal disciplines. And in this regard, I must says that the International Islamic University should be well-poised to take up such a challenge.

    Thank you.

    Speech by Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim at The Ismail Faruqi Award Presentation Ceremony, International Islamic University Malaysia on the 28th of February 1995

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

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Ralph Braibanti, Duke University

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

    He placed great emphasis on the concept of Tawhid.This Arabic word may be translated many ways in English. Among them are unity, union, fusion, belief in the unity of God – Ed. One of his latest articles, “Tawhid: The Quintessence of Islam” appeared in the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies VIII (Summer 1985), an issue of which I was guest editor. “Tawhid,” he there asserted, “is the primeval source determining all phenomena of Islamic civilization.”

    Its simplest expression was the constantly reiterated conviction of the “unicity” of God, which he believed to be most vividly expressed in Islam and to be obscured by trinitarianism in Christianity and by Judaism’s emphasis on Old Testament prophesy. This deep and abiding emphasis on the central doctrine of Tawhid is evidenced by his translation of Kitab Al Tawhid by Shaykh Muhammad Ibn’ Abd al Wahhab, the influential 18th century Arabian reformer who, as the leading religious teacher of Arabia, joined forces with Muhammad Ibn Saud. This merger of the sacerdotal and the secular made possible the modern state of Saudi Arabia.

    Isma’il al-Faruqi’s little-known and sparsely distributed translation of 191 pages was published in 1979 under auspices of the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, produced by the Holy Koran Publishing House in Beirut and Damascus, and printed in Stuttgart, West Germany. In the introduction to this translation, Professor al-Faruqi encapsulated his own views: “The liberated Muslim mind therefore is neither secularist nor does it have to abandon the spirit to achieve advantage in the world of matter. The spirit itself moves it to gain that advantage; Religion itself commands it to be critical, reasonable and empirical, in the highest sense of these terms.”

    Tawhid, he believed, is made manifest by the ummah — the commonwealth of Muslims — one billion strong scattered over the surface of the earth. Correlative with these beliefs was his disdain for any comparative approach which focused on the different cultural manifestations of “folk” Islam as it encountered and was modified in practice by competing older faiths such as Hinduism in India and Indonesia, Zoroastrianism in Iran, and the Pharaonic-Coptic tradition in Egypt.

    He insisted that this attention to differences detracted from the paramountcy of universal doctrinal unity — especially the pristinity and immutability of the Holy Qur’an. This doctrinal unity was greater than that found in any other religion. It endured in large measure because of the sacred nature of Arabic as the unchanged language of the Holy Qur’an. For this reason, he put great emphasis on Arab civilization and on its preservation as a continuing fountainhead of Islam.

    I had many long talks on these subjects while taking vigorous walks with Isma’il when we were together at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Conference Center at Lake Como in August, 1975. His frequent visits and work in such diverse cultural locales did not weaken his views on these issues. His views were those of an “orthodox” Sunni, whose position was respected by Maulana Maudoodi of Pakistan, the Rabitat al-Alam al-Islarni of Mecca, Al-Azhar University of Cairo, the Ministry of Auqaf of Jordan, and leading religious authorities of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

    In his lectures, these ideas and others on Islam were often expressed with such eloquence and force that listeners construed them as being rigid orthodoxy bordering on militancy. Such an interpretation could only be made by those unaccustomed to hearing a firmly-committed Muslim, learned and articulate, certain of the divine origin of the Holy Qur’an, the rectitude of the Sunnah and the finality (seal) of the Holy Prophet. His expository style was not one of deliberate provocation, confrontation or proselytism. Such techniques were not in his character. Nor did the firmness of his commitment to Islam mean that he was antagonistic to the other two Abrahamic religions. On the contrary, he had formally studied Judaism and Christianity, respected them both and understood the relationships among all three faiths.

    Washington Report, August 11, 1986, p. 10

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

    Reading Time: 6 minutesFrom Chapter 4: “The Romantic Relapse of Europe” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Russian Pogroms

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

    The Enlightenment never took root in Russia. Enlightenment ideas relevant to science, to trade and industry, did. These ideas mixed with deep mystical hopes for national restoration and produced the Europeanising industrialisation of Peter the Great. The outcome of this nineteenth century process was a surge of “Mother Russia” feeling coupled with a secularising will to progress. As to the Jews who up till then were living as strange aliens in city and village, the surge could only lead to their Russification. The movement produced some strong advocates — Peretz Smolenskin, Leo Pinsker, etc. — to persuade the Jews to russify themselves — a transformation as difficult to achieve for the Russian Jews, as it was for Russian Christians to promote perseverently.

    The main reason why the Enlightenment proved to be a very indigestible novelty was the unpreparedness of the Russian mind. Russian experience was radically different from that of Western Europe. At last as far as the intelligentsia is concerned, if not the majority of the people, the Russian Church was as guilty as the Catholic Church in the exercise of her dominion. That is why the forces of progress could countenance neither courtship nor alliance with the Church. Moreover, the Church – saw – and did so rightly – that the new movement for progress threatened her own power and therefore did everything it could to oppose and retard it. That is why the new movement leaned farther away from the Church, toward secularism. Furthermore, Christian Russia had no tradition of religious reform, no tradition of Renaissance, scholastic, Cartesian or Enlightenment rationalism. Whatever Enlightenment ideas the Russians of the nineteenth century had were borrowed from Western Europe. And since the whole of Napoleonic Europe was pitted against Russia, the borrowed ideas had to be adopted if and only after they have been fused into the overall “Russia” feeling. As for the Jews, the overwhelming majority of them were, like their Christian neighbors, still living in the crass ignorance of the Dark Ages. It was as if modernity had suddenly burst upon them. It is not surprising therefore that they neither understood nor accepted the Christians’ half-hearted emancipation of them. The event of modernism was dazzling to both Christian and Jew.

    This context explains why the Russian Christian’s demand for Russification was not an “invitation,” not an “emancipation,” but rather an ultimatum. When heeded, it brought quick results, as when Jews quickly rose to highest rank in the service of Czar and country. But when it was received with hesitancy, no time was lost in patient acculturation. The Enlightenment’s ideas of tolerance and reasonableness were quickly transformed into resentment and hate. In little time, even as the Jews were russifying themselves, the most violent pogroms broke out against them without apparent reason or cause. This sad Russian outcome was equally that of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe, but not for the same reason.

    B. European Persecution

    1. The Ideational Groundwork

    Ever since it triumphed over paganism, the Christian Church had stood for the ideal of the universal community. It expanded itself as religion as well as wordly dominion under the aegis of that ideal; and, in fact, it was well suited toward that objective ever since Jesus had decreed: “God is indeed capable out of these stones to raise children unto Abraham” and Paul, “By one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free”Matthew 3:19; I Corinthians 12:13. The Reformation gave the coup de grace to Christianity’s ideal of the universal community. In fact, the Reformation was the result of a storm which, gathering long before, was only triggered by Luther’s proclamation of the 95 theses. The numerous peoples of Europe rallied around their princes in order to shake off the authority of the Catholic Church, an authority which had become a “Byzantine” yoke, full of corruption, full of evil, bearing little or no resemblance to the universalist ideal it claimed itself to be.

    Instead of this worthy Christian ideal, the emerging Protestant leadership tilted toward Congregationalism to justify its breaking away from the Mother Church. But Congregationalism itself needed justification, and this was sought in something outside the Church when ecclesiastical history could not be found to support it. The Renaissance had already impressed the leadership with naturalism and the road lay open for a justification of the new religious autonomy with values intrinsic to the congregation as a distinct and separate human unit. These feelings constitute the germs out of which nationalism grew in Europe. In its prince and dynasty, each new autonomous Protestant congregation began to see a focus around which the people could rally to form the “nation” as a super-entity destined to carry out a “holy” mission of self-realisation. This contributed heavily to the growth of the centralised monarchies, and, in turn, gave the social cohesion necessary to keep the burgeoning European city together and its population attached to the “national” government. European nationalism grew as the universalism of the Church receded; and, by the end of the eighteenth century, it was strong and mature enough to give the Enlightenment and its political offspring — the world-order of the French Revolution — the most violent counter-action.

    The Enlightenment preached its rationalism to Europeans already committed to Christian dogma as well as to Renais¬sance naturalism. These were too ingrained in Europe’s consciousness for pure rationalism to succeed. Hence, practically all Enlightenment thinkers compromised rationalism to make room for both the Christian faith and naturalism. If this compromise could not be effected on the level of pure reason, then it was done on that of practical reason and judgment. Immanuel Kant, the prince of the Enlightenment, lectured on geography and international relations where universal rationalism did not stop him from predicating a “natural” inferiority to the Asian races, nor from asserting that to be black is an argument. Instead of purging it of such compromise or aberration and hence making the Enlightenment more viable and stronger, the next generation of Europeans suspected and repudiated it altogether. Theirs was a failure of nerve; for they could not countenance what lay at the end of the road the Enlightenment opened, namely rationalist repudiation of Christian dogma along with the Church’s authority which the Reformation had attacked, and universalist repudiation of ethnocentrism in favor of a world order founded on the equality of all mankind. Against the Enlightenment therefore, they levelled argument after argument which sought to redefine man in terms of ethnic history, language and race. Blood or life, the earth with its plains, mountains, rivers and forests, and a vague past in the myths and legends of the Middle Ages, became the elements out of which the new ideology was constituted.

    Evidently, such elements are not properly conceived by reason. They are the object of feeling and human instinct. A worldview built upon reason has no room for them; but one built upon them cannot only satisfy the trend toward naturalism (what could be more empirical than nature?) but allow plenty of room for accommodation of Christian dogma on the experiential basis of immediate feeling. The genius of Friedrich Schleiermacher was one of exchanging a crumbling foun¬dation of the faith — universal reason — for the solid one of per¬sonal experience, of ineffable feeling. The “Romantic” revolution was in full swing. The arts — literature, painting, sculpture and music — were already filling the European mind with visions of a new order in which each ethnic group saw itself as the vortex of human history, a manifestation of the absolute on earth. Pregnant with the hopes engendered by a century of rationalism and universalist humanism, the conscience of Europe welcomed the Revolutionary army of Europe as a genuine “emancipating” force. But it turned cynical when that force disclosed the ugly head of France’s imperialism, and surrendered itself with spite to its romantic enemy. The national wars which engulfed Europe in the sequel were the insane attempts of a sick man trying to cure himself of his disease with more of the same.

    How could the Jew fit into this new order? Under a universalism based on reason rather than religious affiliation, the Jew was given a place where he could contribute to the public welfare, the commonwealth or universal utility. But under a nationalism based on the romantic feeling of unity, of sharing in a mystical experience of common history, of communion with a particular “mother earth,” of participation in a Chris¬tian tradition of values, he was most definitely an alien. The European Jew himself oft led and contributed to this romanticism, for its affinity with an age-old ethnocentrism of his own, the “Chosen People” complex. But his service only accelerated his own doom. For in the eye of the European Christian, the forces of a new rejection of the Jew as a foreign body were gathering momentum. It was only a matter of time before these would explode into political action. The transformation brought about by romanticism presented the European to himself as rooted in a given blood and soil and grown under a legacy of Christian values. Whether believer, secularist or atheist, he acknowledged the legacy to be constitutive, regard substance, nor to return them to their ghettos devoid of civic liberties, but of bringing about a “final solution” to their problematic existence in Europe.