Ismail al Faruqi: Selected Essays

Published by: Herndon: IIIT, 2018, 97pp. ISBN: 9781565645981.

Professor Isma[il Raji al-Faruqi was murdered in 1986 leaving a legacy which continues to influence discourses of various kinds throughout the world. He was an authority on Islam, comparative religion as well as a talented scholar who was brilliant in exercising his formidable logic and rational arguments on highly complex subject matters. He maintained an uncompromising stance in the adoption of a tawhidi perspective in evaluating sophisticated disciplines. Importantly, his deep and insightful analysis led him to conclude that the crisis of the modern world was a crisis of knowledge which could only be solved through a new synthesis of knowledge in an Islamic epistemological framework to spur Muslims to be active participants in intellectual life and contribute to it from an Islamic perspective.

These three essays begin with a brief biography of al-Faruqi (1921-1986) where readers are informed that his scholarship covered the whole spectrum of Islamic studies, including the study of religion, Islamic thought, approaches to knowledge, history, culture, education, interfaith dialogue, aesthetics, ethics, politics, economics, science and women issues.

The first essay tackles the problem of the metaphysical status of values in the Western and Islamic traditions. To begin with, al-Faruqi acknowledged that, in the last hundred years, the problem of the metaphysical status of value has made considerable strides in the Western tradition. Immanuel Kant tried to establish the a priori nature of the moral law and as a “fact of reason”. From this position arose two traditions. One carried the Kantian insight deeper and further whereas the other attempted to establish a different insight as it denied Kantian epistemology altogether. These are the idealist and empiricist traditions respectively.