The Com­mu­ni­ca­tor : The Dia­logue at Its Best

M. Tariq Quraishi

Dur­ing his years at McGill, Dr. Ismail al-Faruqi​’s tal­ent as a dis­putant was rec­og­nized by his peers. His abil­i­ty to pur­sue the oppo­nen­t’s argu­ment to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion was aug­ment­ed by his mas­tery of the rhetoric. The way he con­duct­ed him­self dur­ing his encoun­ters with peo­ple of oth­er faiths can be seen in the fol­low­ing excerpt from his dia­logue with Bish­op Ken­neth Cragg and Father Michael Fitzger­ald at Chem­besy on June 26, 1976.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cragg : But that which in Bud­dhism is anti­thet­i­cal to Islam and to ratio­nal­ism is not sim­ply chaff mixed with wheat, if I may put it that way ; it is the very wheat of Bud­dhism. By your analy­sis here it must then have been a false prophe­cy which brought the Bud­dhist to that belief.

al-Faruqi : I won’t say a false prophe­cy. I would say that a true rev­e­la­tion through an authen­tic prophet has been thor­ough­ly falsified.

Fitzger­ald : But by which his­tor­i­cal cri­te­ria is the ​“true” prophet to be iden­ti­fied ? And where is the ​“true” prophe­cy of which you speak with­in Buddhism ?

al-Faruqi : I don?t know, but it can be researched ; the fact that I assume it to be there at the ori­gin is at least a good step in the direc­tion of ecu­meni­cal tolerance.

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

al-Faruqi : No. At one time it was known. But then lat­er on it became fal­si­fied as the Hebrew mes­sage became fal­si­fied, and the Chris­t­ian mes­sage was fal­si­fied.Islam­ic Da’wah : Its Nature and Demands. Amer­i­can Trust Pub­li­ca­tions, Indi­anapo­lis, 1986. pp. 11 – 12.