American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 13 

Meta-Religion : 
Towards A Critical World Theology 

Ismuil RQji a1 Faruqi* 

I. FIVE STAGES OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION 

Religion has been defined as the experience of a reality that is assumed 
to be ultimate as well as personal, thus making the experience an encounter? 
This modem definition is not without merit; for in religion, the object of ex- 
perience is indeed regarded as ultimate and in most cases as a commanding 
person. It is inadequate, however, because it does not specify the experience. 
In order to fulfill the meaning of religion, one has to add that the ultimate 
reality experienced must be apprehended and understood, expressed and pro- 
claimed, its commandments acquiesced in and responded to with individual 
and collective action. 

Religion therefore is the most important constituent of man’s humanity. 
First, it includes the vision of reality and the articulation of that vision, its 
expression in concepts for the understanding and percepts for the imagina- 
tion. This vision and its expression have constituted most of man’s intellec- 
tual output throughout history. Second, it includes acquiescence in the com- 
manding nature of Ultimate Reality and actualization of its commandments, 
and hence includes most of man’s subjective conditions and personalist values. 
Third, since the commandments have as their goal the actualization of the 
highest good, religion includes most or all of man’s action as it relates to 

*The late Dr. Isma’il R. al Faruqi, founding FYesident of the International Institute of Islamic 
Thought and the Islamic Institute of Advanced Studies, was Professor of Islamic Studies at 
Temple University, Philadelphia. He was the first president of the Association of Muslim 
Social Scientists. He taught at McGill University, Syracuse University, the Central Institute 
of Islamic Research, and Al Azhar University; and served as consultant in Islamic studies for 
universities throughout the Muslim World. He was the author of over 25 wrks  on Islam, Chris- 
tianity, Judaism and other world religions. 

Joachim Wach, Ihe Compamtive Study ofReligion. (New York Columbia University Press, 
1963) p. 30 ff. 



14 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

himself, to other men, and to nature. Evidently, the study of man’s religion 
is that of all humans, of their legacies of thought and action, of human history. 

The fact that the object of experience is ultimate implies understanding 
of it as transcendent in both the theoretical (that is, metaphysical and 
epistemological) and the practical (valuational, ethical) senses. On the 
metaphysical level, Ultimate Reality is perceived as the first cause, or princi- 
ple of sufficient reason, which explains all kings and all events. On the ax- 
iological level, it is perceived 8s the last end, or principle, which justifies 
all beings and all events. Its relevance therefore is total. All aspects of reality 
and history are understood as effects and instruments of the activity of a be- 
ing perceived in experience as Ultimate Reality. 

Under these terms, likewise, religion is the very essence and core of culture. 
For the content of religion is the lens through which all understanding and 
thinking take place, the realm of meditation and contemplation, of admira- 
tion and adoration. It is the sublime aesthetic expression. Finally, religion 
is the essence and core of civilization in that it is the gmund of all decisions 
and actions, the ultimate explanation of civilization with all its inventions and 
artifacts, its social, political, and economic systems, its past and future pro- 
mise in history. For it constitutes the spirit of which the facets of civilization 
are the concrete manikstations. Though in an earlier age religious ideas andor 
practices were at the center of human activities, the realization that religion 
lies at the center of culture and civilization is recent. It came about only when 
an explanation of history as an integral unity of all its facets and constituents 
was sought, a need which did not arise before the modem period. And yet 
it was in the modem period itself that religion and its role were subjected 
to the greatest misunderstanding, as we shall see below. 

A. STAGE 1. CLASSICAL ANTZQUZTY 

Although the greatest care must have been given to the indoctrination 
of priests and to their training to perform the requisite functions, classical 
antiquity knows little or nothing of the study of one feligion by the adherents 
of another. The followers of the other religion may have been enemies, vassals, 
or allies, but they were all certainly strangers. Their religious doctrines and 
practices were inseparable from their identity as aliens, or more properly “bar- 
barians,” and were not worthy of study. It was only in the sixth century B.C., 
when Greek thinkers had lost faith in their own religion and began to criticize 
its incoherence and false claims and to condemn the immorality of its gods, 
that some tolerance and curiosity for other religions developed. In the first 
decades of the sixth century, Thales denied that the Greek gods had any authori- 
ty; Anaximander declared the sun and the moon to be not the deities the Greeks 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 15 

had thought them to be, but balls of fire; and Xenophanes, as the exemplar 
of skepticism, taught that all religious claims were unfounded.2 Two centuries 
later, when the notables had nearly completely lost their faith in the Olym- 
pian deities and their religion, Herodotus (484425 B.C.) could give accounts 
of the religions of other peoples (Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Persians) with 
some measure of detachment or objectivity. Even then, Herodotus painted 
pictures of these alien religions in the likeness of the Greek religion and its 
gods, indeed identifying Zeus, Apollo, and Hephaistos with Amon, Horus, 
and Ptah, respectively. In the period hllowing Alexander, the fusion of ~~lqyons 
and cultures and the general skepticism of the elite enabled Berosus, a Babylo- 
nian, Megasthenes, a Syrian, and Manetho, an Egyptian, to produce similar 
works on their and other peoples’ religions reflecting the same skepticism and 
syncretism. 

The initial antagonism to the religions of others of the earlier ages per- 
sisted. If it was not dictated by the attitude of faith, it was done so by a com- 
plex of superiority of one’s faith or unfaith to the faith studied or reported. 
Cicero’s De natura deorum, Varro’s Antiquitates rerum divimnun, StraWs 
references to the Celtic Druids and Indian Brahmins in his Geog9hy, lhcitus‘s 
discussion of Teutonic religion in his Germania, and Euhemerus’s Hiem 
anagmphe all found something to transform into classical form and cite ap- 
provingly, and much to contrast therewith and cite condemningly. 

B. STAGE 2. JUDAEO-CHRISTIANITY 

The religion of the Hebrew patriarchs, and of their states of Israel and 
Judah down to the Assyrian invasion which blotted out the former, developed 
with awareness of other religions. The patriarchs regarded them as legitimate 
for their adherents. If the Old Testament reports are to be trusted, Solomon 
must at one time have thought a combination of Hebrew and Canaanite religion 
(and deities) possible. At later times, however, when the existence of Judah 
was threatened, the other religions and their gods were severely condemned 
and any Hebrew participation in them was prohibited. Since insecurity has 
been the hallmark of Jewish existence ever since, and because all the materials 
we have about Judaism date from the post-Exilic period and went through 
a sieve of Jewish hatred for and fear of all goyim (non-Jews), we may 
characterize the attitude of Judaism toward the other religions as one of hatred, 
fear, and a false complex of superiority or election. The other religions, their 
gods and rituals, were given the worst possible presentation, the most em- 

* Gilbert Murray, Rve Stages of Greek Religion. (Garden City, I W  Doubleday and Co, 1951) 
p. 73 ff. 



16 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

phatic condemnation and derision. To Canaan, Egypt, Moab, Mom, Babylon, 
and Assyria, the redactors of the Old Testament text reserved the worst possible 
abuse. For the Jew, any consideration of these religions was “adulterous,” a 
piece of “a-whoring” after the other gods, to use the expression of Hoseah. 

Christianity inherited this Jewish attitude and saw in the religions of 
Greece, Rome, and the Near East what Judaism saw in its neighbors. For 
both Judaism and Christianity were formed in an atmosphere of struggle against 
overwhelming odds, a struggle lasting for centuries during which the religions 
gained and crystallized their doctrines and world-views. 

The only religion on which Christianity looked with any kind of favor 
was Judaism. But it interpreted it so radically as to transkrm it into something 
else in order to make of it a prepurutio evungelicu, an Old Testament in con- 
trast to which Christianity could establish itself as a “New Testament” and 
a “New Israel.” Consequently, the on-going, living Judaism that did not dissolve 
into Christianity and all other religions were evil, demonic, to be utterly re- 
jected and vanq~ished.~ The gnostic theologians of Alexandria were less in- 
clined to total condemnation than the Semitic or Roman Christians. Some 
of them, particularly Clement and Origen, saw the gods of other religions 
as “fallen angels,” “evil spirits,” “wild beasts,”‘ and the god of Judaism as 
“Demi~rge.”~ If they saw any good in those religions, they conceived of it 
as the work or presence of the logos spermutikos of the Holy Trinity.6 

This attitude of hatred and condemnation of the other religions on the 
part of both Judaism and Christianity, including their relation to each other, 
has persisted for millennia. In Judaism, the same attitude continued to this 
century, when a handful of Jews who had lost faith in the Holy, and regarded 
Judaism merely as an ethnicity and a political program or platform, began 
to see in the person of Jesus a rabbi bent on self-purification, altruism, and 
charity (a far cry from the third person of a holy trinity). Also in this cen- 
tury, some Christians began to see Judaism as a religion justified in itself, 
but reduced to an ethic subsumable under the Christian dispensation. The 
other Christians, for whom Christianity had not lost its essence [namely, the 
mysteries of Trinity, Incarnation, and Redemption, the paradoxes of peccatism 
(sin and fall) and saviorism (salvation as fait accompli) and of the church 
as Christ’s “body” being the only avenue to salvation] continue to see in Judaism 
not a religion dejure but the mere preparation for religion which became 
obsolete with the advent of Christianity. 

I Corinthians 10:20. 
* Clement of Alexandria, Exhortutions I, II. 

Justin Martyre, Apology I, 16:14; Ireneus, Against Heresies, I, 24:l-2. This apologete of 
Christianity identified Socrates as a Christian following his gnostic assertion that Jesus was 
logos (Mind or reason) and Socrates participated in Jesus as rational faculty. 

Clement of Alexandria, Stromathais I, 13. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 17 

When Islam came to the scene in the seventh century, Christian hatred 
and condemnation combined with fear of Islam’s expansion and conversion 
of Christians. Already, the loss of the Eastern and African shores to Islam 
and its march on Byzantium, Spain, and France produced a terror at once 
political-military and religious. Christians poured out their genius in 
vituperating and vilifying Islam, its God, its Prophet, and its scripture. They 
sent out their men to fight it in the Crusades (numerous campaigns ranging 
from 1095 to 1270) and in the colonialist expansions of the last two centuries. 
Their condemnation of Islam continues to this day, though for some of them 
the ground and motivation for such antagonism may have shifted from religion 
and faith to racism and economics.7 

C. STAGE 3. MODERNITY SINCE THE ENLZGHTENMENT 

The Enlightenment removed religion as principle and base of identity 
and set up reason in its place. Ethics and utility, rather than creed and piety, 
became the criteria of human worth. If religious dicta or divine command- 
ments did not agree with the dictates of reason, all the worse for religion. 
This defiance was generated and enhanced by the discoveries of astronomy 
and other natural sciences which, stimulated by the achievements of Islam, 
took a sharp turn upward toward great breakthroughs of their own. The 
magisterium which the Church held for a thousand years finally began to crum- 
ble. It received a tremendous blow in the Reformation; and the successful 
challenges of the sGientists, despite the burning at the stake of Hugo Brache 
and the terror of Galileo, pushed it further away from human affairs. 

While most of the great mouthpieces of the Enlightenment were Chris- 
tians, they derided religion and its men, permitting it a role only if it fell 
“within the boundaries of reason alone,” as the famous book of Kant indicated 
in its title. Whereas Descartes, a century earlier, used reason to prove the 
existence of God, the princes of the Enlightenment reduced its importance 
and regarded it, as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd had done, as necessary for the 
poor in spirit, to prevent them from doing evil and orient them toward some 
virtue; they stood above such plebeian need. Behind this demotion of religion 
stood the epistemology of rationalism under whose criteria the claims or 
religion were found wanting. Only a psychological - rather, pastoral - role 
may therefore be played by religion. 

This tyranny of reason did not last long. Soon the forces of skepticism, 
having been victorious over the Church and all that it stood for, rampaged 

For a comprehensive survey of Christian thinking and attitude to Islam and its people, see 
the works of Norman Daniels and Jacques Waardenburg. 



18 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences &I. 3, No. 1, 1986 

again, this time under the pdssure of rising European particularism. Reason 
is by nature opposed to particularism; it loves the universal. When it became 
a movement during the Enlightenment, it resulted in the Napoleonic unifica- 
tion of Europe (or the attempt to unify it) and the emancipation of the Jews 
from their ghettoes and separate identities. Europe, however, was in no mood 
for universalism. The development of navigation, industry, and W e  had whet- 
ted its appetite for world dominion. But this can only be justified by na- 
tionalism, a brand of particularism that can be justified by feeling alone. 
Romanticism was the result. It dethroned reason and set feeling in its place 
as the criterion of truth and value. The genius of Schleiermacher, the greatest 
thmlogiag of the nineteenth century, was to raflsom Christianity from the abyss 
in which the enlightenment had thrown it. He gave it a new foundation, namely, 
feeling, or experience; and he thus enabled it to be honored as the highest 
expression of the people’s common feeling. He subtitled his major work “Ad- 
dress to the Despisers of Religion” and invited them to adhere to Christianity 
because to be Christian is to share in the treasury of common feelings and 
experiences, in short, to be “folkish.” 

Skepticism did not stop at “shared feeling” or “common experience.” 
The shared commonality or uniformity of the group was elevated in status 
to an arbitrary entity, formed by an arbitrary organism, the state. Though 
centered on some natural characteristics such as language, territory, physical 
traits, and social customs, these are never necessary. They are the accidents 
of history. So, while group sharing remains the fact and mainstay of roman- 
ticism, and hence of nationalism as well, epistemologically it cannot rest but 
on the ineffable experience of the individual. This is epistemological in- 
dividualism; in plain English, relativism, Protagorean in foundation and cultural 
in manifestation. Of necessity, it implies denial of religious knowledge, denial 
of transcendent reality, denial of the Absolute, in short, denial of God as tradi- 
tional Christianity and Judaism have known him. 

Little wonder therefore that those Western thinkers who were not, pro- 
perly speakmg, theologians, sought explanation of the phenomenon of religion 
in the stresses and distresses of individuals and groups. The genesis of Chris- 
tianity in the messianism of Isaiah, the worldly despair of the Jews in and 
after their Exile in Babylon, and its rise among the slaves of the Roman Em- 
pire, and the struggle to upturn the virtu of the Roman soldiers and replace 
their masterly values with those of the humble slaves - these were turned 
into the living contexts explaining the pressms to be Christian. Many a thinker, 
such as Feuerbach, Freud, William James, John Dewey, Fromm, and Jung 
saw religion as an effective prop and savior from a predicament which, if 
not called original sin, is assumed to be man’s existential plight. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 19 

D. STAGE 4. CONTEMHMtARY APPROACHES To THE STUDY 
OF RELZGZON 

It was with this attitude towards Christianity - their own religion - 
as background that Western thought was thrust by developments in industry, 
maritime trade, and the resultant colonial expansion upon the religions of Asia 
and Africa. Darwinism had provided Western thinkers with a methodology 
which, assuming differences from Europe to be signs of primitiveness, led 
them to seek in the phenomena of other peoples the “original sources,” the 
“primordial forms” of a religious development whose apex was their 
Christianity. 

A number of approaches to the study of religion developed, and they 
continue to have their advocates today in every department of comparative 
studies: the anthropological, the sociological, the psychological, the 
philosophical, the theological, and the phenomenological. The anthropological 
method focused on the religions of the primitives as reported by direct obser- 
vation of present practices, andor the confessions and descriptions of the living 
adherents. It sought to understand them as functions of human conditions af- 
fected by the natural environment and the life of the ethnic entity in question. 
Anthropology is bound by evolutionist axioms as well as by an epistemology 
that recognizes only the behavioral data as valid, whether verbal or actional. 
Its emphasis on the ethnic entity is so exaggerated that it regards any analysis 
not based on it as abstractionist. Ethnicity, it holds, makes the man. The 
sociological approach places the emphasis on the social group and understands 
religion as a hctor, constructive or destructive, uniting or separating, integmting 
or disrupting, classifying or distinguishing humans in their group member- 
ship. Like anthropology, it recognizes as data only the behavioral and the em- 
pirical. The psychological method places its emphasis on the internal state 
of the subject and the determinants that affect it in its purely subjective mo- 
ment. It understands religion as states of consciousness as such, depressive 
in case of insecurity or need, projective in case of desire and hope, ecstatic 
in case of fulfillment, and so forth. Its empiricism and behaviorism guard 
it when, in social psychology, the discipline seeks to describe group con- 
sciousness as an entity sui generis, causing it to fall back upon the hard data 
of the given individual. 

The historical method depends upon all these to provide it with its 
data, in which it seeks to uncover patterns of change which it can then establish 
as applicable in other or similar situations. Its axiom is evolutionist, holding 
that every reality comes to be what it is because it was what it was. History 
being a selfdetermining process, its explanation is the uncovering of its earlier 
stages with as many of its determining factors as possible. 



20 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

Finally, the theologians of Christianity, advocates of the theological 
method, avowedly declared Christianity to be the only true religion, the only 
criterion and norm of religious truth, and hence the judge of all other religions. 
The missionaries and Orientalists went out to study the other religions as if 
they were enemy territory, to reconnoiter enemy defenses, to probe for weakness 
in anticipation of the onslaught. The philosophers, for their part, were not 
as blunt as the theologians to declare off hand that their brand or “ism” is 
the only right one. Standing either behind the wall of skepticism as to the 
very knowability of truth, or behind that of an absolutism no less Western 
and dated than the stance of the theologians, they criticized the claims of 
religions concerning the world, divine providence, freedom, resurrection, judg- 
ment, and paradise and hell. 

In an attempt to avoid all these shortcomings at once, a number of 
students of comparative religion sought a different method and approach to 
their materials. Taking their clue from Edmund Husserl in his attempt to avoid 
the pitfalls of idealism and realism, they thought that it is possible to reach 
an eidetic vision of a religion (that is, an understanding of its essence, its 
structuring or ordering principles) by suspending one’s own categories and 
prejudgments, beholdmg the phenomena of religion as they are and, as it were, 
allowing them to speak for themselves. This will to objectivity was genuine; 
for it was born out of disgust with all previous studies of religion, especially 
the philosophical and the theological. Its candidness pushed its advocates to 
call the approach Religionsw‘ssenschaft, or science of religion, and to pour 
their energies on the sheer collection, classification, and establishment of the 
data. They prescribed epoche to the student of religion, that is, the suspen- 
sion of all principles and norms not derived from the data, and the constant 
reexamination of one’s understanding of the essence of a religion in light of 
the data of that religion. Without doubt, the phenomemology of religion is 
the highest point the academic study of religion has reached in the West. 

E. STAGE 5. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY 
OF RELZGZON 

The phenomenological study of religion, however, is not without limita- 
tions. It consists of two branches: reportage, or the collection of data; and 
construction of meaning, wholes, or the systematization of data. 

1. Reportage, or the Collection of Data 

The history of religions has known two influences that sought to 
reduce its jurisdiction by limiting the data that constitute its subject matter: 
one was the attempt to redefine the religious datum in a restricted and narrow 



Ismail a1 Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 21 

manner; and the other was an isolationist policy observed vis-a-vis Judaism, 
Christianity and Islam. 

The attempt to limit the jurisdiction of phenomena of religions by 
giving the religious datum a narrow definition led to theories that have tried 
to isolate the religious element and to identify it in terms of “the religious,” 
“the holy,” “the sacredl’ The problem these theories faced was primarily the 
reductionist’s analysis of the religious phenomenon into something else that 
would lend itself more readily to his kind of investigation. This well-intended 
movement had the effect of limiting the scope of the investigation. If the 
religious is a unique, irreducible, and identifiable element in human life, the 
religious discipline should aim at it first and last. The other elements of which 
human life is supposedly composed may be the objects of other disciplines 
and they may be studied by the history of religions only as relata affecting 
or affected by the uniquely religious element. 

Among Western phenomemologists, where the act of faith has been 
held to consist in the confrontation of the person with God in his most per- 
sonal moment when everything or almost everything that is non-self has been 
detached from consciousness, the discovery of “the religious” as a unique ele- 
ment fell on fertile ground and was taken as a matter of course. Today, for- 
tunately, the relevance of God to every aspect and element of space-time is 
b e i i  rediscovered by Western Christendom, and the repudiation of an isolated, 
unique, religious holy or sacred is being prepared for. In its place, the 
religiousness of everything is being discovered, a religiousness that does not 
consist in the thing’s being a mere relatum. Islam has for centuries been teachug 
the religiousness of all space-time, of all life. 

Not the personal act of faith, nor the social act, nor the whole of 
space-time and life as relata, but the whole of life and space-time as such 
should constitute the data of phenomenologists of religions. Every human act 
is an integral part of the religious complexus. Religion itself, however, is not 
an act (the act of faith, or encounter with God, or of participation), but a 
dimension of every act. It is not a thing but a perspective with which every 
thing is invested. It is the highest and most important dimension; for it alone 
takes cognizance of the act as personal, as standing within the religio-cultural 
context in which it has taken place, as well as within the total context of space- 
time. For religion, the act includes all the inner determinations of the person 
as well as all its effects in space-time. And it is this relation of the whole 
act to the whole space-time that constitutes the religious dimension. Everythmg 
then is subject matter for the study of religion. The cultic and dogmatic have 
too long monopolized without challenge the definition of the religious; and 
the addition of the scriptural, of the theory of origin and destiny of man and 
cosmos, of the moral and of the aesthetic, and finally, of “the sacred” or “the 
holy” is certainly not enough. Every human act is religious in that it involves 



22 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

the inner persoh, the member of society, and the whole cosmos all at once, 
and all being, whether so-called sacred or so-called p robe ,  is the "religious." 
It was an impoverishment of the realm of the religious to limit it, as it were, 
to a unique act of man, to a unique aspect of his life, or to the sacred as op- 
posed to the prohe .  The first two views are not compatible with our modem 
field theory of meaning, of value or of causation, where the particular is not 
a unique element but a point in space-time at which converge and from which 
diverge an infinite number of elements in all directions.* The third denies 
half and more of the realities of the religious experience of mankind. 

This restoration to the religious of its universal scope and relevance 
widens the horizon of the phenomenology of religion. Henceforth, it should 
include every branch of human knowledge and pursuit. For its purposes, 
mankind may still be divided into Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, 
and other, but the whole history, culture, and civilization of the Christians, 
the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Muslims, and so on, should be its object. 

The phenomenology of religion had its jurisdiction further curtail- 
ed in another direction. While, theoretically, it was supposed to be a history 
of all religions, it tumed out to be in reality a history of "Asiatic" and "primitive" 
religions, on the one hand, and of the the extinct religions of antiquity, on 
the other. By far the overwhelming majority of the literature of the library 
of comparative religion has been devoted to them. Judaism, Christianity, and 
Islam always managed somehow to escape. This is not to plead that one group 
of materials is better, richer, or more important than another. Primitive and 
ancient religions may very well hold for us many great lessons. But they are 
far more impenetrable than the other group because of obstacles of language, 
of remoteness of time, of wide difference between their categories and ours. 
The truth that cannot be gainsaid here is that the comparativist has so far 
found the remoteness of primitive and ancient religions far more reassuring 
than the explosive character of the living world religions. Hence, he has been 
far bolder to collect the data of the former, to systematize, generalize about, 
and judge them than the latter. He seems to have shied away, whether in awe 
or in panic, from handling the data of the living religions. 

2, Construction of Meaning - Wholes or the Systematization of Data 

This gmit mass of data, once identified and collected, must be 
systematized, or ordered, in three different operations: 

a. First, it should be classified in a way that fulfills the organiza- 
tional needs of a modern inquiry. Under each headi i  the relevant data should 

* Ushenko, Andrew Paul, Ihe field lkory of Meuning. (AM Arbor: The University of 
Michigan h s s ,  1958) p. 111 ff. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 23 

be so analyzed and related to one another as to reveal the nexus of ideas of 
which they are the embodiment. The organization of the material must enable 
the modem researcher to put under the lucid light of consciousness, quickly 
and certainly, the whole field of ideas and all the particular items therein that 
in any religion or aspect of a religion, constitute a single network or system 
of meanings. It should be topical as well as historical, and should endeavor 
to put at the disposal of the understanding a comprehensive picture of all the 
facts pertinent to all topics, periods, or groups within the religious culture 
under examination. In turn, these groups of data should be analyzed and related 
among themselves so as to disclose the essence of the religious culture as 
a whole. 

b. Second, the relations of each datum with the whole complexus 
of history to which it belongs should be shown and established for thought. 
Its origin must be discovered, and its growth and development, its crystalliza- 
tion, and, where necessary, its decay, misunderstanding, and fmal repudia- 
tion must be accurately traced. Developments of ideas, of institutions, of evalua- 
tions and discoveries, of human attitudes and deeds, have to be projected against 
the background of historical facts. For they did not develop in the abstract 
but in a given milieu, and a need for precisely that development must have 
been felt. The datum in question must have been meant either to serve or 
to combat that development. Equally, every one of these developments must 
have had a whole range of effects which must be brought within the field 
of vision to be systematized if the understanding of the given data, the given 
movement, or the given system of ideas is to be c~mplete.~ 

c. nird, the religious data thus classified and systematized ought 
to be distilled for their meanings, and these meanings should be elucidated 
and systematized in turn. That is to say, they should be related as meanings, 
and not as facts as in the first two steps of systematization, to the historical 
complexus so that the civilization as such becomes both a structured whole 
of meanings and a whole with a meaning. Every religious datum, whether 
it is an expression of an idea, an attitude or &ling-state, refers to something 
that is the content expressed, the meaning intuited or felt, the purpose realiz- 

~~ 

This has been well pointed out by Joseph M. Kitagawa in the opening essay on T h e  History 
of Religions in America" in lhe History ofRe1igim: Essays in M e ~ b g y ,  edited by himself 
and M. Eliade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) p. 26 where he says: '! . .One 
must study the historical development of a religion, in itself and in interaction with the culture 
and society. One must try to understand the emotional makeup of the religious wmmunity 
and its reaction or relation to the outside world. . .There must be added a religio-sociological 
analysis, in our sense of the term, the aim of which is to analyze the social background, to 
describe the structure and to ascertain the sociologically relevant implications of the religious 
movement ." 



24 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

ed or violated, or the object of inaction if no action whatever has taken place 
other than inaction. This something is a value. It i s  the meaning to which 
the religious datum is the human response, noetic, attitudinal, or actional. 
As the human response could not become intelligible without its relation to 
the complexi of history, it cannot be meaningful without its relation to value. 
The former is a planar relation; the latter is a relation in depth. Unless the 
plane of historical relations is seen against the background of and is related 
to values in a depth relation, the religious datum may never be grasped for 
what it really is!O 

In the discernment, analysis, and establishment of this depth rela- 
tion - the relation of “categorial existence” to “axiological being” or value 
- the history of religions meets serious perils and grave pitfalls. And it is 
true that a great number of comparative accounts of religions have failed in 
this requirement of constructing meaning - wholes out of the given religious 
data. But this failure is the failure of the investigator’s own effort. It is not 
an argument against the history of religions or its methodology, but against 
the investigator and his research. The pitfalls of exegesis, are reading into 
a religious datum something that is not there, or perceiving therein no value, 
or a value other than that which the adherent himself perceives. This con- 
stitutes, in most cases, the rejection of the religious wisdom of the adherents 
themselves. If a reconstruction meets the requisities of scholarship while at 
the same time the adherents of the religion in question find it meaningful 
and accept it as saying something to them about their own faith, surely it 
has passed all that can be reasonably required of the comparativist. This was 
essentially the insight of W. C. Smith.11 

Certainly, the application of the principle presents a number of 
serious practical difficulties: The consent of which adherents of the faith may 
be taken as proof, and how may such consent be expressed? Moreover, it 

lo To take an example from this author’s study of Christianity, (Christian Erhics: A Historical 
and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Idea. (Montreal, McGill University Press, 1967): 
“The Fall” or “Original Sin” is a datum of the Christian religion. We must first understand 
what it means discursively, by reading the definition and analyses of Hebraic and Jewish thinkers 
for the Old Testament precursors, and of Christian thinkers from the New Testament to Paul. 
Tillich. Having grasped the doctrinal development of the idea, we then relate it to the historical 
development of Christendom, showing how, in every stage, the Fall developed in answer to 
certain sociological and doctrinal developments. Thus systematized into a developing stream 
or complexi of ideas, each member of which is a network of a number of closely-relataed 
facts, this complex religious datum is then related in depth to the values which, at each stage 
of the development, the datum was meant to and actually did, serve. This last relation is usually 
more evident in the general literature of the civilization than in the strictly doctrinal statements. 
I1 =No statement about a religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religion’s believes 
(Smith, W. C., “Comparative Religion: Whither - And Why?”, Ihe History OfReligions: ETSUYS 
in Methmblogy, cit. supm, p. 42). 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 25 

must be at least theoretically possible that the adherents of a religion may 
have gone so far in interpreting their religion that they have missed its primeval 
essence, that they do not fmd it any longer meaningful. This is of course 
tantamount to their acquiring a new religion, despite the fact that the new 
may still be called by the name of the old; and Smith’s criterion cannot therefore 
be taken as a test of validity in the strict sense. Nonetheless, if we take it 
as a pedagogic principle, and ask the historian of religions to check his work, 
as it progresses, against the perspective of the adherents of the religion under 
investigation, we would have a check-and-balance technique to safeguard the 
.work against aberration. 

The principle governing the work of systematization is therefore 
that the categories under which the systematizing work should proceed must 
be innate to the pertinent religious culture investigated, not imposed thereon 
from the outside. The divisions constituting the various religious cultures 
must not be interchanged; the data of each must be classified, analyzed, and 
systematized not under categories alien to that religious culture, but under 
categories derived from it. Those Christian investigators of non-Christian 
religions who regard ritual law as self-sacrifice, as atonement or salvation; 
and who speak of purity as morality, of destiny in contrast to history, of 
redemption as the end and purpose of religion, betray an obvious governance 
by Christian principles which vitiates against them. The suspicion that the 
investigation in question was carried out in order to show the deficiency of 
the non-Christian religion in the same areas where Christianity is claimed 
to be superior can never be removed. 

The history of religions shows its purely scientific character par- 
ticularly here. Within any one religion, the task of organizing the data into 
a systematic whole, of relating doctrinal, cultic, institutional, moTal, and ar- 
tistic facts to the history of the civilization concerned as a whole, is a purely 
scientific affair, despite the fact that the materials with which the historian 
of religions works are unlike those of the natural or social scientist. The scien- 
tific character of an inquiry is not a function of the materials but of what 
is done with them. The materials may be chemical facts or religious mean- 
ings. An inquiry into either is scientific if it starts from what is historically 
given and seeks to uncover the relations that govern the existence and ac- 
tuality of these facts. It is immaterial that in one case the facts are laboratory 
materials in test tubes and in the other, ideas and facts recorded in books 
in a library or lived by a living community of men. Certainly the “whats” 

~~ 

‘2 It was this consideration that misled Professor Kitagawa to assign to the history of religions 
a position intermediate between descriptive and normative. (9. cit., p. 19). He clearly saw 
the descriptive nature of the discipline when it studies the history of a religion, or when it 
appropriates the analyses of psychology, anthropology, sociology, philology, etc., applied to 



26 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

in the two cases are different; but the presuppositions of methodology are 
the same. Just as the economist, the sociologist, the psychologist, the an- 
thropologist apply the term "social science" to their scientific treatment of 
data, we shall invent the term "humanitic science" to describe the 
phenomenologists' scientific treatment of materials other than those of the 
natural and social sciences. It is granted that religious as well as moral and 
aesthetic meanings are always instantiated in some overt social or personal 
behavior and that, except through abstraction, they are really inseparable from 
their instances. 

II. SHORTCOMINGS OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SCHOOL 

A. THE NECESSITY OF JUDGMENT 

However scientific and reliable the above-mentioned operations may 
be, a phenomenology of religion that has accumulated as many scientific and 
reliable articulations and systematizations as there are religions is a mere 
boodle bag in which religio-cultural wholes have just been put one beside 
the other in cold juxtaposition. The first two steps of phenomenology of 
religion, (namely, reportage and the construction of meaning - wholes) 
therefore justify the specialized disciplines of Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Bud- 
dhist studies, and so forth, but not the comparative study of religions as an 
autonomous discipline. For this, a third step or branch of study is necessary, 
namely, judgment or evaluation. Out of the meaning-wholes constructed by 
the first two branches, one meaning-whole should be arrived at, which would 
belong to man as such. Like the second, this third operation is also a 
systematization, not so much of particular data as of meaning-wholes. Its 
task is that of relating the given meaning-wholes to the universal, the human, 
and the divine as such. For this, metu-religion is necessary or principles 
belonging to such order of generality as would serve as bases of comparison 
and evaluation of the meaning-wholes. 

scriptures, doctrines, cults and social groupings. But when he came to differentiate the history 
of religions from the normative disciplines, he wrote: "While Religionswissenschafr has to 
be faithful to descriptive principles, its inquiry must nevertheless be directed to the meaning 
(sic) of religious phenomana" (hid. ,  p. 21). This concern with meanings is, in his view, suffi- 
cient to remove the history of religions from the ranks of descriptive science. Evidently, he 
precludes the possibiity of a descriptive treatment of normative content such as value-realist 
philosophy has been suggesting for a generation. (cf. the tradition of Max Scheler, Nikolai 
Hartmann, etc.). 



Ismail al Faruqi T d s  A Critical World Theology n 

Such relating does involve a Judgment of the individual meaning-wholes, 
an evaluation of their large claims. That this is itself a very large claim is not 
denied. Indeed, it sounds quite presumputous to want to judge the religidtures 
of mankind. But the point is that the significance of the whole discipline of 
phenomenology of religion will stand or fall with the establishment or repudia- 
tion of this third branch. 

1. First, we have seen that the first two branches can succeed in put- 
ting in front of us a series of internally coherent wholes of meanings, the consti- 
tuents of which m related to one another as well as to their respective categorial 
existents manifest in the history, life and c u l m  of that religion as well as to 
their respective axiological grounds. If the first tm operations have been suc- 
cessful, every meaning-whole will contain within it the claim not only that it 
is true, but that it is the truth. The claim is essential to rehgion. For the religious 
assertion is not merely one among a multitude of propositions, but necessarily 
unique and exclusive. It is of its nature to be impemtive in addition to b e i i  
propositive, and no command can issue therefrom if it did not mean to assert 
that its content is better or truer than the alternative content of another assertion 
if not the only true and good content uberhaupt. 

Imperativeness is always a preference of sometlung to sometlung else; 
and this always implies that what is commanded in any instance is the best thing 
commandable in that instance. Where alternative commandments are of iden- 
tical value, none may be said to be, by itself, c o m l e .  Religious ex- 
clusiveness, when it is asserted not on the level of accidentals but on that of 
the essentials of a religion, can be dispensed with only at the cost of axiological 
relativism. But this sacralization of relativism may not contend with our asser- 
tion of exclusiveness without contradicting itself. What we then have is not a 
series of meaning-wholes, simpliciter, but a juxtaposition of several meaning- 
wholes each of which claims to be the only autonomous expmsion of the truth. 
These wholes do not vary only in detail, nor merely in the important issues. 
Thqr- ’ y contradict one another in most of the principles which con- 
stitute the fiamewrk and structure of their house of ideas. How then can the 
phenomenologtst of religion, who is above all an academician, stop after the 
preseafahion of these wholes? As academician, the historian of religions is above 
all cumemxi with the truth, But to present the meaning-wholes of the religions 
and acqrJiesce to their pluralism is notlung short of cynicism. There is no alter- 
native 60 tbis cynicism except in judging and evaluating the claimant meaning- 
wtroles The phenomenologists of religion must therefore do much more than 
stqSland2.  

2. second, ruwwledge” in the shdy afreliglons does not CoIlSist merely 
ofthe apprehension of data. In science, a datum is gnoseologically valuable in 
Wf, inas& a5 the natural fact held in wnciousness is itself the end of the 



28 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

scientific investigation. In comparative religion a datum has little significance 
unless it is related to the feeling, propensity, aspiration or value-apprehension 
of which it is the expression, the affirmation or negation, the satisfaction or 
denial, the approbation or condemnation, the exaltation or denigration, and so 
forth. But feelings, propensities, aspirations are human, not only Christian or 
Muslim, and value-apprehension is apprehension of a real value in experience. 
It is not therefore enough to know that for a certain religion, such and such 
are held to be facts. Movement from the Christianness or Muslimness of a fac- 
tum to its human-ness or universal reality is indispensable. Likewise, no meaning- 
whole is complete unless its insights, claims, desiderata, and damnata are related 
to their human and thedore real mts, and them to the real values and disvalues 
they seek to make real or to eliminate. Knowledge itself demands this relating 
to man as such, to existential and axiological reality. But to relate the data and 
meaning-wholes in this manner is certainly to judge them. 

Mutually-contmdictory as they are, to relate the data of religions or 
their meaning-wholes to the same reality, whether human or valuational, is d y  
to present an incomplete picture with which the human understanding can do 
nothing. Indeed, such relating of them cannot be maintained in consciousness 
without coercion. But data that cannot be treated except coercively, that is can- 
not be related to the universal and the real without dislodging or being dislodg- 
ed by other data, cannot be simply true. Either the dislodging or the dislodged 
data are wrong, or their place in the meaning-whole has been wrongly assign- 
ed. The consequence therefore is that either the construction of the meaning- 
whole has been faulty or the meaning-whole as a whole has laid a false claim 
to the truth. 

B. THE DESZRABILZTY OF JUDGMENT 

Since the data which the phenomenologists of =@on collect are univer- 
sally related to meanings or values, they are, in contradistinction to the dead 
facts of naW science, life-facts. In order to perceive them as l i f e - h ,  an epoch 
is necessary in which, as the phenomenologists have argued, the investigator 
would put his own presuppositions, religion, and perspective in brackets while 
he beholds the given religious datum. This is necessary but insufficient. That 
the lik-fact is endowed with energizing and stirring pcruner implies for epistemology 
that to apprehend it is to apprehend its moving power in experience. Hence, 
life-fact cognition is life-fact determination, and to perceive a religious meaning 
is to suffer determination by that meaning. The phenomenologists of religion 
must therefore be capable of moving freely from one context to another while 
enabling his ethos to be determined by the data beheld alone. Only thus can 
he construct the historically given data into selfcoherent meaning-wholes, which 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 29 

is his objective as a comparativist. But what does this peregrination mean for 
him as a human being, as a searcher for wisdom? And consequently, what does 
it mean for him to present to his fellow men these mutually repulsive, severally 
appealing and determining meaning-wholes? 

It may be argued that the comparativist should do no more than pre- 
sent these meaning-wholes from the highest level of detachment possible. Ivory- 
tower detachment is not only impressive but necessary when the subject matter 
investigated and presented to man belongs to the realm of nature which we call- 
ed "dead facts.- To apply it in the realm of life-facts, where cognition is to be 
determined in discursive thought as well as in feehng and action, is to expose 
men to their energizing power and moving appeal. Now, if the comparativist 
of religions takes no more than steps 1 and 2, he is exposing man to galaxies 
of meaning-wholes that pull him apart in different directions. There can be no 
doubt that every human being must reach his own personal decision regarding 
what is M y  meatlmgful, and that the phenomenologist of relqgon is an academi- 
cian who must remain absolutely aloof from all attempts to intluence man's 
decision-making. But has he, by presenting to man merely the meaning-wholes 
in cold juxtaposition, that is, without relating them to the necessarily universal, 
the necessarily real, the human, presented him with the whole truth? 

In this age, when the world communtiy has become conscious of a 
universal human identity and is repeatedly callrng for a discipline that will think 
out its spiritual problems as a human world community, has the ivory-tower 
phenomenologist of religions, whose training has equipped him best for the job, 
the right to shy away? Does his shying away cast no doubt on his whole enter- 
prise? By wanting to preserve the religions of man firozen as they are, this ivory- 
tower scholarship detaches itself from the world of man and life that is constant- 
ly beiig made and remade and degenemtes into superficiality. 

These three considerations discussed from the perspective of necessi- 
ty and desirability of judgment - the first iwo being theoretical, affecting 
knowledge of relgions, and the third practical, questioning the wisdom of mi@ 
judgment - lead us to think that judgment is both necessary and desirable. There 
is hence no escape fbr the phenomenologist of religion from developing a system 
of principles of meta-religion under which the judgment and evaluation of 
meaning-wholes may take place. Although there have been many Christian 
theologies of the comparative study of religions, then? is, as yet, unfortunately 
no critical meta-religion. This shortcoming points further to the unprepanhess 
of modem Christendom to meet the world community that is rapidly coming 

It is not within the purview of this essay to elaborate on a system of 
meta-religion. But it would indeed be incomplete if, having striven to establish 
its necessity and desirability, we omit discussing its possibility. 

into being. 



30 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 

C. THE POSSIBILITY OF JUDGMENT 

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

Perhaps the most common genre of meta-rehgion is that which looks 
upon the differences among ~wons as belonging to the surface, and upon their 
common agreements as belonging to the essence. This view does not always 
have to assume the superficial form it usually takes in interremous conventions 
where the ”lowest common denominatof agreements are emphasized at the cost 
of all the differences. It can be sophisticated, as when it claims that underlying 
all dilkences there is a Feal sumcommonto all whichis easilydkmmb le 
upon closer analysis. But it is nonetheless false because it seeks that substratum 
on the level of the figurizations and conceptualizations of the different digions 
where no such unity can be found except through selection of the materials in- 
vestigated or a coercive interpretation of them. The profound differences that 
separate the religions on the level of teachings here all disappear in order to 
clear the road for generalization. When hindrances are found to be obstinate, 
they are subjected to an interpretation capable of beamg the required meaning. 
Such is the case of the analysis of Friedrich Heiler, who goes to great lengths to 
prove that all religions teach the same God and the same ethic, and whose 
conclusions are not even true to the theory of empirical genedization, not to 
speak of rneta-religion whose principles must be apodeictically certain. For 

this enumeration carefully omits him! - Jesus, all are “imagery” in which the 
one and same ”reality is constantly perso~~gied.~~ Moreover, “this reality of the 
Divine” is identified as “ultimate love which reveals itself to men and in 
men””; and “the way of man to God is universally the way of sacrifi~e.”~~ 
Obviously this is to see the non-Christian religions with hopelessly Christian 
eyes, to bend the historically given so as to accord with a predetermineb chris- 
tian order. 

Despite the fact that this sort of “schohhip” may serve to instill among 
the rank and file a little ympathy b r  9 k  othed who, hithato, have been regadd 
as “infidels,* it remains at bottom a ptuitous cmdescension. As a mdhodolology 
of the comparative study of religions, it is utterly v m t h l e s ~ . ~ ~  

A f$r more profound and philosophical theory of history of religions 

him, Yahweh, A h ~ M a z d a h ,  Allah, Buddha, Kali, and - presumably, though 

1’ Fdedrich Heiler, T h e  History of Religions as a preparation for the Cooperation of Religions” 
in Zhe History of Religions:  essay^ in M e t ~ l o g y ,  cit, supm, p. 142. 
l4 Bid., p. 143. 
l5 Bid., p. M3-44. 
16 Other examples betraying the same shortcomings are Albert Schweitzer‘s Christianity and 
the Religions of the HbrU (Men and Unwin, London, 1923); Hendrik Kraemer, Why Chris- 
tianity of all Religions? (Westminister Press, Philadelphia, 1962); Stephen Neill, Christian 
With and Other liaiths: Ihc Christian Dialogue with Other Religions (OxEDrd University Ress, 
l%l); A. C. Bouquet, Ihc Christian Faith and Non-Christian Religions (James Nisbet and 
Co., London, 1958); Jacques-Albert Cuttat, La Renamtm des Religwns &bier, Editions Mon- 



Ismail al Faruqi T d s  A Critical World Theology 31 

has been briefly laid out in an article by B. E. Meland!’ It too regards the rehgions 
as fundamentally one, not on the level of doctrine or figumation, but on that 
of a deeper lying substratum - which is true - and seeks to reach, reconcile, 
or judge the pronouncements of the different religions on the figurization level 
by reference to that deeper reality which is common to all. It is in thehtter 
aspect that the theory runs aground. W h e m  the unpMm@cal theories lid 
because they do not seek humanity on the deeper level where it d y  is but 
on the figurmhonal level where it certainly is not, Meland’s philosophical theory 
runs short because he identifies that reality hi such a way as to make any 
knowledge - and hence any methodological use - of it impossible. Let us see 
how this is so. 

Meland analyzes the nam of man as consisting of three elemis: first, 
“the primodial ground of the individual person as actualized event: that is, the 
primodial substratum of reality in which he has his beii ,  his cI.eatedness. This 
deeplying substmte is ontological and hence it transcends all particularisms; 
but “in its actuality . . . (it) is concrete.” It is 3nad.s lik in God.” It is ”univer- 
sal”; hence, “all concretion is ultimately due” to it. All perspectives, judgments, 
and formulations of or within a religion ”partake of this concreteness” and are, 
hence, “relative to it” in the “decisive” sense “that in this time and place reality 
has spoken.” It “defines the base of our humanity” and gives man the capacity 
to understand the humanity of anotherY second is “the individuated selfhood 
of each person,” and third, “the cultural history in which the drama of corporate 
existence is enacted.’1g 

In contrast to the first element, which is universal, the second and third 
are specific and particular, and belong to the level of history and culture. It is 
true that neither the universal nor the particular is found one without the other; 
but whereas the particular is readily and directly available for knowledge, the 
universal is never reached except through the particular. Thus the particular, 
which is a concretization of the universal, is relative thereto in the ontic sense; 
for it ows to the unived iis very bei i .  This may be gmnted. As to the awihbili- 
ty of the universal for knowledge, Meland rules out all hope for the historian 
of religions ever to attain it outside his own culture and concretization on the 
grounds that “the structw of faith [i.e., the particular] is so deeply organic to 
the individuation of the person in any culture. . . [or so] much d. this is below 
the level of conscious awareness. . . [that man’s] processes of thought cannot 

taigne, M s ,  1957); R. C. &her, llre Convergent Spirit: T m n l s  a Dialectics of Religion 
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963); etc. 
17 “Thmiogy and the Historian of Religion”, Zhe Journal of Religion, Vol. XLI, No. 4, Oc- 
tober, 1961, pp. 262-276. 
18 hid . ,  p. 265. 
19 hid . ,  p. 265-66. 



32 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

escape or tmscend its conditioning, however disciplined they may be.qo 
This reduction of all human knowledge to relativity, to the particular 

cultural structure of the subject (which Meland calls the "fiduciary fkamewrk: 
bortuwing the expression of Michael Fblany~), stem from a nmtakmg of relativity. 
The afore-mentioned ontic relation between primodal reality and its concrete 
actualization in space-time, which is the onedimdonal dependence of the par- 
ticular on the universal, is here inteqreted as epistemlogical and is turned around 
so as to become the absolute dependence of the universal on the particular. For 
this twist, however, no reason is given; and its net purport is the resolution to 
recognize only the particular as given, thus closing the gate of any reliable 
knowledge of the universal. But knowledge of the universal, of primordial reali- 
ty, must be possible if the particular culttm or relqgon, the %duciary framemrk,= 
is not to be final. 

Passage from the particular to the universal, that is to say, the search 
for universal, that is to say, the search for a meta-religion with which the par- 
ticular may be properly understood as well as evaluated, is possible because, 
to parody the words of Kant, although all history of religions begins with the 
historically given data of the religions, the concrete religious experience of men 
in history, the given of the particular religions, it is not necessary that it all arises 
therefrom. Meland too is keen to save this possibility, though he is opposed to 
any facile dogmatip of the universal. With this in mind, he suggests the method 
of negotiation of meaning in personal interreligious encounter, asserting that the 
impenetrable opaqueness of meaning which the alien religion presents to the 
investigator could be dissipated by the encounter between him and the adherent 
of the religion, provided that both are aware of their fiduciary frameworks, as 
well as of the fact that they are, as living concretizations of primordial reality, 
anchored in that one and the same reality. In such an encounter, Meland holds, 
it would not be their particularistic dogmatip that carries the religious mean- 
ing sought, but the persons saying such words as they do.zl 

One may ask, however, what the adherent means besides what is af- 
fmed and denied, which belongs to the level of the fiduciary framework. For 
an encounter to serve the purpose Meland has assigned to it, it should have a 
meaning and a relevance to the study of religions, that is to say, to the interest 
txmscew the particular religions of the adherents, under which the latter could 
be illuminated, understood, evaluated, and judged. But what is that meaning 
and relevance which must be other than what the psychologist, the economist, 

hid . ,  p. 272; 261; 275. Here Professor Meland finds himself in agreement with Michael 
Polanyi, Personul Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 266), who iden- 
tifies the particular for knowledge as "fiduciary framework" outside of which "no intelligence, 
however critical or original, can operate" (Meland, B. E.,  Op. cir., p. 271). 
2' hid . ,  pp. 274-75. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 33 

the historian, and other social scientists are intemted in? Meland gives us no 
indication of it. How then can the desired "negotiation of meaning" be possible? 
How may that of which the fiduciary framework is the figurbtion be critically 
established for knowledge? Indeed, Melandhas alre;ady laiddownthat the primor- 
dial reality is utterly unknowable. In this case, what ndiance should be placed 
on any person's claim that in affimmg and denying what he does, he is expms- 
ing "primodhl reality"? How can one cli€ferentiate between a person com- 
municating a particularized "primordial reality" and one communicating a par- 
t i c d m  hallucination? Does any fiduciary framework express, take account 
of, and corktitute a concretization of "primordial reality" as well as any other? 
Are men absolutely Eree to develop any fiduciary framework they wish? Has 
all human wisdom not attained an- final at all conceming that primordial 
reality besides its h e i n ?  

If these questions yield only negative mults, then negotiated meaning 
is impossible and encounter is futile. If, on the other hand, the yield is positive, 
then m y  me&-re@on is possible, and the compadvist should apply himself 
to the task of eldborating it. In doing so, he may not take the stand of skep 
ticism. For to assert God and not to allow Him to be differentiated from a 
hallucination is idle, as it is for a Muslim to assert the unity of God and not 
that of truth, or for any rational being to assert reality and then to d e c k  it 
utterly unknowable. To assert with blyanyi and Meland that all we can ever 
have is a Muslimized or Christianized, Germanized or Russified version of the 
truth is skepticism - the denial of truth itself, includmg that of the skeptids 
thesis, h la Epbnenides. 

The rock-bottom axiom of this relativism in religious knowledge is the 
principle that "the mts of man are in the region; or, more precisely, in that 
matrix of concn3e experience, however much he may succeed in venturing bepnd 
these psychic barriers through various efforts at s h a d  experience."p' First, this 
is not selfevident. The opposite, namely, that the root of man is in the human 
universal rationality in which he partakes by nature, is quite conceivable. Nor 
can it be made to accord, second, with the wisdom of those religions that ex- 
pressed men's universal bmtherhd in their common descendance from Adam, 
and attributed their cultural peculiarties to en~ironment."*~ Third, it stems from 
an unfortunate fixation in the Western mind that whatever is, is first of all either 
French or German or English or Christian or Jewish, and is human, but is univer- 
sal or real only in second place. This fixation is so chronic that the Western 
mind not only cannot see reality except as geographically, ~ t i ~ ~ l l y ,  cultmlly, 
or sectarianly determined, but also assumes that God created it so. "Each [con- 
crete occasion of reality] in its own circumstances, bodies forth its distinctive 

t= Ibid., p. 264. 
23 Genesis II: 1-9; Qur'an 49:B; 45:16. 



34 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

disclosure as an event of actuaIity, prehending the creative act of God with its 
own degm of ~ l t ~ v ~ ~ ” r *  That is the end ofthe mad. It is relativism clauning 
for itself divine sanction. 

D. THE BENEFZZS OF JUDGlMENT 
Certainly, what unites men of diffemt fiduciary fmneworks is, as 

Meland says, theirstanchg as actdimions ofprmmhal d t y ,  theircreaaedness 
by one and the same Cator .  Rehgiously spealang, the C a t o r  has not only 
granted man something of the Creatofs spirit, that is, a capacity to transcend 
his creatureliness and recognize the Creator who is his source, 
but has also taken several measures to bring to man a knowledge of Himself. 
Man the&= knaws God, the primordial reality, ifnot naturally, then by means 
of revelation. On the other hand, metaphysically spealung, the level of being 
at which man stands is differentiated from the l m r  levels of things, plants, 
and animals not only by that instrument of the will to live called the understan- 
ding, but by spirit, which enables man to cognize and evaluate his standmg in 
Beii’s multileveled s t r u m .  This is none other than Being’s attainment of con- 
sciousness of itself. In man, B e i i  judges itself. That it has often misjudged 
itself is the proof that it can judge itself, and consequently that it must, can, 
and in hct does know itself. For it is as inconceivable that Being wuld enable 
the emergence of a creature that is a judge of Being without endowing it with 
the hculty to know the object of judgment, which is itself, as it is to find a 
b e i i  on any level that is not accompanied by the development of such Cognitive 
faculties as enable the higher concretization of Being to fulfill that which 
distinguishes it from the lower levels and hence constitutes its raison &em. 

Pursued in its three branches, the study of religions i s  the sovereign 
queen of the humanities. In a sense, all the humanities, bcludmg the comparative 
ones, are here front-line soldiers whose duties are the collection of data, and 
their analysis, systematidon, and recoIlstNction into meaning-wholes. The sub  
ject matter of these disciplines is men’s ideas and actions in all fields of human 
endeavor; and all these are, as we have seen, constituents in the religiocultuml 
wholes which the science of religions proper studies as wholes, and compam 
and relates to man and God in the attempt to reach the truth of both. The queen’s 
concern is for every battlefield and hence for every individual soldier. But her 
real work is at headquarters to observe where the ship of humanity i s  going. 
Comparative religion, then, is not a course of study; it is not a department in 
a divinity school. It is, rather, by itself a college of liberal arts, each department 
of which is organically related to the center, whose job is to make sense out 
of the infinite diversity of the religiocultuml experience, and thus contribute 

2’ Meland, B.E., Op. cit., p .  265. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 35 

to the monstruction of man’s knowledge of himself, to his rehabilitation in an 
apparently alien cosmos, to his realization of value. Inasmuch therehre as com- 
parative religion is a collection and systematization of hcts about human acts, 
I&, and relations, it is a college. Inasmuch as amprative ~ lqgon  is an evaluation 
or judgment of meaning-wholes with the aid of a body of critical meta-religious 
principles, it is the queen of the humanities. 

At any university or college, however, these disciplines operate in an 
autonomous manner without recognizing their organic relation to religion. This 
is not undesirable. First, a measure of evaluation and judgment relative to the 
data under immediate examination is necessary for collection and systematiza- 
tion. Second, and in a deeper sense, their attempts at evaluation are desirable 
inasmuch as intellectual curiosity, or the will to know, is dependent upon the 
recognition of the unity of truth, that is, upon the realization that the discovery 
of truth is a discovery of a reality that is not divisible into unrelated segments 
but constitues a unique and integral whole. This is quite consistent with the se- 
cond principle of Islamic methodology, namely the unity of truth and knowledge 
(Islamization oflynaoledge, p. 26). Such a realization is always a requisite for 
venturing into the unknown fields of reality. 

Third, their evaluations and judgments are of inestimable value to the 
student of religions, even though they may be biased or emneous. They serve 
as a check and balance to the comparativist whenever he is inclined to set the 
facts aside in favor of abstract constructionism. Such evaluation and judgment 
as the specialist data-reporter and systematizer are likely to make at least will 
be truer to the hcts in question; and this is a need which the study of religions 
can never overemphasize and no historian of religion can oversatisfy. 

Fourth, the study of religions should keep m of these developments 
and be ready to evaluate the discoveries attained by these disciplines. The real 
issue is the need for and desirability of evaluation on the level of religion, that 
is to say, on the highest, the most comprehensive, and most critical level of all. 

111. SHORTCOMINGS OF THE OTHER SCHOOLS 

A. THE SEhTlMEiWX. ECUMEN.IS’S 

All of us have heard superficial scholars, moved more by sentiment 
than reason, claim that the religions of mankind are all one. With no little 
demagoguery, they flash out their claims at public conventions that all the relqgons 
command the golden rule of Christianity, namely, “Do unto others as you wuld 
have them do unto you,” or “ h e  thy neighbor as thyself,” or, venturing new 
mottos, such claims as “Every religion has some notion of ultimate reality, or 



36 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

commands the having of a good heart, observance of good conduct, altruism, 
or a spirituality or somethmg beyond the material life of this wxld.” Little do 
these sentimentalists realize that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; 
that a good will, mipmity, spiritdity, and ultimate realty as such do not spec@ 
what we are to do with our lives on earth; that humans hold these values and 
at the same time perpetrate atrocious crimes against humanity. The lowest com- 
mon denominator may be common; but it is the lawest not only in the sense 
that it is the least important constituent in the rehgion in question but also in 
that the demand it makes on the adherent hardly distinguishes him from other 
~hg~ons. E;mcmg such a lowest common denominator as an index of commonality, 
the conscientious adherent is bound to shout: “five la di$erencd‘! 

Such latter-day ecumenists who have laid aside their religious identity 
and call upon others to do the same need not deter us from our quest. Their 
call appeals to the shallow-minded; and its effect is always brief. There are others 
though, fbr more sophisticated, whose call is oft based upon more solid grounds. 
They can be classified into three groups: those who find their base in man; those 
who find their base in the world; and those who find it in some vague though 
transcendent reality. Naturally, there are always some - perhaps they are the 
majority - who hold their own religion to be the religion of the world and to 
find world theology in the tenets of their own religious tradition. 

This last class comprises today the overwhelrmng majority of the 
theologians of Christianity. Their claim may be read in Hendrik Kraerner‘s Chris- 
tianity and the Religions ofthe ubrld, and in Emil Brunner‘s study on Chris- 
timity and Human Civilization. And it can be deduced from the writings of 
Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and the comparativists of religion in the Wst. While 
the theologians of the ethnocentric religions - like Judaism and Hinduism - 
are deliberately unecumenical, those of the other religions are for the most part 
altogether UMWZUE of the problem. 

Those who base their world theology on man happen to be today‘s 
skeptics as far as religious truth is concerned. That was the conclusion of our 
analysis of the claim of B e d  Eugene Meland, as we have already seen. As 
we shall see below, the claim of Wilfred Cantwell Smith derives from the same 
skepticism reg- religious truth. 

Finally, there are those who base their world theology on transcen- 
dent reality. These are the mystics. Fritjhof Schuon is the lea- figure. His 
call for “the transcendent unity of the religions” (also the title of his book) has 
won him a number of hllowers, including such Muslim neo-Sufis as Hosein Nasr. 

B. THE RELIGIOUS SKErmcS 

Trained as a historian, and often claiming to be one, Smith learned 
the historical method and assumed doubt to be the fmt principle of human 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 37 

knowledge. Applied to religion, this doubt is claimed to p m e  that there is no 
such thmg as religion, that no such reality exists. What we call ”religion: he 
claims, is a reified abstraction of the mind, created by our propensity to abstract 
from observed reality and to re@ - or make into a thug or substance - the 
observation the mind has perceived. 

Religion, he claims, is only a succession of states of consciousness 
which had better be named faith, or faithfulness. “Faith” is a personal quality, 
always an attribute of a person, an attribute that qualifies the person’s fears, at- 
titudes, and hopes and is hence changing at every moment. Like the river of 
Heraclitus, one never steps in the same river again. Faith is not digion; hith 
is dynamic, internal, personal, and inefhble, directly determining all attitudes 
and actions. Relqgon, on the other hand, is static, external, impersonal, a cumula- 
tion of states of faith, discursive epidescriptions of somethug that once was 
and hence is subject to a thousand mistakes. These accumulated descriptions 
are then hypostatized as “religion,” whereas they are no- but cumulative 
abstractions of states of faith. 

While this description of religion may be true of biblical Judaism and 
church Christianity, it can hardly apply to Islam, which the Qur‘an declared to 
be ”AZ Islam,” “A1 Din,” “Fitrah AUah: revealed in toto and completely during 
the last two decades of the Prophet‘s Life (SAAS), and recorded in an absolute- 
ly integral, historically established document - A1 @rbn AZ &rim. Nobody, 
whether Muslim or otherwise, has codbed his own personal hith with Al Islam, 
as if they were one reality; personal islam as a m h r  (prhciple) distinct from 
A1 Islam, the religion of God recorded in the Qur’an. The Muslim seeks always 
to improve his personal faith to accord with the Qur‘anic A1 Islam. The latter 
is normative, absolute, unchanging; the former, as Smith rightly indicates, is 
changing, relative to its subject. It is the reality to be judged by A1 Islam, A1 
Fuqun, or the criterion, of all judgment. 

Further critical analysis of Smith’s allegations may be read elsewhere 
(cf. this author‘s essay, “The Essence of Religious Experience in Islam,” Numen, 
1972). Suffice it to say that Smith’s notion of rehgion does not even permit him 
to call b l f a  Christian. For how does he himself from the adhe~nts 
of other religions without a constant unchanging substance (a res, as he called 
it) as norm and standard of Christian-ness? If Christianity were the river of 
Heraclitus, haw could any issue of orthodoxy-heresy, of tradition-reform, or 
saintliness-sinfulness ever be recognized, let alone established? 

And yet it is precisely on this d y  hnsy fbundaton that Smith builds 
his theory of wrld theology. His aqpnent is contained in his most recent publica- 
tion, T m d  a WrU-lkology: k i t h  and The compQmtive History of Religion 
(Philadelphia: The W%minister Press, 1981) His claim is that, while the reified 
religious traditions of the wrld may differ from one another in the images they 
have built of themselves in the minds of adherents prone to reification, their 



condition of^ o f b e l i e v i i i n a ~ ~ , o f h a v i n g a t t i t & s  
to life engendered by such notion, is one and the same. It is this condition that 
makes them human and distingcllshes them from plants and animals. Faith, in 
a sense mxmbhng piety, is common to all religious adherents and gives 
significance to life. Indeed, faith is the source and criterion of all significance. 

Thus,the notion of hith which does not distinguish between Christian 
and Christian - let alone between Christian and Muslim - is for Smith tk 
basis of a world theology pmisely because it does not distinguish at all. But 
however universal the state of having fhith may be, it does not define digion. 
We undentand yeligion not as a c- ’ tic ofthe human person, like hunger, 
sex,~,,,pl~,hatred,anger,orpalousy..,re~onisthatwhich 
determines what we do with any or all of these human propensities, including 
the propensity of fhith. Is M h f d n e s s  as such any difkrent from hunger? What 
kind of world theology can be built over a human propensitY? or predicament? 

Smith’s answer that rehgious content does not matter derives from 
epistemological despar of ever b e i i  able to establish any religious claim. Ques- 
tions of religious truth are for him, as for Meland, ever personal and subjective, 
ever relative, ever devoid of objective validity, a pmrogative that belongs to em- 
pirical propositions alone. May religious content be treated with such 
epistemological unconcern, nay, amtempt? Is it of such little importance fbr Smith 
whether a person has a fhith that commits him to the saintly, self-sacrificial I& 
of ksus or to that of a vicious, debauched tyrant? Of what good is the descrip 
tion of both as “men of faith”? Obviously, Smith’s world theology is 
epistemologically, ethically, and religiously worthless. 

Unlike the claims of the skeptics, that of the mystics is old. Muslims 
have known it as claimed by thehtinis as well as Ibn M i ;  and world scholars 
have knuwn it in the claims ofthe Admita School ofshanlcua, the Deuta School 
of Ramanuja Hinduism, or the modem ecumenism of Samapdh--. 
Fritjhof Schuon’s claim (Ihe T m c W  Vkiry OfMigions, Tr. by F? Xwn- 
send, London, 1953), and that of his follower and pupil, S. Hosein Nasr (Ideals 
and Realities OfIslam, London, lM), is not &rent as to substance, but only 
in inslgnlficant detail. 

Schuon and Nasr claim that all rewons are anchored in a reality that 
is absolute and transcendent. This reality may be CoIlCeived ofin personal, theistic 
terms, as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do; but to perceive it otherwise, as 
Thoism and Buddhmm ’ do, is equally possible. All religions conceive of kmcem 
dent reality as n o d v e ,  a source of standards and/or commandments dewant 
for the umduct of life. And all seek to center human consciousness and life 
on the transcendent d t y  because it is ultimate and absolute in all aspects. 



Ismail ai Fanqi Towards A Critical World Theology 39 

The lift: of mankind hwen mund its umsciousness of this reality, 
for which it coined the words "Sacred% and "Holy" Consciousness of the 
sacred and obedience to an emulation ofthe holy o the ha bark so fall rehgms. 
This attitude towad the holy is particularly evident by its absem from the con- 
tempomy k t ,  as contrasted with its lift: of a pnwious age, and with Asian 
and African life where it still predominates, but where it is @ting what seems 
to be a losing battle against the threat of k t e r n  materialism, atheism, and 
secularism. 

Schuon and Nasr affirm that in this relation of the religious to the 
sacred, a base may be found for a "phihophta perennis," a "universal human 
religion." Advocates of such universal relqgosity, such as F'ythagoras and the 
mystics of all rehgions, abound in history. But history has known them as belong- 
ing to *ring traditions and cultues with differing consequences to their lives 
and those of their followers. It is nonetheless true that in pmximity to and in 
consciousness of the sacred, humans curb their wills, repudiate the relativities 
of history, and walk humbly and lovmgly together toward the source of all truth 
and all bliss. 

This sounds more like wishful thmlang than d t y .  often, the fiercest 
religious opponents were mystics, endowed with differing insights into what 
transcendent or ultimate reality commanded, exhod,  or expected them to do. 
Granted the ontological qualities they ascribe to tmscendent reality, and gmted 

bllows for human E, either from ackmwledgmg its existence , its b e i i  transcen- 
dent and real, or from the attitude of humility and obedience it elicits and ob 
tains from its adwcates. It is c;ertainly possible for diametrically opposed rehgious 
tenets and ethical commandments prescribing the most cruel savagery to issue 
from transcendent reality, from a sacred conceived to be sacred and holy by 
its followen. Meed, isn't the history of confirontation between the rehgions, 
or between parties within one and the same rehgion, ample evidence that op 
posites may well claim to issue from a transcendental source? 

As the Batinis and Ibn"Arabi an# their critics have told us in our own 
tradition, a reality esoterically known, however tmnscendent or real it may be, 
may be thought of as validating any view, any commandment. That is why 
transcendent reality must give us this content through melation, or subject any 
content presented in its name to scrutiny by reason. Otherwise, there would be 
no tehg whether the transcendent reality claim is indeed a reality or simply 
a great hallucination. That is why every Batini form of religion must end in 
corruption. It rejects en hpothesi the possibility of c o d o n ,  except by its own 
source and advocate. Unless that source is absolutely without blemish, and ever- 
right in the perception of truth and value - a condition no human can claim 
- Batini (esoteric) and mystical theorieshaveallendedineJraggerationandabuse 
by their own foIlmn. 

their common humble subservience to and l m  ofthat d t y ,  wthrng necessaril Y 



As a world theolog~, mysticism’s claim for a transcendent unity of all 
the relig~ons is empty. It is on a par with the claim of ecumenical sentimen- 
talism; and, though the claim is anchored in an affirmation rather than a 
tion, like the skeptics, it avails nothing. It does not provide criteria for settliog 
diffhences among the relqyons of the world, nor does it provide positive in- 
dications for conduct. A critical world theology cannot be content with such 
aftinnation, because it cannot rest with a relativist understandug of the content 
commanded. 

IV. TOWARDS AN ISLAMIC THEORY OF META-RELIGION 

The relation of Islam to the other relig~ons has been established by God 
in His revelation, the Qur’an. No muslim therefore may deny it; since for him 
the Qur’an is the ultimate rehg~ous authority. Muslims regad the Qur’an as God’s 
own wod verbatim, the final and definitive revelation of His will for all space 
and time, for all mankind. 

The only kind of contention possible for the Muslim is that of exegetical 
variation. But in this realm, the scope of variation is limited in two directions. 
First, continuity of Muslim practice throughout the centuries constitutes an ir- 
refutable testament to the meanings attributed to the Qur’anic verses. Second, 
the methodology of Muslim orthodoxy in exegesis rests on the principle that 
Ambic lexicography, grammar, and syntax, which have remained frozen and in 
perpetual use by the millions ever since their crystallization in the Qur’an, leave 
no contention without soluti0n.45 These facts explain the universality with which 
the Qur’anic principles were understood and observed, despite the widest possi- 
ble Variety of ethnic cultw~s, languages, races, and customs characterizing the 
Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, and from Russia and the Balkans 
to the heart of Africa. 

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

t5 On this point Muslim scholarship is unanimously in agreement. To those who are not familiar 
with this longstanding tradition, suffice it to warn that the situation of hermeneutical despair 
and confusion which exists in the case of Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and other scriptures 
has absolutely no parallel in Islam. 



Ismail al Faruqi T d s  A Critical World Theology 41 

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

A. JUDAISM AND CHRISII;QNITY 

Islam accords to these two religions special status. First, each of 
them is the religion of God. Their founders on earth, Abraham, Moses, David, 
Jesus, are the prophets of God. What they have conveyed - the Torah, the 
Psalms, the Evangel (gospels) - are revelations from God. To believe in these 
prophets, in the revelations they have brought, is integral to the very Edith 
of Islam. To disbelieve in them, nay to discriminate between them, is apostasy. 
“Our Lord and your Lord is indeed God, the One and Only God.”t6 God 
described His Prophet Muhammad (SAAS) and his followers as ”believing 
all that has been revealed from God”; as ”believing in God, in His angels, 
in His revelations and Prophets”; as “not-distinguishing among the Prophets 
of God.-’ 

Arguing with Jews and Christians who object to this self-identification 
and claim an exclusivist monopoly on the former prophets, the Qur‘an says: 
“You claim that Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and their tribes were Jews 
or Christians [and God claims otherwise]. Would you claim knowledge in 
these matters superior to God‘s?”Z8 “Say, [Muhammad], We believe in God, 
in what has been revealed by Him to us, what has been revealed to Abraham, 
Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the tribes; in what has been conveyed to Moses, to 
Jesus and all the prophets from their Lord.”*g “We have revealed [Our revela- 
tion) to you [Muhammad] as We did to Noah and the Prophets after him, 
to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the tribes, to Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, 
Solomon, and David.”so “It is God indeed, the living and eternal One, that 
revealed to you [Muhammad] the Book [i.e., the Qur’an] confirming the 
previous revelations. For it is He Who revealed the Torah and the Gospels 
as His guidance to mankind . . .Who revealed the Psalms to David.”31 “Those 
who believe [in you, Muhammad], the Jews, the Christians or the Sabaeans 
- all those who believe in God and in the Day of Judgment, and have done 

26 Qur‘an 20:88; 29:46; 42% 
2’ Qur’an 2:285. 
** Qur’an 2 : N .  
29 Qur’an 3% 

Qur’m 4:163. 
31 Qur’an 3:2-4. 



good works, will receive their due reward from God. They have no cause 
to k, nor will they grieve."s* 

The honor with which Islam regards Judaism and ChrisWty, their 

Islam sees them in the world not as "other views" which it has to tolerate, 
but as standing &jute, as truly revealed religions from God. M o w e r ,  their 
legitimate status is neither sociopolitical, nor cdtural or civilizational, but 
religious. In this, Islam is unique. For no religion in the world has yet made 
belief in the truth of other religions a necessary condition of its own Edith 
and witness. 

Consistently, Islam pursues this acknowledgment of religous truth 
in Judaism and Christianity to its logical conclusion, namely, self-identification 
with them. Identity of God, the source of revelation in the three religions, 
necessarily lea& to identity of the revelations and of the rehgions. Islam does 
not see itself as coming to the religious scene ex nihilo but as ndXmat~ 'on 
of the same truthpresentedby all the pnxedmg prophets of Judaism and Chris- 
tianity. It regards them all as Muslims, and their revelations as one and the 
same as its T-r with Hanifism, the monotheistic and ethical religion 
of pre-Islamic Arabia, Judaism, Christianity and Islam constitute crystalliza- 
tions of one and the same religious consciousness whose essence and core 
is one and the same. The unity of this religious consciousness can easily be 
seen by the historian of civilization concerned with the ancient Near East. 
It is traceable in the literatures of these ancient peopless4 and is supported 
by the unity of their physical theater or geography, in their languages (for 
which they are called "Semitic"), and in the unity of artistic expression. 

This unity of the religious consciousness of the Near East consists 
of five dominant principles which characterize the known literatures of the 
peoples of this region. They are: (1) the ontic disparateness of God, the Creator, 
from His creatures, unlike the attitudes of ancient Egyptians, Indians, or 
Chinese, according to which God or the Absolute is immanently His own 
creatures; (2) the purpose of man's creation is neither God's self-contemplation 
nor man's enjoyment, but unconditional service to God on ear&, His Own 
"manor"; (3) the relevance of Creator to creature, or the will of God, is the 
content of revelation and is expressed in terms of law, of oughts and moral 
imperatives; (4) man, the s e m t ,  is master of the manor under.God, capable 
of transforming it through his own efficacious action into what God desires 
it to be; and (5) man's obedience to and fulfillment of the divine command 

~ ~ a n d ~ , i s n o t c o u r t e s y b u t ~ l ~ ~ d r e ~ ~ t r u t h .  

32 Qur'an 5:m. 

34 An analysis of ancient Near Eastern religious consciousness may be Fead 'in this author's 
Hisroriml A t k  of the Religions ofthe Wrhi. (New York The M d a n  Co., l974), pp. 3-34. 

" Qur'an 3~67; 21~71-94. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical Mrld Theology 43 

results in happiness and felicity, its opposite in suffering and damnation, thus 
coalescing worldly and cosmic justice together. 

The unity of “Semitic“ religious and cultural consciousness was not 
affected by intrusion of the Egyptians in the days of their empire (1465465 
B.C.),35 nor by the Philistines from Caphtor (Crete?); nor by the Hittites, 
Kassites, or “People of the Mountains” (the Aryan tribes?), who were all 
semiticized and assimilated, despite their military conq~ests.~6 Islam has taken 
all this fix granted. It has called the central religious txaditioxl of the Semitic 
peoples “Hanifism” and identified itself with it. Unfortunately for the early 
Muslim scholars who benefited from this insight as they labored, the language, 
histories, and literatures furnished by archeology and the disciplines of the 
ancient Near East were not yet available. Hence they scrambled after the 
smallest bits of oral tradition, which they systematized for us under the title 
of “History of the Prophets.” In reading their materials, we must remember, 
however, that the accurate-knowledge of Abraham, of Julius Caesar, of ‘Amr 
ibn al ‘Ass7 and of Napoleon, about the Sphinx or the pyramids of Egypt, 
for instance, was equal - i.e., nil. 

The Islamic concept of “Hanif“ should not be compared to Karl 
Rahner‘s “anonymous Christians.” “Hanif“ is a Qur’anic category, not the in- 
vention of a modem theologian embarrassed by his church’s exclusivist claim 
to d i v k  grace. It has been operating within the Islamic ideational system 
for fourteen centures. Those to whom it is attributed are the paradigms of 
faith and greatness, the most honored representatives of religious life, not 
the despised though tolerated approximators of the religious ideal. Islam’s 
honoring of the ancient prophets and their followers is to be maintained even 
if the Jews and Christians stop or diminish their luyalty to them. ‘Worthier 
of Abraham are those who really follow him, this Prophet and those who 
believe in him.”3* In the Qur’an, the Christians are exalted for their self- 
discipline and humility, and they are declared the closest of all believers to 
the Muslims. “[0 Muhammad], you and the believers will find closest in lave 
and friend&+ those who say ‘I% are Ch&ians,’ for many of them are ministers 
and priests who are truly humble.”59 If, despite all this commendation of them, 

$6 The evidence of “Bu al ’Amamah (Akhetaten) is the very opposite. The EguPtian colonial 
governors in Palestine communicated with the Pharaoh not in m i a n  but in Aklradian. 
s6 Regarding the latter, Sabaho Momti wrote: -In the course of establishing themselves, 
the new proples t lpwghly absorbed the great cultural tradiion already existing. In this pro- 
cess of &so@&, MesopOtamia seems to prerail . . . . Like Rome in the Middle Ages, despite 
its political decadeoce, Mesopotamia.. .celebrates the triumph of its culture<over its d e s ) . ”  
l7te hce ofthe krcieni Orient. (New York Doubleday Anchor Books, 1962) p. 164. 
57 Leader of the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 19/641 and later Governor. 

Qur’an 3558. 
I’ Qufan 582. 



of their prophets, and of their scriptures, Jews and Christians would persist 
in opposing and rejecting the Prophet and his followers, God commanded 
all Muslims to call the Jews and Christians in these words: "0 People of the 
Book, come now with us to rally around a fair and noble principle common 
to both of us, that all of us shall worship and serve none but God, that we 
shall associate naught with Him, and that we shall not take one another as 
lords beside God. But if they still persist in their opposition, then warn them 
that We shall persist in our affirmation ."ro 

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

B. THE OTHER RELIGIONS 

Islam teaches that the phenomenon of prophecy is universal; that it 
has taken place throughout all space and time. "Every human," the Qur'an 
affirms, "is responsible for his own personal deeds. On the Day of Judgment, 
We shall produce publicly the record of such deeds and ask everyone to ex- 
amine it as it alone will be the basis of reckoning. Whoever is rightly guided is 
so to his own credit; whoever errs does so to his own discredit. There is no 
vicarious guilt; and We shall not condemn [i.e., We shall not judge] until 
We had sent a prophet."41 It follows from God's absolute justice that He would 
hold nobody responsible unless His law has been conveyed, promulgated and 
is known. Such conveyance and/or promulgation is precisely the phenomenon 
of prophecy. The same principle was operative in the ancient Near East, where 
the states carved their laws in stone stelae which they erected everywhere for 
people to read. Ignorance of the divine law is indeed an argument when it 
is not the effect of unconcern or neglect; and it is always an attenuating fac- 

'O Qur'm 3~63-64. 
" Qur'arl 1713-15. 



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 45 

tor. Being absolutely just as well as absolutely merciful and forgiving, God, 
Islam holds, left no people without a prophet to teach them the divine law. 
“There is no people,” the Qur’an asserts, “but a warnedprophet has been sent 
to them.”44 Some of these prophets are widely known; others are not. So neither 
the Jewish nor the Christian nor the Muslim ignorance of them implies their 
nonexistence. “We have indeed sent prophets before you [Muhammad]. About 
some of them We have informed you. About others We have Thus the 
whole of mankind, past and present, is capable of religious merit and felicity 
as well as of demerit and damnation, because of the universality of prophecy. 

As Islam conceives it, the divine system is one of perfect justice. 
Universalism and absolute egalitarianism are constitutive of it. Hence, the 
phenomenon of prophecy not only must needs be universally present but its 
content must needs be absolutely the same. If different in each case, the univer- 
salism of the phenomenon would have little effect. Therefore Islam teaches 
that the prophets of all times and places have taught one and the same lesson; 
that God has not differentiated among His messengers. “We have sent to every 
people a messenger,” the Qur’an affirms, ”to teach them that worship and ser- 
vice are due to God alone; that evil must be avoided [and the good pursued] .“M 
“We have sent no messenger except to convey [the divine message] in the tongue 
of his own people, to make it [the content] clearly comprehensible to them.”15 
With this reassurance, no human has any excuse for failing to acknowledge 
God, or to obey His law.” “[we have sent to every people] prophets to preach 
and to warn, that no human may have an argument against Godrs judgment 
of that individual‘s deeds] nrs 

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

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

1. Islam holds that the messages of all prophets had but one essence 

42 Qur’an 35:24. 
45 Qur‘an 4033; 4:163. 
44 Qur’an 16:36. 
45 Qur’an 14:4: 
46 Qur‘an 4:164. 



46 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

and core composed of two elements. First is tawhid, or the acknowledgment 
that God alone is God and that all worship, service, and obedience are due 
to Him alone. Second is morality, which the Qui’an defines as service to God, 
doing good, and avoiding evil, 

Each revelation had come figurkd in a code of behavior particularly 
applicable to its people, and hence relevant to their historical situation and 
conditions. This particularization does not affect the essence or core of the 
revelation. If it did, God’s justice would not be absolute and the claims of 
universalism and egalitarianism would fall to the ground. Particularization 
in the divine law must therefore affect the “how” of service, not its purpose 
or “what,” the latter being always the good, righteousness, justice, and obe- 
dience to God. If it ever affects the ”what,” it must do so only in those areas 
that are nonconstitutive and hence unimportant and accidental. This princi- 
ple has the special merit of rallying.humanity, whether potentially or actual- 
ly, around common principles of rehgion and morality; of remuving such prin- 
ciples from contention, from relativism and subjectivism.4’ 

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

2. The second cause of religious diversity is not as benevolent as 
the first. The first, we have seen, is divine; the second, human. ’Ib acknowledge 
and do the will of God conveyed through revelation is not always welcomed 
by all men. There are those with vested interests that may not agree with the 
divine dispensations, and there are numerous circumstances favoring such 
disagreement. 

First, divine revelation has practically always and everywhere ad- 
vocated charity and altruism, ministering by the rich to the material needs 
of the poor. The rich do not always acquiesce in this moral imperative and 
may incline against it. Second, divine revelation is nearly always in favor of 
ordenxi social living. It would counsel obedience of the ruled to the law and 
self-discipline. But it always does so under the assumption of a rule of justice, 

It should be added here that Islam holds its revelation to be mainly a revelation of a ”what” 
that can become a “how” befitting any historical situation. Thus, the ”how” or prescriptive 
form of the law may and does change in substance as well as in application, but not its spirit, 
purpose or ”what.” Usul a1 Eqh discipline has devised and institutionalized a system to gwern 
rhe process of evolution of the law. 



Ismail al Faruqi Tbvards A Critical World Theology 47 

which may not always be agreeable to rulers and kings who seek to have their 
own way. Their will power may incline them against the social ethic of 
revelation. 

Third, divine revelation always reminds man to measure himself by 
reference to God and His law, not by reference to himself. But man is vain; 
and self-adoration is for him a constant temptation. Fourth, revelation demands 
of humans that they discipline their instincts and keep their emotions under 
control. Humans however, are inclined to indulgence. Orgies of instinct- 
satisfaction and emotional excitement have punctuated human life. Often, this 
inclination militates against revelation. 

Fifth, where the contents of revelation are not judiciously and 
meticulously remembered, taught, and observed publicly and by the greatest 
numbers, they tend to be forgotten. When they are transmitted from genera- 
tion to generation and are not embodied in public customs observed by all, 
the divine impedves may suffer dilution, shift of emphasis, or change. Finally, 
when the divine revelation is moved across linguistic, ethnic, and cultural 
frontiers - indeed, even to generations within the same people but far remmed 
from its original recipients in time - it may well change through interpreta- 
tion. Any or all of these circumstances may bring about a corruption of the 
original revelation. 

This is why God has seen fit to repeat the phenomenon of pmphecy, 
to send forth prophets to reconvey the divine message and reestablish it in 
the minds and hearts of humans. This divine injection into history is an act 
of sheer mercy. It is continual, always ad hoc, unpredictable. To those who 
inquire, What was the rationale behind sending Muhammad (SAAS) at that 
time and place? the Qur'an answers: "God knows better where and when to 
send prophets to convey His message."48 

C. ISLAMS RELATION l?3 ALL HUMANS 

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

This relation constitutes Islam's humanism. At its root stands the 
reason for creation, man's mison detre. The first mention of the divine plan 
to create man occurs in a conversation with the angels. "I plan to place on 
earth a vicegerent for Me. The angels responded: Would you place on earth 
a being who would also do evil and shed bloc? while we always praise and 



48 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

glorify and obey You? God said: I have another purpose unknown to 
The angels, evidently, are beings created by God to act as His messengers 
and /or instruments. By nature, they are incapable of acting otherwise than 
as God instructs them to act, and hence they are incapable of morality. Their 
necessary predicament, always to do God’s bidding, differentiates them from 
the human creature God was about to place on earth. 

In another dramatic and eloquent passage, the Qur’an reports: “we 
[God] offered the trust to heaven and earth and mountain. They refused to 
carry it out of f a .  But man did carry it.”50 In the heavens, on earth, and 
in the mountains, God‘s will is fulfilled with the necessity of natural law. Crea- 
tion therehre, to the exclusion of man, is incapable of fulfilling the higher 
part of God’s will, namely, the moral law. Only man is so empowered; for 
morality requires that its fulfillment be free; that its opposite or alternative, 
that which is amoral or immoral, be possible of fulfillment by the same per- 
son at the same time and in the same respect. It is of the nature of the moral 
deed that it be done when the agent could do otherwise. Without that option 
or possibiity, morality would not be morality. If done unconsciously or under 
coercion, the moral deed might have ultilitarian but no moral value. 

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

To clarify the raison d’etre of man, the Qur‘an has rhetorically asked 
mankind: “Would you then think that We have created you in vain?”51 The 
Qur’an further praises “men of understanding” who affirm: “0 God! Certain- 
ly You have not created all this [creation] in ~ain!”~P As to the deniers of such 
a purpose for creation, the Qur’an turns to an assertive, even offensive tone. 
“Indeed We have not created heaven and earth and all that is between in vain. 
That is the presumption of unbelievers. Woe and Fire to As to the 
content of the divine purpose, the Qur‘an asserts: “And I have not created men 
andjinn except to worship/serve Me.”54 The verb Zzbada means worship as 

I9 Q u K ’ ~  2:30. 
50 QuYan 33%. 
51 Qur’an 23:116. 
51 Qur’an 3:191. 
53 Qur’an 3827. 
I 4  Qur‘an 5156. 



Ismail al Faruqi Tawards A Critical World Theolw 49 

well as serve. It has been used in this double sense in all Semitic languages. 
In the Qur‘an, it is given further elaboration by the more speciiic answers 
given to the same questions of why creation? Why man? “It is He Who created 
heaven and earth. . .that you [mankind] may prove yourselves in His eye the 
worthier in the deed.” “And it is He Who made you His vicegerents on 
earth. . .that you may prove yourselves worthy of all that He had bestowed 
upon’you.”55 

In order to enable man to fulfill his raison d’etni‘, God has created 
him capable, and “in the best of He has given him all the equipment 
necessary to achieve fulfillment of the divine imperatives. Above all, “God, 
Who created everythmg perfect. . .created man out of earth. . .perfected and 
breathed into him of His own spirit.” He has bestowed upon him “his hear- 
ing, his sight and his heart” [the cognitive faculties].57 Above all, God has 
given man his mind, his reason, and understanding, with which to discover 
and use the world in which he lives. He has made the earth and all that is 
in it - indeed, the whole of creation including the human self-malleable, 
that is, capable of change and of transformation by man’s action, of engineer- 
ing designed to fulfill man’s purposes. 

In religious language, God has made nature “subservient” to man. 
He has granted mankind “lordship” over nature. This is also the meaning of 
man’s khiZufih or vicegerency of God in the world. The Qur’an is quite em- 
phatic in this regard: “God has made the ships [the winds which drive them] 
subject to you. . . .And the rivers. . .the sun and moon, day and night.”58 “He 
has made the seas subservient to you. . .camels and cattle. . .all that is on 
earth and in heaven.”59 God has planted man on earth precisely to “reconstruct 
and use it as a usufruct”6o and to this purpose, made him “lord of the earth.”b1 
In order to make this engineering of nature and its usufruct possible, God 
has imbedded in it His s m  or patterns,”6* the so-called laws of nature which 
we know to be permanent and immutable solely through our faith that He 

55 Qur’an 11:7. 
“We have not created heaven and earth but for. . .We have created life and death. . .for you 

to prove yourselves worthier in your deeds. . . All that is on earth and all the worldly ornaments 
We have made thereof are to the purpose of men proving themselves worthier in the deed” 
(Qur’an ll:? 6:165; 18:7). 

57 Qur’an 32:7-8. 

5g Qur’an 16:14; 22:36-37, 22:65; 31-20; 45:12. 
6o Qur’an 11:61. 
61 Qur’an 67%. 

l6 Qufan 95:4. 

‘* Qur’an 14~32-33. 

Qufan 30:30; 48:23. 



50 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences W. 3, No. 1, 1986 

is not a malicious but a beneficent God.6s Reading God's patterns in nature 
or creation is equally possible in psychic or social natureu thus opening nearly 
all areas of creation to human observation and cognition, as well as a hir 
portion of the divine purpose or will. 

Besidesall this, GodhasrevealedHiswillthroughtheprophetsdirect- 
ly and immediately, and commanded them to proclaim it to their peoples in 
their own tongues. He has sent the F'rophet Muhammad with a f& version 
which he convenanted to guard against tampering and corruption,66 and which 
has been preserved intact, along with Arabic grammar and syntax, lex- 
icography, etymology, and philology - all the linguistic apparatus required 
to understand it exactly as it was revealed. Certainly this was a gratuitous 
gesture, an act of pure charity and mercy, on the part of the benevolent God. 
Its purpose is to make man's knowledge and fulfillment of the divine will easier 
and more accessible. 
Every human being, Islam affirms, stands to benefit from these divine dispen- 
sations. The road to felicity is a free and open highway which anyone may 
tread of his own accord. Everybody is innately endowed with all these rights 
and privileges. God has granted them to all without discrimination. "Nature," 
"the earth," "the heavens" - all belong to each and every human. 

Indeed, God has done all this and even more! He has implanted His 
own religion into every human at birth. The true religion is innate, a religio 
nahrmlis, with which all humans are equipped.66 Behind the dazzling religious 
diversity of mankind stands an innate religion inseparable from human nature. 
This is the primordial rewon, the Ur-Reigion, the one and only true rehgion.67 
Everyone possesses it unless acculturation and indoctrination, misguidance, 
corruption or dissuasion have taught him otherwise.6* All men, therefore, 
possess a faculty, a "sixth sense," a sensus communis with which they can 
perceive God as God. Rudolph Otto called it "the sense of the numinous"69 
and phenomenologists of rehgion have recognized it as the faculty that perceives 

On the philosophical uncertainty of the laws of nature, see Clarence Irving Lewis, Anulysis 
of Knowledge and Yaktion (Lasalle, Ill. : Open Court Publishing co., 1946) and George San- 
tayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1923). Their position, 
which is that of contemporary science, is epistemologically identical to that held by al Ghazali 
(d. 504/llll) in his controversy with the philosophers (see his Thfit a1 Falasifhh or Refuta- 
tion of the Philosophers, tr. by Sabih Kamali (Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963). 

55 Qur'an l5:9. 
56 Qur'an 30:30. 
c7 Qur'an 3:19. 

It is his parents that make him a Jew, a Magian or a Christian." 
59 Rudolph Otto, me Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). 

Qur'an 51:21; 33:62; 35:43. 

This is the substance of the Hadith, "Everyman is born with natural religion-i.e. a Muslim. 



Ismail al Faruqi T d s  A Critical World Theology 51 

the religious as “religious,” as “sacred,”70 autonomous and sui generis, without 
reductionism. 

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

Concerning morality and piety, man’s career on earth, Islam 
countenances no distinction among humans, no division of them into races 
or nations, castes or classes. All men, it holds, ”issued from a single pair: 
their division into peoples and tribes being a convention designkd for mutual 
acq~aintance.~’ “Nobler among you,” the Qur’an asserts, ”is only the more 
righte~us.”~* And the Prophet added, in his farewell sermon: “No Arab may 
have any distinction over a non-Arab, no white over non-white, except in 
righteousne~s.”~~ 

V. ISLAMIC META-RELIGION IN HISTORY 

Under these precepts, whether explicitly revealed in the ipsissimu verba 
of God or implied therein, the Prophet Muhammad (SAAS) worked out and 
proclaimed the constitution of the first Islamic state. He had barely arrived 
in Madinah (July, 622 C.E.) when he brought together all the inhabitants of 
Madinah and its environs and promulgated with them the Islamic state and 
its constitution. This event was of capital importance for the relation of Islam 
to the other religions, and of non-Muslims to Muslims of all times and places. 
Four years after the Prophet’s demise in 101632, ‘Umar ibn al Khattab (RAA), 
the second caliph, ordered that the date of promulgation of this constitution 
was so crucial for Islam as a world movement that it should be considered 
the beginning of Islamic history. 

The constitution was a covenant, whose guarantor was Allah (SWT), bet- 
ween the Prophet, the Muslims, and the Jews. It abolished the tribal system 
of Arabia under which the Arab defined himself and by which society was 

70 Mircea Eliade, Partem of Compamtive Religion (London: Shed and Ward, Ltd., undated) 
and me Sacred and the Pmlfane (New York Harper and Row, l%l). 

7z Bid. 
73 Ishaq ibn Hisham, Simt Rasul Allah (% Life of Muhammad, tr. by Alfred Guillaume (Ox- 
ford: oxford University Press, 1946). 

71 Qul-an 49:B. 



52 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 3, No. 1, 1986 

governed. Henceforth, the Arab was to be defined by Islam; his personal and 
social life was to be governed by Islamic law, the shariizh. The old tribal 
loyalties gave way to a new social bond which tied every Muslim to all other 
Muslims across tribal lines, to form the ummah. The ummuh is an organic 
body whose constituents mutually sustain and protect me another. Their per- 
sonal, reciprocal, and collective responsibilities are all defined by law. The 
Prophet was to be its chief political and juristic authority; and, as long as 
he lived, he exercised this power. After his death, his WZuhfa’(p1. of khalijizh, 
“successor”) exercised political authority, while juristic authority devolved 
exclusively upon the ’ulam’ (the jurists), who had by then developed a 
methodology for interpretation, renewal, and expansion of the sharibh. 

A. THE JEWISH UMMAH 

Alongside this ummah of Muslims stood the ummah of the Jews. Their 
old tribalist loyalties to the Arab Aws and Khazraj tribes were to be supplanted 
by the bond of Judaism. Instead of their citizenship being a function of their 
clientship to this or that Arab tribe, it was hence to be a function of their 
Jewishness. Their life was to be structured around Jewish institutions and 
governed by the Torah, their revealed law. Political authority was vested in 
the chief rabbi who was also known as Resh G l u t ,  while juristic authority 
rested with the system of rabbinic courts. Overarching both ummuhs was a 
third organization, also cdled a1 ummuh, or a1 dawluh a1 Zslamiyyah (the 
Islamic polity, government, or “state”) whose constituents were the two um- 
mhs and whose raison d’etre was the protection of the state, the conduct of 
its external affairs, and the carrying out of Islam’s universal mission. The “state” 
could conscript the UrrrmQh of Muslims in its services, whether for peace or 
for war, but not the UmMQh of Jews. Jews, however, could volunteer their ser- 
vices to it if they wished. Neither the Muslim nor the Jewish urmah was 
free to conduct any relation with a foreign power, much less to declare war 
or peace with any other state or foreign organization. This remained the ex- 
clusive jurisdiction of the Islamic state. 

The Jews, who entered freely into this covenant with the Prophet 
(SAAS) and whose status the new constitution raised from tribal clients on 
sufferance to citizens de jure of the state, later betrayed it. The sad conse- 
quence was, first, the fining of one group, followed by the expulsion of another 
p u p  found gwlty of greater offense, and finally the execution of a third group 
that plotted with the enemy to destroy the Islamic state and the Islamic move- 
ment. Although these judgments were made by the Prophet himself (SAAS), 
or by an arbiter agreed upon by the parties concerned, the Muslims did not 
understand them as directed against the Jews as such, but against the guilty 
individuals only. Islam recognizes no vicarious guilt. Hence, when the Islamic 



Ismail al F m q i  Towards A Critical World Theology 53 

state later expanded to include northern Arabia, Palestine, Jordan and Syria, 
Persia, and Egypt, where numerous Jews lived, they were automatically treated 
as innocent constituents of the Jewish ummah within the Islamic state. This 
explains the harmony and cooperation that characterized Muslim-Jewish rela- 
tions throughout the succeeding centuries. 

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

After centuries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine (Christian) oppres- 
sion and persecution, the Jews of the Near East, of North Africa, of Spain, 
and Persia, looked upon the Islamic state as a liberator. Many of them readi- 
ly helped its armies in their conquests and cooperated enthusiastically with 
the Islamic state administration. This cooperation was followed by accultura- 
tion into Arabic and Islamic culture, which produced a dazzling blossoming 
of Jewish arts, letters, sciences, and medicine. It brought affluence and prestige 
to the Jews, some of whom became ministers and advisers to the caliphs. In- 
deed, Judaism and its Hebrew language developed their “golden age” under 
the aegis of Islam. Hebrew acquired its first grammar, the Torah its most highly 
developed jurisprudence, Hebrew letters their lyrical poetry; and Hebrew 
philosophy found its first Aristotelian, Musa ibn Maymun (Maimonides), 
whose thirteen precepts, couched in Arabic first, defined the Jewish creed 
and identity. Judaism developed its first mystical thinker as well, Ibn Gabirol, 
whose 3ufi’’ thought bmught reconciliation and inner peace to Jews throughout 
Europe. Under Abd al Rahman III in Cordoba, the Jewish prime minister, 
Hasdai ben Shapirut, managed to effect reconciliation between Christian 
monarchs whom even the Catholic Church could not bring together. All this 
was possible because of one Islamic principle on which it all rested, namely, 
the recognition of the Torah as revelation and of Judaism as God‘s religion, 
which the Qur’an attested and proclaimed. 

B. THE CHRIsT1AN UMMAH 

Shortly after the conquest of Makkah by Muslim forces in 8/630, the 
Christians of Najran in Yaman sent a delegation of chieftains to meet the Pro- 
phet (SAAS) in Madinah. Their purpose was to clairfy their position vis-a- 
vis the Islamic state, and that of the state vis-a-vis them. The conquest of 
Makkah had made the Islamic state a power to reckon with in the region. 



54 b l .  3, No. 1, 1986 

The delegates were the guests of the Prophet (SAAS), and he received them 
in his house and entertained them in his mosque. He explained Islam to them 
and called them to convert to his faith and cause. Some of them did and in- 
stantly became members of the Muslim wnmah. Others did not. "hey chose 
to remain Christian, and to join the Islamic state as Christians. The Prohpet 
constituted them as a Christian ummah, alongside the Jewish and Muslim' 
d, within the Islamic state. He sent with them one of his companions, 
Mu'adh ibn Jabal (RAA), to represent the Islamic state in their midst. They 
converted to Islam in the period of the second caliph (2-14/634-646), but the 
Christian ummah in the Islamic state continued to grow by the expansion of 
its frontiers to the north and west. Indeed, for the greater part of a century, 
the majority of the citizens of the Islamic state were Christians, enjoying 
respect, liberty, and a new dignity they had not enjqred under either Chris- 
tian Rome or Byzantium. Both these powers were imperialist and racist and 
they tyrannized their subjects as they colonized the territories ofthe Near East. 

An objective account of the conversion of the Christians of the Near 
East to Islam14 should be required reading far all, especially for those stiIl 
laboring under the Crusades-old prejudicethat Islam was spread among chfis- 
tians by the sword. Christians lived in peace and prospered under Islam fbr 
centuries, during which time the Islamic state saw righteous as well as tyran- 
nic sultans and caliphs. Had it been a part of Islamic sentiment to do away 
with the Christian presence, it could have been done without a ripple in the 
world or history. But it was Islam's respect for and acknowledgment of Jesus 
as Prophet of God and of his Evangel (Gospel) ,as revelation that safeguarded 
that presence. The same is true of Abyssinia, a neighboring Christian state, 
which harbored the fust Muslim emigrants from the m t h  of Makkah and 
maintained with the Islamic state at the time of the Prophet a covenant of 
peace and friendship. The expansive designs of the Islamic state never in- 
cluded Abyssinia precisely on that account. 

American Journal of Islamic Social ScKnCes , 

C. U .  OF OTHER RELJGIONS 
, 

Persids incursion into Arabia had left behind it some, though very few, 
Arab converts to the Zoroastrian hith. A larger number of these lived in the 
buffer desert zone between Persia and Byzantium, and in Shatt al 'Arab, the 
lower region of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, where Arabia 
and Persia overlapped. Notable among the Persian Zoroastrians in Arabia 
was Salman al Farisi (RAA), who converted to Islam before the Hi.& and 
became one of the illustrious companions of the Prophet (SAAS). 

1s 

tions, l%l). 
m, Ihe Rwching aflslanr (London: 1906, Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf Publica- 



Ismail al Faruqi Tawards A Critical World Theology 55 

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

Following the conquest of India by Muhammad bin Qasim in 91/7Ll, 
the Muslims faced new religions which they had never known before, Bud- 
dhism and Hinduism. Both religions coexisted in Sind and the Punjab, the 
regions conquered by Muslims and joined to the Islamic state. Muhammad 
bin Qasim sought instruction from the caliph in Damascus on how to treat 
Hindus and Buddhists. They appeared to worship idols, and their doctrines 
were at the farthest remove from Islam. Their founden were unheard of by 
Muslims. The caliph called a council of trlama and asked them to render 
judgment on the basis of the governor‘s report. The judgment was that as long 
as Hindus and Buddhists did not fight the Islamic state, as long as they paid 
the jizyah or tax due, they must be free to worship their gods as they please, 
to maintain their temples, and to determine their lives by the precepts of their 
faith. Thus, the same status as that of the Jews and Christians was accorded 
to them.75 

The principle governing Islam and the Islamic state’s relations with 
other religions and their adherents had thus been established. It was im- 
plemented as the Islamic state e n t e d  into relations with those adherents, 
a pmess that took place either during the Prophet’s life or very won after 
it. When the sharihh crystallized in prescriptive form, the status, rights, and 
obligations of Muslim and non-Muslim citizens were already included. For 
fourteen centuries in many places, or less because of a later arrival of Islam 
or the imposition of Western law by colonial administrations, the shanhh suc- 
cessfully governed Muslim - non-Muslim relations. It created a ntodus viven- 
di which enabled the non-Muslims to perpetuate themselves - hence their 
continuing presence in the Muslim world - and to achieve felicity as defin- 
ed by their awn faiths. 

Al Kufl’s Shah-Nanrah, tr. by H. M. Elliott in his 2 7 ~  History ofIndia 0s Told by Its Own 
Historians (London: 1867-77, Vol 1, pp. 184-87). 



56 American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences b l .  3, No. 1, 1986 

The atmosphere of the Islamic state was one replete with respect and 
honor to religion, piety, and virtue, unlike the tolerance of modem thes  in 
the West born out of skepticism regarding the truth of religious claims, of 
cynicism and unconcern for religious values. The Islamic shan’zzh is other- 
wise knmn as the millah or millet system (meaning “religious communities”), 
or the Bhimmuh” or Zmi system (meaning the covenant of peace whose 
dhimmuh or guarantor is God). 

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

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

VI. CONCLUSION: THE CRITICAL METHODOLOGY OF ISLAM 

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

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



Ismail al Faruqi Towards A Critical World Theology 57 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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