1921–1986 · Mandate Palestine; United States · Philosopher, historian of religions, educationist
Ismāʿīl Rājī al-Fārūqī was born in 1921 in Jaffa, in Mandate Palestine, into a family of judges and religious scholars. He was educated at a French Catholic school and at the American University of Beirut, and served briefly as a district governor in the Mandate administration. After the war of 1948 he left for the United States, where he took graduate degrees in philosophy at Indiana University and Harvard, writing on the foundations of ethics. Feeling that he lacked a grounding in the Islamic sciences, he then spent four years at al-Azhar in Cairo.
Al-Fārūqī taught at McGill University, at the Central Institute of Islamic Research in Karachi, at Syracuse University, and from 1968 at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he built a programme in Islamic studies and became a leading figure in the comparative study of religion. His early writing on Arab identity (On Arabism: ʿUrubah and Religion, 1962) gave way to a more universal Islamic emphasis, and he wrote critical studies of Judaism, Zionism and Christian ethics as well as works of interreligious dialogue.
His central idea was tawḥīd, the unity of God, treated as the organising principle of thought, ethics, society and art; this is the subject of Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life (1982). Convinced that the crisis of the Muslim world was above all intellectual and educational, he co-founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought in 1981 and set out a programme for the ‘Islamization of Knowledge’, which sought to reconcile modern academic disciplines with an Islamic worldview.
Al-Fārūqī and his wife, the art historian Lois Lamyāʾ al-Fārūqī, with whom he wrote The Cultural Atlas of Islam (1986), were murdered at their home near Philadelphia in May 1986. His project continued through IIIT and allied universities, notably in Malaysia, and remains a reference point in debates on Islamic education and epistemology.
