The Concept of Din (Religion) in the Qur’an as Interpreted by Ismail al-Faruqi

NOTES FROM THE IIIT CONFERENCE ON APPROACHING THE QUR’AN AND SUNNAH #5

[This is the fifth in a series of my notes on the International Institute of Islamic Thought conference on approaching the Qur’an and Sunnah held in Herndon VA. These notes are raw material for an edited report I will write on the conference later and represent my perception of the discussion. The proceedings will be published by IIIT at a later time. The Minaret of Freedom Institute thanks IIIT for the grant that makes the publication of these notes possible. Responsibility for any errors in the notes is mine alone.]

Fifth Session, Moderator: Iqbal Unus
Paper presentation by Imtiyaz Yusuf
“The Concept of Din (Religion) in the Qur’an as interpreted by Ismail al-Faruqi”

I focus on two books of Faruqi: Uruba and Religion and Essence of Religious Experience in Islam. I think it is a mistake to view the early Faruqi as an Arab nationalist. Rather he was concerned with Arab consciousness in which identity is religious rather than ethnic. He meant that you should understand Islam as the Arabs understand it. He was trained as a scholar and a philosopher of religion. Religion is a divine-human enterprise with a practical application. In Arab consciousness religion is a struggle between monotheism and polytheism.

He has three approaches to the Qur’an: ideational, axiological (ummatism) and esthetic (evident from the esthetics of Qur’anic language). Qur’an mentions dîn in 94 places. Western scholars mention how focus moves from Yawm ud-din in the Meccan period to a more communal focus in the Medinan period. Asad speaks of dîn as moral law. Maududi talks about dîn as clarified for the Arabs by the Qur’an. For Faruqi, Arabs (“Semites”) are the founders of monotheism and tawhid transforms the Arabs.

The ideational spirit is universalist and predates Islam. Three phases: Judaic (B.C.), Christian (birth of Jesus to Hijra), and Islamic (after Hijra).  For him the Jews were always monotheist, but the separatism came later, opposed by hanifi monotheism. Arab versions of Christianity are a movement of universal ethical monotheism against Hebrew separatism. It is tolerant, affirmative, and monotheistic. Islam is the triumph of monotheism over polytheism.

Monotheism is to see God’s will alone as normative. Universalism, life affirmation, etc. are values realizable in the world. Dîn is worship of the transcendent God who is unknown and unknowable, but we may yet know God’s will which is sufficient for every practical purpose. God is a presupposition of being which is to be realized in life. He claims non-Arab Muslims have to struggle with these notions, which is why they lean toward metaphorical interpretations. Pax Islamica has never been religiously monolithic.

Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab need to struggle to understand what dîn means in Arab consciousness. Phenomenology can help. We are bogged down in tribal and ethnic issues, of ethno-religious conflicts misperceived as religious conflicts.

Discussant 1: Ahmad Kazemi Mousavi

Thee are many points in in Uruba that I cannot understand in a non-nationalist interpretation. Why were the Prophet’s worst problems in a confrontation with Arabs? The Qur’an doesn’t support this kind of Uruba. Many Persian words are used in the Qur’an because there was already an interaction with Persian and even other languages.

Discussant 2: Khaled Troudi

The Islamic concept of progressive revelation leads to the concept of ad-din al-haqq, the (one) true religion. Because of the connection abd, there is the element of servanthood. 3:19, 85. “Surely the true religion with Allah is Islam” is understood by Tabari and Tabrisi to mean Islam and din have the same meaning. For Ibn Kathir, it mans no other religion is acceptable to God. Classical Shia tafsir interpretation of these verses should also be taken into account.

Response by Imtiyaz Yusuf

I agree with Dr. Kazemi on the problems that nationalism poses for us, but Faruqi’s Arabism is different. I mentioned Ibn Khaldun to him and he insisted Ibn Khaldun is about tribal identity, not religion.

Abubaker Al-Shingieti: I make a distinction between Uruba and nationalism of the Nassaite sort. Islam takes the universalist aspect of Uruba to a new level. Let me give one example. The Arabs of central Arabia differed from those in the north and south because the latter two had kings while those of the center typically did not, but elected their leaders from those they thought the wisest or the most generous.

Khaleel Muhammad: Did Dr. Faruqi speak Hebrew?

Yusuf: I think so.

Muhammad: There is an institutional backlash against Faruqi where is seen as the “angry Palestinian.”

Aisha Musa: Give us concrete examples of the distinction between Arab and non-Arab Musims?

Al-Shingieti: Faruqi has always been seen as political scholar and his other achievements are under-appreciated. Faruqi doesn’t like terms Semitic and Hamitic because they have been exploited to make divisions in what he sees as a continuous community. He was a Mu`tazalite in the sense that he avoided anthropomorphism, trying to keep the conception of God as transcendent as possible. He has problems with the Sufis like ibn Arabi. For him the non-Arab is the one who brings his ethnic culture into their understanding of Islam.

Mehmet Ata Az: What does suppositional being mean?

Yusuf: He was rejecting the Western notion that God is pure idea.

Ayoub: Whenever we know something, we limit the object of our knowledge. The finite cannot encompass the infinite. This is not a problem at all; it is the reality. My problem with Dr. Faruqi’s ideas is that if we look at the history of Arab thought, his notion of Uruba is not new. Even if he says he disagrees with the Nassarists and Baathists, they influenced him. Like Wagner speaking of the Teutonic spirit. Uruba was invented by Christians seeking to promote their space in a Muslim dominated society. We can speak of Queen Zenobia, and yes they were interesting cultures, but we should not make too much of them. What brought Arabs to the fore was not Uruba, but Islam. The Arabs were always colonized in their own homes. The Arabs conquered Persia, but Persia conquered the Arabs. The greatest Arab grammarian was a Persian. Before Islam the Arabs were not much. How can we say Ibn Sina was an Arab when he himself said he was a Persian? It is a romantic notion that doesn’t square with history.

Kenneth “Abdul-Hadi” Honercamp: I find the Uruba discourse dated.

Ayoub: A man saw the Prophet surrounded by Salman and Bilal and said “Who are these people?” The Prophet came and said “Whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab.”

Sami Catovic: I think this “Arab consciousness” is reallyh an Islamic consciousness.

Ahmad: If Faruqi really believed that Ibn Khaldun spoke only of tribalism, then I must side with Dr. Mousavi that Faruqi’s Uruba is not completely free of nationalism. I also agree with Dr. Shingieti, but we find many elements in the hadith and even in modern Arab discourse that still reflect a notion of privilege for the Arabs. Perhaps the issue is not ethnic but linguistic. Can one have an Arab consciousness (in Faruqi’s sense) without speaking Arabic fluently? As to the aversion of the Arabs of central Arabia for kings, they seem to have overcome that in recent times, even as they insist they have the only true understanding of Islam! It seems to me likely that Faruqi’s understanding of Uruba evolved and his conversations with students such as yourself may have helped in that evolution.  I often find my own understanding evolves form the attempt to explain ideas to my students; why should that not have been the case with Faruqi? Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman, who knew Faruqi in both periods of his life, is among those who have told me that Faruqi’s ideas in these areas did change.

Yusuf: Faruqi did like classical music, but he did not like Wagner because, he said, Wagner was a fascist. Abu Sulayman says Faruqi was an idealist.

Ayoub: The Arabic language before Islam was a private language, not a religious language. Islam made the Arabic language a religious language. The Bible was translated into Arabic after the coming of Islam. You have to square Faruqi with history. Mazrui says we took the religion, not the language.

Ahmed Rafiq: Of my studies in the U.S. Indonesian professor always cautioned me “Beware of the liberal Muslims.” When I told him I am at Temple, where Faruqi taught, he said “Oh, that’s OK.” Followers of the local religions say that although they worship many gods, they still believe in a Supreme God.

Mousavi: Maybe Faruqi’s struggle was a search for a new Arab identity because in the 1950s religion was not so prominent and he gave it up [or revised it] later, but in this paper it is presented as a substitute [proxy?] for Islam.

Yusuf: I appreciate the concept of Uruba in terms of what is the Arab contribution to religion. It wasn’t nothing.

Ahmad: A Jewish comedian said he would not let his children listen to classical music. When asked what is wrong with Mozart, he said, “Nothing, but if they listen to Mozart, the next thing You know they are listening to Beethoven, and you know what that can lead to: Wagner!”

Safi: Maybe Faruqi’s notion of Uruba is easier to accept if we look at the analog of Anglo-Saxon culture and its relationship to liberalism and modern democracy.

Yusuf: Faruqi’s vision of “Islamization of knowledge” was not to create ideological factories, but that is what we have gotten in the universities inspired by him.

Al-Shingieti: Even Arab nationalists are now on the margins of discourse in the Arab world. Faruqi’s idealiam and romanticism was important for his evolution as an intellectual. He not only imagined the future but engaged in a process of planning institutions, including IIIT. Uruba was a romantic idea, but it was real in a sense. Faruqi looked at history and reconstructed the idea from the history of the Arabs. Certainly in Arab poetry were ideas that were unique and up-to-date. It is important to look at the dialectic of particularity and universality at play in the phenomenal expression of Uruba in specific cultural terms.

Ayoub: I like the point about the dialectic between the Arab and Islam. If we look at history we see the Arabs of central Arabia had a rudimentary culture. They had good poets, but what else? Maybe that is the divine plan. The first period of Islamic civilization is the Ummayyad period, moving the capital of Islam from Medina to Kufa and Damascus, which made it part of Mediterranean civilization. The Abbassids replanted the capital from the Byzantine, almost Mediterranean, Damascus to the different culture of Baghdad. Islamic culture only really blossomed with the infusion of other cultures, including Greek, a multi-cultural mix in the Arabic language. Can we call it Uruba? I don’t think so. It would cause a lot of historical problems. What motivated Faruqi we don’t know, but his contribution cannot be denied. He may not have known Hebrew, but he knew French [and English] and he knew the West. When I see Uruba I see Michel Aflaq.

Honercamp: Uruba seems to be all-inclusive, except for the Sufis. What was their crime?

Yusuf: They were corrupted.

Honercamp: So we throw out the baby with the bath water?

Yusuf: There was also their allegorical interpretation; he was influenced by Ibn Taymiyyah.

Ayoub: Ibn Tyamiyyah was a Kurd. Faruqi’s understanding of Sufism was sophisticated.

Catovic: A lot of modernists seem to have adopted the Westerners’ notions of Sufism, including its foreignness, perhaps an example of cultural authority.

Ayoub: We misrepresent what Sufim has done in Islamic history. After the fall of Baghdad the center of Islamic civilization ceased to be geographic and became spiritual. Without Sufi influence and work Islam would not have taken root as it did, peacefully, not just by “professional Sufis,” but traders, etc. When the colonialists, esp. the French and Italians, tried to de-Islamize societies, it was the Sufis who preserved Islam. People are not looking for “do’s and don’ts” they are looking for spiritual nourishment.

Yusuf: That is why Rumi is the best selling poet in the U.S.

Ahmad: Maybe that explains the appeal of the Gulen movement. They have adopted the spirituality of Sufism, but dispenses with the authoritarianism of the tariqa.

Catovic: And replaced it with the authoritarianism of a cult.

Safi: Sufism also captured culture with the music and dance.

Yusuf: I’ve never understood how Faruqi could be a Mu`tazilite who translated Abdul-Wahhab.

Honercamp: There are two discourses going on, us with those who misrepresent Islam and within the community us who misrepresent Sufism.

Yusuf: We have this problem with how Sufism is practiced back home. I enjoy it very much, but then my rational part comes in and says “No!”

Ayoub: Someone said Sufism was a reality without a name; now it is a name without a reality.

Ahmad: Rejectionism is a vulnerability we must all guard against. Islmamophobes and Wahabis aren’t the only ones who make the flaws of their targets into an excuse to throw out baby with the bathwater. When I mentioned Gulen I heard several shouts of “cult.” What evidence has anyone of cult-like activity in the movement?

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
www.minaret.org