إسماعيل راجي الفاروقي
Ismāʿīl Rājī al Fārūqī
Person
Palestinian-American scholar of Islam and comparative religion (1921–1986), professor at Temple University, and a principal source for this site’s Glossary.
What it means
Born in Jaffa, Palestine, in 1921, he studied at the American University of Beirut, took master’s degrees in philosophy at Indiana University in 1949 and at Harvard University in 1951, and his doctorate at Indiana in 1952. He then studied Islam in Cairo and Christianity at the Faculty of Divinity of McGill University. He taught at McGill, in Karachi and Cairo, and at Syracuse University, and in 1968 became professor of Islamic studies and history of religions at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he taught until his death.
His work ranged across the study of religion, Islamic thought, ethics, aesthetics and the meeting of faiths, and he set out a new reading of tawḥīd (the unity of God) and its bearing on knowledge. With Fazlur Rahman and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, he was among the most prominent scholars of Islam in North American universities from the 1960s. He and his wife, the scholar Lois Lamya al Faruqi, were murdered in 1986.
What the sources say
The biography follows the front matter of his Islam: Religion, Practice, Culture and World Order, with an introduction by Imtiyaz Yusuf (London and Washington: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012), pp. vii, ix, xi and xv. The terms and Arabic forms in this Glossary follow his Toward Islamic English, and articles on this site cite both works.