Ismail Al-Faruqi - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Al-Faruqi was born in Jaffa, Palestine. His father, 'Abd al-Huda al-Faruqi, was an Islamic judge (qadi) and a religious man well-versed in Islamic scholarship. Faruqi received his religious education at home from his father and in the local mosque. He began to attend the French Dominican College Des Frères (St. Joseph) in 1936.

His first appointment was as a Registrar of Cooperative Societies (1942) under the British Mandate government in Jerusalem, which appointed him in 1945 the district governor of Galilee. When Israel became an independent Jewish state in 1948, al-Faruqi at first emigrated to Beirut, Lebanon, where he studied at the American University of Beirut, then enrolled the next year at Indiana University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, obtaining his M.A. in philosophy in 1949. He was then accepted for entry into Harvard University's department of philosophy and was awarded his second M.A. in philosophy there in March 1951, with a thesis entitled Justifying the Good: Metaphysics and Epistemology of Value (1952). His dissertation was deeply influenced by the phenomenology of Max Scheler (1874–1928), particularly the latter's notion of axiological intuitionism. Al-Faruqi argued that Scheler's axiological intuitionism privileged feeling as knowing, thus recognizing the logic of the heart as an a priori emotional intuition of value. Such recognition could justify carving out a conceptual as well as practical space for the emergence of a critique of post-Enlightenment Reason from the standpoint of a non-Western philosopher. However, he decided to return to Indiana University; he submitted his thesis to the Department of Philosophy and received his Ph.D in September 1952. By then he had a background in classical philosophy and the developing thought of the western tradition. In the beginning of 1953, he and his wife were in Syria. He then moved to Egypt, where he studied at Al-Azhar University (1954–1958) and viewed as similar to acquiring another Ph.D.

In 1958, al-Faruqi was offered a position as a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Divinity at McGill University in Canada. During his two-year tenure at McGill he studied Christian theology and Judaism, and became acquainted with the famous Pakistani Muslim philosopher Fazlur Rahman. During these years, al-Faruqi was preoccupied with his anti-Zionist Arab identity. Rahman reminisced in 1986 that al-Faruqi's blunt anti-Zionism and his refusal to play the detached scholar "frightened" his McGill colleagues. Although he was soft-spoken with unfailing smiles, at McGill he was considered to be, in Rahman's words, "an angry young Muslim Palestinian". In order to challenge al-Faruqi's Arabo-centric views of Islam, and to broaden his scope of understanding the ummah, in 1961, Rahman arranged a two-year appointment for him in Pakistan at the Central Institute of Islamic Research. Rahman intended to expose al-Faruqi to the cultural diversity of Muslims and their contributions to Islam. "Except", Rahman (1986) later recalled, "it was his Arabism which drew a great deal of fire both inside and outside the Institute, as well as his academic preference for Cairo".