Ismail Raji al Faruqi  January 1, 1921 – May 27, 1986) was a Palestinian-American philosopher. He spent several years at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, then taught at several universities in North America, including McGill University in Montreal. He was Professor of Religion at Temple University, where he founded and chaired the Islamic Studies program. Al-Faruqi was also the founder of the International Institute of Islamic Thought. He wrote over 100 articles for various scholarly journals and magazines in addition to 25 books, of the most notable being Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas. He also established the Islamic Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion and chaired it for ten years. He served as the vice-president of the Inter-Religious Peace Colloquium, The Muslim-Jewish-Christian Conference and as the president of the American Islamic College in Chicago.

With the completion of the knowledge formation, Dr. Ismail Al-Farouqi moved again to the United States, where he worked since the late fifties as a professor of the philosophy of religions in a number of American and Western universities, and he has distinguished books in this field. In English and has not been Arabized, we mention among them: Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World, The Great Asian Religions, Christian Ethics. Close to this are his writings on the Jews and the Zionist phenomenon, such as The Origins of Zionism in the Jewish Religion and the Islam and The Problem of Israel, books that were praised by the thinker Abdel Wahhab Al-Masiri in his encyclopedia (Jews, Judaism and Zionism) as being able to transcend the political and reach the epistemological understanding of phenomena associated with the Jews.

Professor Ismail Raji al Faruqi was a co-founder of International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS). He was also the founder of the Islamic Studies program in the Department of Religion at Temple University. A distinguished scholar of Islam and comparative religions, trained at Indiana University and McGill University, Professor Faruqi authored, with his wife Dr. Lamya al Faruqi – a distinguished scholar of Islamic art – the seminal work titled The Cultural Atlas of Islam. His book on Christian Ethics was only one of many outstanding books and publications that spoke of his command of the subject. Ismail and Lamya were both murdered in their home in Philadelphia on May 26, 1986 in circumstances that have never been resolved.

ISMAIL RAJI AL FARUQI SEMINAR (UK) - 2010

A two days international seminar on The Legacy of Ismail Al-Faruqi: Thought and Institution was held on 6-7 June 2010 at the University of Westminster in London. The seminar was jointly organized by The Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminister, London, UK, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, USA and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, (IIIT) UK and USA.

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