Between daʿwa and Dialogue: Religious Engagement in Muslim-minority Environments

ABSTRACT

Muslim engagement in interfaith and intercultural dialogue began in earnest after the turn of the twenty-first century in response to the rise of global jihad. Both dialogue and jihad are outgrowths of daʿwa, the call or mission of Islam, the principal mode of modern Islamic activism. The foundations were laid in the later part of the twentieth century by Muslim intellectual-activists living in non-Muslim environments, who played a special role in conceptualizing the new notion of dialogue and its relation to daʿwa. This essay focuses on four pioneering figures, two from the indigenous context of India – the modernist Asghar Ali Engineer and the reformist ʿālim Wahiduddin Khan, and two from the diaspora milieu of the West – the Palestinian-American academic activist Ismail Raji al-Faruqi and the European Muslim spokesman Tariq Ramadan. Each represents a distinct religious orientation that also reflects a different phase in the evolution of modern Islamic discourse. Taken together, these intellectual-activists chart the trajectory of modern Islam from the early pre-Islamist liberal hopes to the present post- and neo-Islamist efforts to navigate between Western-dominated globalization and Islamist jihadism.

KEYWORDS:

• Interfaith dialogue
• daʿwa
• Islamism
• Muslim-minority intellectuals
• India
• USA
• Western Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Itzchak Weismann http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1888-8784

Notes

1 A recent guide of interfaith dialogue sponsored by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the Islamic Society in North America (ISNA) begins with an incident that took place at the Islamic Center of Rochester, New York, in 2010. A talk on interfaith dialogue met with resistance and got out of control when one of the audience declared that this was unbelief leading to hellfire and that the speaker should check his commitment to Islam (Shafiq and Abu-Nimer 2011, xi).

2 For the development of practices of interfaith dialogue in the Western world, see O'Mahony and Siddiqui 2001; Smith 2007. For South Asia, see Bigelow 2010.

3 Muslim writers nevertheless often cross over between mission and dialogue. See e.g. Sakr 2007; Bin Humaid 2010. The latter was a member of the Saudi Committee of Senior Scholars, the former a Lebanese-born American who was a founding member of the Muslim Students Association in the United States and the first representative of the Muslim World League to the United Nations.

4 For a discussion of the term Islamism and the various organizations and movements belonging to this trend, see Osman 2016.

5 Among Asghar Ali’s numerous books that testify to his continuous preoccupation with the subject, see Engineer 1984, 1995b, 2007a.

6 On Ahmad Khan, see the classic, Smith 1946, 14–46. On Asghar Ali’s attitude to him, see Engineer 2001d, 191–202.

7 For studies supporting these claims see, Friedmann 1971; Eaton 2000.

8 Interview with Sayyid M. Saeed at ISNA conference in Chicago, 6 September 2015.

9 Khurshid Ahmad represents a parallel view from the other side of the Atlantic. He was a member of the Islamist Jamaʿat-i Islami movement in Pakistan and a founder in 1968 of the Islamic Foundation in Leicester. On him, see Siddiqui 1997, 123–135.

10 First presented at the International Conference of the Fifteenth Century Hijrah at Kuala Lumpur, 24 November – 4 December 1981.

11 For al-Faruqi’s initiative on the subject, see the proceedings of the session he organized as part of the American Academy of Religion conference in 1979 (al-Faruqi 1982b, IX–XI).

12 For Muslim apprehensions about the Catholic and Protestant approach, see Siddiqui 1997, 50–56.

13 For a detailed exposition of these ideas, see Khan 2010.

14 Interview with Mawlana Wahiduddin Khan at ISNA conference in Chicago, 7 September 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) under [grant number 952/15].