Loving America and Longing

for Home: Ismail al-Faruqi

and the Emergence of the Muslim
Diaspora in North America
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi*

ABSTRACT
In this paper, I weave the experience of an emerging community of Muslim
diaspora around a biographical narrative of the Muslim activist and scholar
Ismail al-Faruqi. Through this narrative, I illustrate that the diasporic
experience begins in the place of origin and it does not inevitably lead
toward a perpetual hybridization. The latter point is particularly significant
because notions of diaspora and hybridity are conceptually linked and are
often understood as a unidirectional cutting and mixing between the West
and the East, or between the modern and the traditional. Al-Faruqis
experience shows that, in a Fanonian sense of colonialism, diasporic
experience conveys living as a stranger, at and away from home.
The postcolonial condition has made it possible for ethnically diverse
communities of Muslims to reside in the West, but maintain strong
connections with their place of origin. Adopting the allegory of the Prophets
migration or hijra, al-Faruqi constructed a fantastic notion of the ummah
and a normative homo islamicus subject. Although he was profoundly
influenced by the diversity of the Muslim Student Associations
constituency, al-Faruqi encouraged Muslims to transcend their differences
and sought to conceive a discursively homogenous ummah. Ultimately,
however, his project failed because it did not correspond to real life
experiences of Muslims of the West. Historically, Muslim communities have
negotiated the boundaries of Muslimhood and the social responsibilities it
entails, both in their homelands and in their new home in the West a new
home that increasingly becomes hostile to their presence, and thereby
further complicates their triangular diaspora/host society/homeland
relationship.
* Department of Sociology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK,
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

2004 IOM
International Migration Vol. 42 (2) 2004
ISSN 0020-7985

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Ghamari-Tabrizi

INTRODUCTION
Each generation of immigrants or diasporic communities generate their own
identity entrepreneurs (Lal, 1997), those who situate themselves in the position of constructing and disseminating new forms of identity, who take it upon
themselves to define and give meaning to the experience of living away from
home. For a large number of American Muslim immigrants, Ismail al-Faruqi
symbolized how an emerging Muslim diaspora communitys attempt to construct
a Muslimhood which remains in perpetual tension between displacement and
settlement, between rupture and continuity. Through his biographical narrative,
I shall argue that al-Faruqis experience of displacement and his Islamization
project neither represented an intentional hybridity, nor led to the emergence
of an organic hybridity (Werbner and Modood, 1997). That is to say that
he neither intended to intentionally disrupt the sense of order and continuity
in Muslims communities ( la Salman Rushdie), nor did he integrate unconsciously new elements of culture and language of everyday life experiences
into his new discourse of Muslimhood. He navigated between the two without
ever belonging to either tendency.
For communities of Muslim immigrants, the question of assimilation, or their
lack of, has been entangled, on the one hand, with the perceived incommensurability of imagined or actual Islamic ways of life with Western cultural
norms and social order (Esposito and Haddad, 1998), and on the other hand,
with questions about their loyalty and commitment to their new home (Pipes,
1990, 2002). This predicament became more central and controversial in
Muslim communities of the West particularly after the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the emergence of the War on Terror with its antagonistic civilizational overtones.
Not only does the Muslims presence in the West disturb the aesthetic sensibilities of the European and American social landscape, their religious practices
call into question foundational premises of secular liberalism in their host societies. In France, for example, Dominique Schnapper (1991) put it bluntly that
since Muslims social praxis is not informed by the principle of distinction
between the private and public, Islam poses a dilemma with regard to the French
national tradition. Koranic rules concerning individual rights, she argued,
not only contradict French common law but are also in conflict with social
customs and dominant values. She stressed that limits ought to be imposed on
the principle of respect for particularlisms in the national context (Schnapper,
1991: 360-361). The French experience points to a more general conceptual as
well as practical issue of how the boundaries of the particular is negotiated and
how it is situated in a national/global frame (Wayland, 1997).

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63

The Rushdie Affair of 1986 brought to the surface the predicament of Muslim
immigrants more than any event in recent history. While the Affair became
synonymous with Ayatollah Khomeinis fatwa (religious edict) calling for
Rushdies death, nevertheless, and more importantly, it was a dramatic manifestation of the cultural politics of British Muslims. During riots and rallies in Bradford
and Birmingham, Salman Rushdies cultural translation (Bhabha, 1991) became
the target of the wrath of migrs whose cultures were supposedly translated in
his book.1
The Rushdie Affair epitomized what Edward Said had described as the
contradiction between plurality of terrains, multiple experiences and different
constituencies (Said, 1986: 228) versus commitment to a fundamental human
and intellectual obligation to the freedom of expression (Said, 1984: 30). One
might plausibly argue that this contradiction could have been easily avoided.
There should be enough room for intellectual obligations of any sort in a plural
terrain room for both Salman Rushdie and his Muslim critics (Prakash, 1992).
But as James Clifford (1988) once wrote, the privilege of standing above cultural particularism, of appealing to the universalist power that speaks for
humanity, for universal experience of love, work, death, etc., is a privilege
invented by totalizing Western liberalism (1988: 263).
Stuart Hall (1992) and Homi Bhabha (1991) located the migr experience in the
West as suspended between two totalizing positions: religious/ethnic absolutists
and the liberal universalists. Neither, according to Bhabha (1991), represent the
values of the multiracial society that we [?] identify with, either as political ideal
or as a social reality (1991: 10). The Rushdie Affair prompted British liberals
to defend the ideals of integration, and to warn against the transgressions of
fundamentalism. They asked Muslims not to isolate themselves in the host society, and invited them to integrate into British society properly without
abandoning their faith (Asad, 1990).
Muslim immigrants experience in the United States is historically and politically
distinct from Europe, particularly in the context of the American assimilationist
ideology of the melting pot. Despite these differences, Muslim immigrants
have faced the same institutional barriers and cultural conflicts in the United
States. For example, John Esposito and Yvonne Haddad (1998) have organized
their recent collected volume around the central question: Will [the recent
immigrants] remain Muslims in America or become American? In the introduction of the book, Esposito raised the following pointed questions:
Can Muslims become part and parcel of a pluralistic American society without
sacrificing or losing their identity?...The primary question facing Muslims in
America is whether or not they can live Muslim lives in a non-Muslim

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territory...Especially for immigrants raised in Muslim-majority countries, this is

a particularly vexing question...They continue to differ, debating questions
such as whether they should vote, whether they are bound by Islamic (divine)
or secular (man-made) laws, and whether they should participate with nonMuslim neighbours in community life and fully accept and defend a non-Muslim
homeland (Esposito and Haddad, 1998: 3-7).

Espositos questions point to several problems pertaining to Muslim communities in North America: (1) do Muslims want to become part and parcel of a
pluralistic American society? (2) if so, what parts of their identities would they
need to reconsider and what kinds of identities would they need to re-articulate?
(3) are Muslims in America coming from societies in which they are bound in
their civic and political life by Islamic laws? If so, are they unfamiliar with
secular (man-made) laws? (4) does participation in community life and corporate politics undermine their Muslimhood?
Esposito and Haddad, and many of the contributors to their books (Esposito and
Haddad, 1998; Haddad, 1991) base their conception of Muslims experience in
North America on an assimilationist national ideology. They address immigrants
experience of loss and nostalgia, but only en route, to borrow from James
Clifford (1997), to a whole new home in a new place (1997: 250). The advocates of this assimilationist approach, on the one hand, reduce Muslims life
experience prior to their migration to their religious praxis, and thereby
problematize the processes of their integration into a secular society. And, on
the other hand, they neglect the dual orientation of diaspora communities,
(Werbner, 2000a, 2000b), a common feature of postcolonial immigration in
which transnational bonds and alliances persist through global transportation
and communication networks.2 As Pnina Werbner argued, while diaspora communities fight for citizenship rights and inclusion in the host society, they continue
to foster transnational relations and to lie with a sense of displacement and
of loyalty to other places and groups beyond the place of settlement (2000a: 5).
In contrast to this postcolonial diasporic notion of migration, assimilationist
approaches are designed to integrate immigrants, not people of diasporas
(Clifford, 1997: 250).
Invoking the language of diaspora carries different kinds of political, cultural,
and historical currencies, the most important of which is identification with a
point of origin. Clifford (1997) puts it nicely: Transnational connections break
the binary relation of minority communities with majority societies a dependency that structures projects of both assimilation and resistance (1997: 255).
In the case of Muslims, however, this identification with a point of origin goes
beyond the homeland, or any other constitutive myths of homeland and

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65

return. Rather, in contrast to place-centred conceptions of diaspora (Safran,

1991), in the case of Muslim diaspora the idea of return (to the roots) refers
to a state of being in which the attachment to a place becomes only incidental.
Indeed, one of the main predicaments of Muslim diaspora communities in the
West has been the difficulty of navigating between the imagined global space of
the ummah with local life experiences of Muslims both in the West and in their
homelands. This duality is not simply a matter of traditional Muslims facing the
challenges of the modern world. Rather, these dualities have been made possible
by certain disjunctures compellingly argued by Arjun Appadurai (1996) as the
relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed
(a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and
(e) ideoscapes (1996: 33).
Appadurais -scapes model allows us to understand Muslims diasporic experiences not within the immigration/assimilation paradigm, but rather through the
dialectics of rupture and continuity within the context of a flowing cultural and
political space. That is to say that Muslims in North America do not necessarily
represent a community of peoples who have migrated to the West from a traditional society, with traditional commitments to non-hybrid identities. The
simple assertion that diasporic displacement generates hybridity is often misleading and historically inaccurate. Rather, as I shall illustrate through a biographical narrative of Ismail al-Faruqi, the diasporic experience of continuity
and rupture neither begins away from home nor does it inevitably generate or
perpetuate hybridity.

ISMAIL AL-FARUQI: THE ACTIVIST SCHOLAR

On 27 May 1986, Ismail al-Faruqi and his wife Lamya were brutally murdered
in their Wyncote, Pennsylvania home. According to the police report, an unidentified intruder broke into their home at 2:30 am and stabbed Professor al-Faruqi,
his wife, and their daughter with a 15-inch knife. Although the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) initially suspected that the murders were politically motivated, only 48 hours later they halted their investigation arguing that the incident
was a burglary gone awry.3 In order to politicize the murders, one of the most
prolific members of al-Faruqis brainchild International Institute of Islamic
Thought (IIIT), Louay Safi, directly pointed to two Jewish groups, the Jewish
Defence League and the Jewish Defence Organization, as the prime suspects.
More than 4,000 people attended al-Faruqis funeral organized by the Islamic
Society of North America (ISNA) and held at the Masjid Muhammad in West

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Philadelphia. In a memorial service in Washington, DC, prominent scholars and

politicians, such as Jesse Jackson and Clovis Maksoud, the UN observer from
the League of Arab States, paid tribute to the family for their honourable quest
to restore cooperation and peace to a divided world and their commitment to
establish a foundation for a religious, ethnic and cultural renaissance during
their lifetime (Kashif, 1986: 2). The assassination of the al-Faruqis prompted
the US Congress to hold its first hearing on terrorism waged against Muslims
and Arab-Americans.
Gutbi Mehdi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, remarked,
al-Faruqis death was a landmark in the progress of the Islamic dawa [calling]
in this country. Now people are taking us seriously (Mehdi, 1987). Regardless
of how and why he was murdered, his peers and followers immediately
elevated him to a martyr of a cause: Muslims dawa in the West. Al-Faruqi
would be remembered for his leading role in the emerging movement of the
Muslim diaspora in North America.
Along with two other Muslim scholars in America, the Pakistani philosopher
and theologian Fazlur Rahman and the Iranian mystic philosopher and theologian
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, al-Faruqi was instrumental in giving scholarly significance
to Muslim scholars study of Islam, which hitherto was the exclusive province
of the disinterested and objective Orientalist scholars. But among these three,
al-Faruqi was distinct in his quest for turning a scholarly agenda into an institutional mission for dawa. Much of his efforts were concentrated on Muslim
students coming to the United States for higher education. He believed that
living as a minority in the West afforded the best opportunity for these students
to realize that they are a part of global community of Muslims (the ummah).
This was a place in which they could transcend their ethnic and national loyalties for the sake of a universal commitment to Muslimhood. His vision was to a
large extent autobiographical, for he was a Palestinian refugee who discovered
the world of Islam in the West.
Born to affluent Palestinian parents in 1921 in Jaffa during the British Mandate,
al-Faruqi was exposed to French and English cultures and languages early in his
life. He received his elementary education at the mosque school, and later
attended College des Frres, a French Catholic school in Palestine. He earned a
bachelors degree in philosophy at age 20 from the American University in Beirut.
In 1945, he was appointed the governor of the province of Galilee in Palestine.
However, with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, his career in
government came to an abrupt end.
Al-Faruqi migrated to the United States to pursue a life in academia. He attended
Indiana University and after completing his masters degree he went to Harvard

Loving America and longing for home

67

for a second masters degree. In 1952, he received his doctorate in Philosophy

from the University of Indiana. His dissertation, On Justifying the Good: Metaphysics and Epistemology of Value (1952) was deeply influenced by the phenomenology of Max Scheler (1874-1928), particularly the latters notion of
axiological intuitionism. Al-Faruqi argued that Schelers 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 postEnlightenment Reason from the standpoint of a non-Western philosopher.4
Al-Faruqis studies in the United States stimulated in him a new appreciation of
Islam, to which he responded by deciding to go to Cairo where he studied
Islamic theology at al-Azhar from 1954 to 1958.5 His al-Azhar years supplanted
his earlier interest in phenomenology. He was influenced by revivalist ideas
of early Muslim reformers who emphasized the Islamic roots of all modern
sciences and rationality.
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-Faruqis 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 Rahmans words, an
angry young Muslim Palestinian.
In order to challenge al-Faruqis Arabo-centric views of Islam, and to broaden
his scope of understanding the ummah (the global community of Muslims), 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
(1986: 42).

AL-FARUQI: FROM ARABISM TO ISLAMISM

In 1963, after returning to the United States, he was hired as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicagos Divinity School. Between 1964 and 1968,
al-Faruqi established himself as an Associate Professor at the Department of

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Religion at Syracuse University, where he initiated its programme in Islamic

Studies. In 1968, he accepted a position at Temple University as a Professor of
Religion, where he also founded the Islamic Studies Programme. He held that
position until his death in 1986.
Much of al-Faruqis early thought is associated with what he called urubah
(Arabism). In his 1962 book, On Arabism: Urubah and Religion, he argued that
urubah comprises the core identity and set of values which embrace all Muslims, a single community of believers (ummah). Al-Faruqi formulated the notion
of urubah in contradistinction to two other hegemonic ideologies: Arab nationalism and non-Arab Islamic revivalism. Adopting an overtly essentialist position,
he argued that more than merely the language of the Quran, Arabic provided
the only possible linguistic structure within which the Islamic conception of the
world could be apprehended. Therefore, he asserted that urubah captured the
core of Muslim consciousness, its values and faith it was inseparable from the
identity of all Muslims (al-Faruqi, 1962: 2-30).
He also maintained that urubah was the only context within which the nonMuslim Arabs countries could integrate into their larger societies. Even nonMuslim Arabs, according to al-Faruqi, could identify with urubah expressed in
the Quran. In effect, urubah left non-Muslim Arabs and non-Arab Muslims at
the mercy of combined linguistic and religious essentialisms. Any other form of
consciousness and identity was a distortion created by colonial penetration
(al-Faruqi, 1962: 211). As John Esposito observed:
Though few would question Arab influence on non-Arab Muslim faith and
culture or Arab Muslim influence on non-Muslim Arabs, the implication that
they both find their ultimate expression and fulfilment in al-Faruqis interpretation
of Arabism might be regarded by some as an attempt to establish the hegemony
of Arab Islam or, more precisely, Arab Muslim culture (1991: 67).

Both Arab nationalists and non-Arab Muslim intellectuals shunned al-Faruqis

agenda to bring non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs together through
urubah. While many Muslim intellectuals such as Fazlur Rahman agreed with
al-Faruqis assertion that the Quran could not achieve the same eloquence and
expressiveness in any other languages except Arabic, they were critical of
al-Faruqis blatant Arab chauvinism. Al-Faruqis sojourn in Pakistan did little to
alter his doctrine of urubah.
Interestingly, it was in the United States several years later that he began to
question the foundations of his earlier position. In 1968, for the first time he
encountered members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Temple

Loving America and longing for home

69

University. The convergence of Muslim students from diverse cultural backgrounds dramatically swayed his perception of Arab versus Islamic identity. In
the spring of 1968, while a patient at the Johns Hopkins Ophthalmology Centre,
al-Faruqi confided in one of the active members of the MSA, Ilyas Ba-Yunus,
Until a few months ago, I was a Palestinian, an Arab, and a Muslim. Now I am
a Muslim who happens to be an Arab from Palestine (Ba-Yunus, 1988: 14).
In his narrative of his own intellectual development, al-Faruqi often shared with
his close associates the significance of this moment of transformation. He moved
from his initial desire to carve out a legitimate conceptual location in the West, to
a notion of Muslim identity constituted in a bifurcated system of classifications
between the West and Islam. In response to a colleagues inquiry about his
conversion to Islam, al-Faruqi replied:
There was a time in my life [] when all I cared about was proving to myself
that I could win my physical and intellectual existence from the West, that I
could succeed as a man of the West. But, when I won it, it became meaningless.
I asked myself: Who am I? A Palestinian? A philosopher? A liberal humanist?
My answer was, I am a Muslim (cited in Quraishi, 1986: 24).

Although al-Faruqi raised questions which pointed to the diversity of his life
experiences, in his response he eschewed the incorporation of that diversity into
his notion of Muslimhood. He depicted the different stages of his intellectual
development and identity formation as emerging successive totalities, rather
than incessant processes hybridization. That is to say that for al-Faruqi, he
could either be an Arab who happened to be a Muslim or a Muslim who
happened to be an Arab, either a liberal humanist or a Muslim. He spoke of
his predicament from the standpoint of the internal development of his
consciousness rather than a historically specific and culturally diverse transnational experience.
Al-Faruqi remained oblivious toward the diasporic contingencies of these identity questions and desired to transcend the location from which these they were
arisen. He lived in diaspora, but refused to disaporize, for the lack of a better
word, his identity. I borrowed this awkward concept from Boyarins account
of Rabbi Saadya which offers striking resemblance with al-Faruqis struggle
with multiple identities.
Diasporized, that is disaggregated, identity allows the early medieval scholar
Rabbi Saadya to be an Egyptian Arab who happens to be Jewish and also a
Jew who happens to be an Egyptian Arab. Both of these contradictory
propositions must be held together (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1993: 721).

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In contrast to this disaggregated identity, al-Faruqi considered his transformations to be the result of competing aggregated identities. For him, identity and
the consciousness of ones self was the result of the replacement of one totality
with another. He intended to protect the integrity of his convictions, but failed
to realize that cultures are not preserved by being protected from mixing but
probably can only exist as a product of such mixing (Boyarin and Boyarin,
1993: 721). In its atemporality, therefore, he developed his Muslimhood as a
mirror image of his conception of urubah. He shifted from one to the other
without acknowledging their contingencies or how either could emerge outside
a diasporic location.

AL-FARUQI AND THE MUSLIM STUDENTS ASSOCIATION

Established in 1963 on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, the MSA
has been the most successful Muslim immigrants association in America.
Although predominantly comprised of Arab students, MSA was influential in
establishing itself as the premier organization of Muslims in America, regardless of their ethnicity.6 The growth of the MSA, especially after the mid-1970s
oil boom, was exceptional. By 1983, the MSA had already established 310
student chapters with more than 45,000 members (Arabia: The Islamic World
Review, May 1983: 63).
Al-Faruqi became one of the MSAs most efficacious advocates and played a
major role in the realization of its stated mission as the organization for preventing the disintegration of Muslims in this country. Through his involvement
in the MSA, al-Faruqi met AbdulHamid Ahmad AbuSulayman, a Saudi student
of political science with whom he began a long-term cooperation. His connection with AbuSulayman was a turning point in his career; it transformed his
individual search for Muslimhood into an institutional effort which resulted first
in the formation of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS, established 1971), and later to the establishment of the IIIT in 1981.
Whereas earlier al-Faruqis concern was mainly changing things through his
individual scholarship and by participating in ecumenical dialogue,7 as a founding member and the first president of AMSS (1971-1976) he embarked on a
new institutional activism. Al-Faruqis institutional engagement emerged from
his rejuvenated interest in Islam generated through his encounter with the MSA.
More importantly, AbuSulaymans ability to raise funds from patrons in Saudi
Arabia, and later Pakistan and Malaysia, made this new institutionalism financially possible.

Loving America and longing for home

71

Retracting his idea of urubah, al-Faruqi intended to lay the foundation for a
universal, homogenous identity in the context of which the diverse global community of Muslims could be unified. Accordingly, he vehemently opposed what
he considered to be sectarian activities of the MSA. In a keynote speech to the
Annual Convention of the Federation of Islamic Associations (FIA), he called
for the confluence of Muslims from all over the world into a new body which
transcended the barriers of nationalism and ethnocentrism (1969: 2). He chastised
the establishment of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) and Malaysian
Islamic Study Group (MISG), both of which emerged from the rank and file of
the MSA. In their separate activities, as Tariq Quraishi (1986) remarked, and
the assertion of their identities, [al-Faruqi] saw the death of an idea. [...] MSA,
to him, was more than a body, it was the spirit of the Muslims (1986: 25).
Although al-Faruqi was profoundly influenced by the MSA, he could never
comprehend its cultural diversity and historical specificity. He believed that the
MSA could afford the students an institutional context within which they could
transcend their cultures and history and construct a universal homogeneous
Muslimhood. Neither was he attentive to the cultural and historical contingencies of the MSA, nor was he mindful of MSAs emerging fundamental demographic changes. Although the MSA was conceived as a student organization,
from the very beginning non-students joined the MSA. While at its inception
only 1 per cent of Muslim students remained in North America after obtaining
their degrees (Lovell, 1992: 71), the expansion of professional associations in
the late 1970s and 1980s indicated the rapid growth in the number of people
who stayed in the United States after their schooling. By 1983, the number of
local community groups affiliated with the organization was nearly as great as
the campus chapters. Such a diversity, as Larry Poston (1991) observed,
became increasingly difficult to manage and the very name Muslim Student
Association became a misnomer (1991: 132). The growing number of nonstudent members of the MSA, the establishment of several other Muslim professional associations, most notably the AMSS, American Muslim Scientists
and Engineers (AMSE), and Islamic Medical Association (IMA) demanded new
organizational forms and a reconsideration of its original platform.
The MSA devoted its entire 1976 Annual Meeting to address the growing disparity
between its mission statement and the actual composition of its membership.
After the convention, in February 1977, several Muslim associations (MSA,
AMSE, IMA, and AMSS) formed a joint task force to re-evaluate the institutional
forms and the objectives of the emerging Muslim community in North America.
The task force recommended the establishment of the Islamic Society of North
America (ISNA), a plan which was finally approved in 1981 by the general
assemblies of the affiliated organizations (Ahmed, 1991).

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AL-FARUQI AND THE ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE PROJECT

Although al-Faruqi supported the establishment of ISNA, he maintained his practical distance from its organizational and logistical needs. For him, organizations
such as ISNA were too closely involved in the everyday concerns of Muslim
communities. That type of involvement could disturb his ambition of articulating a universal conception of Muslimhood. In 1981, the same year that ISNA
was founded, al-Faruqi embarked on a new institutional form of the ongoing
diasporic project called the Islamization of knowledge. The idea of the Islamization of knowledge was initially introduced by al-Faruqi in the Second Annual
Conference of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) in 1972. In
his presidential address he observed:
As social scientists, we have to look back at our training and reshape it in the
light of the Quran and the Sunnah. This is how our forefathers made their own
original contributions to the study of history, law and culture. The West
borrowed their heritage and put it in a secular mold [sic]. Is it asking for too
much that we take this knowledge and Islamize it? (al-Faruqi, 1972).

The central principle of this project was similar to that of early salafiyyah movement.8 They believed in the Islamic roots of the Enlightenment and that the
Europeans borrowed the basic principles of modern scientific knowledge from
Muslims and now Muslims needed to reclaim it. Accordingly, in order to reappropriate the scientific knowledge, al-Faruqi proposed a de-alienization move,
characteristic of most Islamic modernist movements. However, unlike the earlier
movements, al-Faruqi coupled the de-alienization with an epistemological
critique of Western science. He argued that Muslims will not reclaim the
past glory of Islam merely by learning new sciences and acquiring modern
technology from the West. Rather, Muslims needed to scrutinize the metaphysical
presuppositions upon which modern sciences were constructed (al-Faruqi and
Abu-Sulayman, 1989). Al-Faruqi considered Muslim students in the West to be
the ideal agents for the realization of this project. They were exposed to the
latest scientific and technological achievements, while at the same time, they were
culturally inclined to accept an Islamic critique of its philosophical foundations.
Following al-Faruqis lead, both MSA and AMSS decided to choose Islamization
as the theme of their conventions in 1975 and 1976. In August 1975 and April
1976, the AMSS published the proceedings of the convention in two volumes
under the title From Muslim to Islamic. The title of the proceedings captured the
AMSSs new epistemological critique of earlier Muslim reformers uncritical reappropriation of what they called Western knowledges. Gaafar Sheikh Idris, a
founding member of the AMSS and MSA, addressed both conventions and laid
out the general lines of what he called The Process of Islamization. According

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73

to Idris, knowledge does not become Islamic merely because it is acquired by a

Muslim Islamization requires a radical epistemological shift. However, in his
thesis, what this shift entails remained unexplored. Although in his call for Islamization, Idris emphasized the importance of an organized effort for the realization
of this process, until the establishment of the IIIT, these calls remained at an
abstract and general level.
In 1981, al-Faruqi and 30 of his close associates established the IIIT in Herndon,
Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. From the beginning, the Governments of
Pakistan and Malaysia showed enthusiasm for the Project of Islamization of
Knowledge and patrons from Saudi Arabia demonstrated willingness to finance
the endeavour. Hundreds of Muslims intellectuals participated in the first international conference of the IIIT held in Islamabad, Pakistan in 1982.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 and its subsequent influence among young Muslims around the world gave a sense of urgency to the establishment of an organization that could offer competing Muslim discourses of modernity. With the
support of petro-Islam, the IIIT sponsored numerous conferences around
the world and published hundreds of monographs and journal articles, encouraging the new generation of Muslims to engage with the Islamization of virtually
every academic discipline. The Islamization project began as an endeavour to
construct a disciplined, normative Muslim, unaffected by the degenerate West.
But al-Faruqi and other founders of the project expanded the objectives of the
project as the Westerners only hope for redemption.9
The new organization was neither a political response in terms of participation
in corporate politics or in any militant form of political activism nor was it an
attempt to engage Muslims in the cultural politics of the West. Rather, from its
inception, the project embarked on a contradictory agenda. On the one hand,
al-Faruqi and other proponents of the Islamization project intended to articulate
an Islamic response to modernity for the consumption of Muslim students
studying in the West who would eventually transfer this articulation to their
home countries after the completion of their education. On the other hand, they
confronted the fact of a growing population of Muslims whose return home
increasingly became a symbolic expression of longing rather than an actual plan
for relocation. Rather than young educated travellers passing through the West,
al-Faruqis audience turned into permanent residents of American neighbourhoods.

AMERICAN MUSLIMS AS AL-FARUQIS IMAGINED UMMAH

The number of Muslims in America increased sharply after the oil boom of the
mid-1970s. Although there are no reliable numbers available to show the actual

74

Ghamari-Tabrizi

number of new Muslim immigrants, the share of Muslims among the total number of immigrants entering the United States rose from 4 per cent in 1968 to
10.5 per cent in 1986 (Stone, 1991: 31). This trend continued its exhilarated
growth during the 1990s with the massive migration of high-tech engineers
from South and South-East Asia. As the rapid rise in the number of mosques
built in the United States indicates (see Figure 1), from the early 1980s Muslim
communities began to assert themselves as a permanent feature of the cultural
and political landscape of their host society. Mosques were rapidly transformed
into community-building institutions, both in the places of their operations with
the establishment of schools and outreach programmes (CAIR, 2001: 34-38),
as well as in the cyber space with extensive reach and services.
FIGURE 1
NUMBER OF MOSQUES FOUNDED IN THE UNITED STATES
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

Source: CAIR, 2001.

The diversity and conflicts between these emerging diasporic Muslim communities have not represented a movement toward the realization of the ummah
(Johnson, 1991). Not only do Muslims remain ethnically divided, they offer
competing views in their political loyalties, gender politics, and in the understanding of their historical position in the West. As Table 1 demonstrates, only
14 per cent of mosques in the United States are ethnically integrated. The same
study found that a significant number of the immigrants mosques are located in
suburban areas and middle class neighbourhoods, while African-American

75

Loving America and longing for home

mosques serve inner-city working class communities (CAIR, 2001: 26). Moreover, no women serve on the executive boards of more than 86 per cent of all
mosques in the United States (CAIR, 2001: 57).

TABLE 1
MOSQUES GROUPED ACCORDING TO DOMINANT ETHNICITY
2000 study

1994 study

African American

27%

29%

South Asian

28%

29%

Arab

15%

21%

Mixed South Asian/Arab

16%

10%

All others

14%

11%

Source:

CAIR, 2001: 19.

Despite the demographic and political realities of Muslim communities in North

America, in these emerging communities, al-Faruqi saw the possibility of transcending nationalism and forging an ummah reconnected with its authentic
aspirations. Moreover, he came to believe that not only could Muslims in North
America realize the ideal ummah, but through doing so, they could rescue the
West from its own vices. Addressing Muslims living in the West a few months
before his death, al-Faruqi asserted:
If you look upon this as an event in world history, you will see that Allah,
subhanahu wa taala, has prepared the course of history to welcome you in
the West...By bringing you here...Allah, subhanahu wa taala, has carved
out a vocation for you, a new mission, and this mission is to save the West
(1987: 55).

Often in his public lectures, al-Faruqi compared North American Muslims

experience to that of Prophet Mohammads hijra (migration) from Mecca to
Medina the beginning of Islamic calendar. We want to live as if we were, he
observed, the companions of Mohammad from Makkah [Mecca] to Madinah
[Medina] This is our Madinah, we have arrived, we are here (al-Faruqi,
1987: 56). Through his allegory of hijra (migration), al-Faruqi constructed a
discourse through which he inverted the trauma of displacement into the possibility of transcendence from the place of origin. In his narrative, for the first
time since the colonial encounters and the formation of modern nation states,
the emergence of diasporic and transnational communities has brought Muslims

76

Ghamari-Tabrizi

closer to the realization of the ummah. Al-Faruqi (1980) argued that the new
hijra signified not only migration from the place of origin, but also the abandonment of and transcendence from tribalism and nationalism (shuubiyah).
Through his symbolic language of depicting Muslims of North America as the
companion of the prophet in Medina, al-Faruqi, on the one hand, emphasized
the permanence of this experience, and on the other hand, intended to invent
a homogeneous community with shared aspirations and common ambitions.
Al-Faruqis discourse of hijra recognized diversity and hybridity at the point of
origin, but encouraged uniformity and non-hybridity.
Not only does al-Faruqis discourse of hijra advance a conception of homogenous ummah, it also neglects to include the ansar, the community of those
who protected and welcomed the Prophet and his companions after their departure
from Mecca. As Aminah McCloud, one of the most respected African-American
Muslim scholar/activists has pointed out, Muslim immigrants identity politics is
predominantly informed by white discourses of race relations in the US. Rather
than black Muslims, she asserted, the ansar of Muslims immigrants have
paradoxically been white Christians (cited in Mattingly, 2001). Al-Faruqi and
other leaders of new Muslim immigrants engaged in ecumenical dialogue and
institutional cooperation with the dominant white American society rather than
their African-American fellow Muslims. McCloud sorely castigated Muslim immigrants for being reared the way the majority of white Americans are reared to
despise blackness (cited in Mattingly, 2001).
Frederick Thaufeer al-Deen, an African-American community leader who converted to Islam in the late 1970s and then served as an imam in Oklahoma City,
put forward another critique of al-Faruqis allegory of hijra and its homogenizing presuppositions. He argued that rather than transcending it, the ummah needs
to embrace diversity and difference as its foundational feature. Accordingly, he
speculated that the growing number of Muslims of different ethnic and national
origins in the United States has created a simulacrum of the Hajj, the annual
Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. In a recent interview, he compared America to
the city of Mecca during the Hajj [] when Muslims from all over the world
dialogue, talk through problems, offer solutions, engage one another, and share
things (cited in Mattingly, 2001). Through the powerful symbolism of Hajj,
eloquently articulated by Malcolm X in his autobiography, rather than an undesirable haven of hedonism, Thaufeer al-Deen regarded America as the Mecca
of a global Muslim community. As Shabbir Mansuri, the founding director of
the Council on Islamic Education, remarked: There is no other place on earth
outside of the US where dialogue of the sort were experiencing is happening
And I see Gods hand in it (cited in Mattingly, 2001).

Loving America and longing for home

77

EMERGING MUSLIM COMMUNITIES

AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW MUSLIMHOOD
Appropriating the symbolic power of al-Faruqis loss, six months after his death,
in December 1986, the Planning Committee of the ISNA filed a report in a public
hearing in Plainfield, Indiana about the condition and responsibilities of Muslims
in North America. Acknowledging the changes in the composition of its constituents, over the objection of many of the participating organizations, the committee strongly endorsed the political participation of Muslims as an emerging
minority group in American politics:
In order to exert influence on the political decision-making and legislation in
North America, ISNA should launch a campaign to educate Muslim citizens
about their voting rights and mobilize them to vote on issues affecting Islam
and Muslims. On a longer-term basis, ISNA should develop communication
with and among politically active Muslims and establish a separate political
organization in due course (Johnson, 1991: 111).

Objections to this new policy were voiced from two opposing groups. First,
those who expressed a separatist view, fearing that participating in American
politics would result in the inevitable assimilation of Muslims. The chief spokesperson of this tendency was Tariq Quraishi, a close associate of al-Faruqi, and
the director of the North American Islamic Trust, one of the most influential
constituent organizations of ISNA. The second group sought to limit the activities of Islamic associations to religious rituals; it was suspicious of any attempt
to politicize Islam, citing the Iranian and Afghani experiences. The Tablighi
Jamaat, with a primarily Indo-Pakistani membership, represented the most
powerful organization in this tendency (Haleem, 1987).
Fear of association with political Islam has always been a central feature of
Muslim organizations of North America. On the one hand, militant political Islam
has always generated a strong appeal to Muslim students, and such militancy
could undermine the leadership and the legitimacy of many of these organizations. On the other hand, in the American political landscape, being Muslim
and politically active could inevitably be interpreted as a sign of hostility toward
American global interests. Many American politicians consider Muslims support to be a political liability.10 Because post-cold war American foreign policy
has been driven by the substitution of the green (the sacred colour of Islam)
peril of Islam for the red threat of communism, any participation of Muslims in
American politics inevitably raises suspicions of sabotage and disloyalty.11
Finally, in 1987, the ISNA announced the establishment of the ISNA-Political
Action Committee (PAC). While al-Faruqis murder became a medium through

78

Ghamari-Tabrizi

which ISNA advanced the cause of the constitution of Muslims of the West,
al-Faruqi himself was at best ambivalent toward community activism and the
collective participation of Muslims in American corporate politics. His notion of
new Muslimhood had less to do with political action or community activism,
and more with an elitist endeavour of soul-searching and a return to rational
foundations of Islamic theology.
With the growing number of Muslim immigrants in North America and Europe,
al-Faruqis Islamization Project became subject to increasingly strident criticism.
According to many Muslim critics, the fact that the IIIT was exclusively concerned with plans for higher education demonstrated the elitist character of its
educational reform project. Moreover, others suggested that the Project
assumed a corporate institutional form which undermined its intention to
encourage innovative and creative contributions of all Muslims to the process of
Islamization.
In his appraisal of the first decade of the Islamization project, Louay Safi (1993)
suggested that the implementation of the project required an organization of
highly qualified scholars working in unison under a unified command. This
requirement was neither available nor desirable, for bureaucratic organizations
tend to suppress the very elements that make science possible, viz. creativity
and originality (1993: 40-41). Another critic, V.R. Nasr (1992), voiced the
same concern, arguing that Islamization should not begin with, [but] rather
end in institutions and organizational expressions (1992: 18). Finally, as the
former President of the MSA, Ilyas Ba-Yunus (1988) criticized al-Faruqi and
argued that the eminent professor continued to ignore [the fact that] education
has to start from the bottom up (1988: 22). Ba-Yunus argued that without a
community which supports and initiates Islamic educational institutions, no project
of Islamization could be fruitful. He chastised the IIIT for its failure to acknowledge the necessity of the communitys involvement in its project. He criticized
al-Faruqi, AbuSulayman, and the IIIT movement:
[They] seemed to have ignored another important principle of institutionalized
education; namely that these are the communities which make educational
institutions, not that educational institutions make and shape communities
(Ba-Yunus, 1988: 23).

Neglecting the significance of community activism and its relation to the Islamization project, the hierarchical educationist standpoint of al-Faruqi dominated
the IIIT/AMSS. This became more evident, according to Ba-Yunus (1988),
after the establishment of the ISNA in 1981, when al-Faruqi distanced himself
from the community-based activities of Muslim organizations. This happened,
Ba-Yunus (1988) recalled, at the time that these organizations [...] needed Ismails

Loving America and longing for home

79

eloquence, his motivating power and his ability to raise funds more than ever
(1988: 23-24).
Both al-Faruqi and his critics, however, remained committed to the construction of a new homo Islamicus in the West, one from the top down, and the other
from bottom up. The elitism of organizations such as the IIIT or ISNA sprang
from their conception of the ummah as a community of Muslims which transcended residual ethnic, national, linguistic and gender differences. While at the
same time, they remain hostile to and sceptical of the emergent hybrid identities
characteristic of the Muslim diaspora.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, I wove the experience of an emerging community of Muslim
diaspora around a biographical narrative of Ismail al-Faruqi. I chose al-Faruqi
to illustrate that the diasporic experience begins in the place of origin and it does
not inevitably lead toward perpetual intentional or organic hybridization.
The latter point is particularly significant because notions of diaspora and
hybridity are conceptually linked and are often understood as a unidirectional
cutting and mixing between the West and the East, or between the modern and
the traditional. Al-Faruqis experience shows that, in a Fanonian sense of colonialism, diasporic experience conveys living as a stranger, at and away from home.
He attended a French/Catholic school in his Palestinian homeland and discovered Islam in the United States. At home, he experienced hybridity through the
interplay of British and French colonialism and Palestinian/Islamic cultures, but
abroad, he imagined an ummah which presupposed normative, homogeneous
Muslimhood. Al-Faruqis transformation from a Palestinian Arab into a Muslim
who happens to be a Palestinian was distinctly a diasporic experience.
Unlike earlier experiences of minority immigrants, al-Faruqi and other Muslims
of diaspora do not define their cultural and political predicament through
assimilation/segregation paradigm. Muslims participate in American corporate
politics, but they refuse to be regarded as a minority group contained in its
borders. As William Safran (1991) observed, diaspora communities pose a more
serious challenge to host societies than do other minority communities: they
test the efficacy of the process of integration and the outer limits of freedom
[] and the limits of pluralism (1991: 97). Although they unremittingly
negotiate and re-imagine these limits, for Muslims, the ongoing War on Terror
has dented the agility of these boundaries. The War on Terror, with its
civilizational accent, has further solidified these borders, and contributed to the
advancement of homogenizing reactive identities.

80

Ghamari-Tabrizi

Al-Faruqi navigated the postcolonial world but jettisoned his own hybridity to
conceive a discursively homogenous ummah. In the final instance, the failure of
his Islamization project, and his ambivalence toward the diversity of the emerging Muslim diaspora, made him and his ideas marginal in the ways Muslim
communities negotiate the boundaries of Muslimhood in the triangular relationship of diaspora/host society/homeland.

NOTES
1. For a discussion of the Rushdie Affair in the context of British multiculturalism,
see Asad (1990). I shall emphasize here that Rushdie himself never intended to
write a book which represents the experience of a whole community. He wrote,
Do not ask your writers to create typical or representative fictions. Such books
are almost invariably dead books. The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which,
to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own image reflected (Rushdie,
1991: 412).
2. As James Clifford (1997) argued, there are important differences between conceptions of diasporas in relation to their place of origin, as it was evident in the
debate between Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy. Clifford wrote: Mercers version is rigorously anti-essentialist, a site of multiple displacements and rearticulations of identity, without privilege to race, cultural traditions, class, gender, or
sexuality. Diaspora consciousness is entirely a product of cultures and histories
in collision and dialogue. For Mercer, Gilroys genealogy of British blackness
continues to privilege an African origin and vernacular forms despite his
stress on historical rupture and hybridity and his assault on romantic Afrocentrisms. For Gilroy, Mercer represents a premature pluralism, a postmodern
evasion of the need to give historical specificity and complexity to the term
black, seen as linked racial formations, counterhistories, and cultures of resistance (Clifford, 1997: 266).
3. The information regarding Ismail and Lamya al-Faruqis murder is based on the
reports in the Spotlight, a Washington-based weekly paper, and two special
issues of Islamic Horizon, a journal of the Muslim Student Associations (July
1986 and September 1986).
4. Notably, since the turn of the last century, many non-European intellectuals
have articulated their critique of Western [instrumental] rationality in a phenomenological frame, thus the significance of Heidegger in modern philosophical
discourses of non-Western intellectuals. For a discussion in the Iranian case see
Boroujerdi (1996); in the case of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb see Euben
(1999); and in the case of Japanese phenomenological philosophers influenced
by Heidegger see Feenberg (1995).
5. His experience is not uncommon among Muslim intellectuals. Many prominent
thinkers in the Islamic world used their Western education to enhance and deepen

Loving America and longing for home

6.
7.
8.
9.

10.
11.

81

their commitment to Islam. For example, French existential Marxism profoundly

inspired one of the influential ideologues of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shariati,
during his study in Paris in the early 1960s. An outspoken critic of the Islamic
Republic, Abdolkarim Soroush studied the philosophy of science at the
University of London in the mid-1970s, on the basis of which he developed his
epistemological critique of orthodoxy, both Marxian and Islamic. Sayyid Qutb,
the Egyptian revolutionary theologian, came to the United States in 1949 to
study educational administration. He witnessed American support of the
establishment of the state of Israel, underwent a transformation, and became
more committed to his Islamic consciousness. More recently, during an interview I conducted with the Egyptian social critic Abdulwahab el-Massiri in Cairo
in April 1996, he confided in me that during his student years in the United States
he rediscovered the Quran in literary criticism classes of Susan Sontag.
Information from the Know your MSA brochure, n.d., IIIT Archives.
Interview with Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Fall 1996, Herndon, VA.
An Islamic modernist reform movement during the second half of the nineteenth
century, led by the Iranian ideologue and political activist Jamal al-Din Afghani
(1838-97) and his Egyptian protg Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905).
Many conservative pundits, such as Daniel Pipes, interpret this allegorical
romantic discourse as the as the conspiracy of militant Muslims to transform
fundamentally the American social order. In several postings in his web site,
Pipes particularly targeted al-Faruqi as one of the proponents of conquering
America. See for example his posting http://www.danielpipes.org/article/83.
George W. Bushs and Al Gores presidential campaign committees as well as
Hillary Rodham Clintons senate campaign returned contributions from various
Muslims organizations citing the contributors defence of the Palestinian cause.
See Lewis (1999) and Pipes (1990). For the issues of foreign policy, see US
Congress, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, 1993, Islamic
Fundamentalism in Africa and Implications for US Policy, Hearings, Washington: US G.O.P. Also, US Congress, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee
on Europe and the Middle East, 1985, Islamic Fundamentalism and Islamic
Radicalism, Hearings, Ninety-ninth Congress, Washington: US G.O.P.

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Loving America and longing for home

85

AMOUR DE LAMRIQUE ET NOSTALGIE DU PAYS DORIGINE:

ISMAIL AL-FARUQI ET LMERGENCE DE LA DIASPORA
MUSULMANE EN AMRIQUE DU NORD
Jintroduis ici lexprience de la communaut mergente de la diaspora musulmane autour du rcit biographique du militant et rudit musulman Ismail
Al-Faruqi. Dans ce rcit, je montre que lexprience diasporique commence
dans le lieu dorigine et quelle ne mne pas invitablement une hybridisation
perptuelle. Ce point est particulirement important du fait que les notions
de diaspora et dhybridit sont lies dun point de vue conceptuel et sont souvent perues comme une coupure et un mlange unidirectionnels entre lOccident et lOrient, ou entre les socits modernes et traditionnelles. Lexprience
dIsmail Al-Faruqi montre, comme au sens o Franz Fanon entendait le
colonialisme, que lexprience diasporique amne vivre comme un tranger
la fois dans le pays dorigine et loin de lui.
La situation post-coloniale a permis des communauts de musulmans ethniquement diverses de vivre en Occident, mais celles-ci conservent des liens forts
avec leur lieu dorigine. En adoptant lallgorie de la migration du prophte
(lhgire), Ismail Al-Faruqi a construit une notion fantastique de la Ummah et
un homo islamicus sujet normatif. Bien que profondment influenc par la
diversit des membres des associations dtudiants musulmans, Ismail Al-Faruqi
a encourag les Musulmans dpasser leurs diffrences et tent de concevoir
une Ummah homogne. Mais son projet a finalement chou parce quil
ne correspondait pas lexprience relle des musulmans vivant en Occident.
Les communauts musulmanes ont traditionnellement ngoci les frontires
entre lIslam et les responsabilits sociales quil entrane, tant dans leur pays
dorigine que dans leurs nouveaux pays en Occident, des nouveaux pays
qui deviennent de plus en plus hostiles leur prsence et compliquent de ce
fait davantage la relation triangulaire entre diaspora, socit daccueil et pays
dorigine.

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Ghamari-Tabrizi

QUERIENDO A AMRICA PERO EXTRAANDO A SU PAS:

ISMAIL AL-FARUQI Y LA EMERGENCIA DE UNA DISPORA
MUSULMANA EN AMRICA DEL NORTE
En este documento se aborda la experiencia de una comunidad emergente de
la dispora musulmana entorno a una narrativa biogrfica del activista musulmn
y estudioso Ismail al-Faruqi. A travs de esta narracin, se ilustra que la
experiencia de la dispora comienza en el pas de origen y no conduce inevitablemente a una hibridacin perpetua. Este punto es particularmente importante
puesto que las nociones de dispora e hbrido estn conceptualmente vinculadas
y a menudo se comprenden como interrelacionadas y como mezcla unidireccional entre el Occidente y el Oriente, o entre lo moderno y lo tradicional. La
experiencia de al-Faruqi demuestra que, en un sentido fanoniano del colonialismo,
la experiencia de la dispora implica vivir como un extranjero, en el hogar
y lejos del mismo.
La condicin poscolonial permite que comunidades tnicamente diversas de
musulmanes residan en el Occidente pero mantengan fuertes lazos con su lugar
de origen. Adoptando la alegora de la migracin del profeta o hijra, al-Faruqi
construy una nocin fantstica de la ummah y un tema normativo homo
islamicus. Si bien tuvo una gran influencia de las diversas asociaciones de
estudiantes musulmanes, al-Faruqi alent a los musulmanes a ir ms all de sus
diferencias e intent concebir una ummah homognea. Sin embargo, y en ltima
instancia, este proyecto fracas porque no corresponda a las experiencias de
vida reales de los musulmanes en el Occidente. Histricamente, las comunidades
musulmanas han negociado las fronteras de su musulmanismo y las responsabilidades sociales que ello entraa tanto en sus pases de origen como de
residencia en el Occidente un nuevo hogar que cada vez es ms hostil a su
presencia y, por consiguiente, complica la relacin triangular entre la dispora,
la sociedad de acogida y el pas de origen.