The Point de Bascule blog has published a profile of the late U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. leader Ismail Faruqi centered on his activities in Canada. The article begins:
In July 1986, a Montreal Gazette reader wrote to the editor to complain that the assassination of Muslim leader Ismail Faruqi in Pennsylvania had been “deliberately left out” of the newspaper. He was particularly upset since Faruqi had been a leading figure of the Montreal Muslim community from 1958 until 1967. “When a member of the Moslem community is a victim of terrorism, there is no coverage,” he complained. “But you (the media) choose to print news that portrays Moslems as terrorists.” At the time, this Gazette reader also contacted the Muslim Community of Quebec on Chester Avenue in Montreal (also Canada Revenue Agency) to express his indignation. Agreeing with the Gazette reader, MCQ president Mohammed Amin claimed that the lack of coverage was part of a pattern of “biased reporting of the media in general and of The Gazette in particular.” Clair Balfour, the Gazette’s ombudsman, rejected the claim of “anti-Muslim bias” (the term Islamophobia had not yet been invented by the Muslim Brotherhood). He concluded that the lack of coverage was understandable given the fact that Faruqi was not an international newsmaker. No major press agencies on which The Gazette relied for its information had alluded to Faruqi’s activities in Montreal, added the ombudsman. Once informed about the Montreal connection though, the Gazette’s ombudsman took the time to investigate Faruqi’s activities. On July 31, 1986, he published his findings in an article entitled Islamic Scholar Slain in U.S. Was Figure in Montreal (also scan of the original article).
Read the rest here.
A previous post reported that in August 2010, a Georgetown Professor presented the Annual Isma’il Faruqi Lecture at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Another earlier post discussed the international conference on Dr. Faruqi that was held by IIIT and organized jointly by IIIT, the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSID), the University of Westminister, UK, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, University, USA.
A Hudson Institute report explains that Al-Faruqi, a Temple University professor who had been an activist with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), played a pivotal role in the founding of IIIT and that that it was al-Faruqi who secured $25 million from the Saudi Islamic Development Bank in order to establish IIIT. Al-Faruqi is probably best known for his concept of the “Islamization of Knowledge” described as follows:
Al-Faruqi attempted to articulate an Islamic worldview by fortifying it with ration- al and scientific arguments. In the latter part of his career, he became more and more concerned with the spiritual aspects of Islam. He advocated a radical Islam- ization of new knowledge. He recognized that the crisis of the modern world was the crisis of knowledge. And this crisis, al-Faruqi thought, could only be cured via a new synthesis of all knowledge in an Islamic epistemological framework. The “Islamization of Knowledge” project sought to arouse Muslims to become active participants in intellectual life and contribute to it from an Islamic perspective.