Potential Challenges of Interfaith Engagement: A Revisit to Al-Faruqi’s Contribution

In recent years, Malaysia and the rest of the globe have seen the rise of interfaith dialogue and engagements that include religious discourse, religious debate, scriptural reading, spiritual engagement, and literature on religions. It becomes a requirement for living a faithful life. The inter-religious dialogue, which enables people to listen to and converse with the other partner of religious organisations or communities, is an example of an interfaith engagement. The only goals of this involvement are to deepen one's convictions and obtain respect and understanding. Some of these engagements, nevertheless, have gone too far from the original objectives. Even still, each religion has unique goals, objectives, and methods for fostering peaceful coexistence with different faiths, which makes interfaith relations more challenging. Due to the diversified aims and current practices of inter-faith engagement, the paper attempts to investigate the contemporary challenges of interfaith relations. The method used in this article is a descriptive and analytical study. It highlights the background of interfaith relations, explore potential challenges of inter-religious engagements, and provides some solutions to these challenges from an Islamic perspective. The article will also discuss several solutions to these challenges, particularly from Ismail Raj al-Faruqi's point of view on his ethics for interfaith engagement. The findings conclude that interfaith engagement should encourage a practical approach that is fruitful with the result. It promotes a unique interaction of different religious groups to examine their religious background and contribute to humanity.