Ismail Ragi al-Faruqi's early life was shaped by displacement and by an unusual education across three languages and traditions. Born in Jaffa in 1921, he was schooled first in Arabic in a mosque setting, then in French at a convent school, and finally in English at the American University of Beirut, where, after early academic difficulty, he retrained his own methods of study and went on to graduate with distinction. He entered the Palestinian civil administration and had begun to build a career there when the events of 1948 ended it, dispossessing his family of their land.

He came to the United States and enrolled at Harvard, but financial pressure forced him to interrupt his studies after earning an M.A. Using a research grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, he entered the construction business and built and furnished homes until he judged he had secured enough stability to return to scholarship. He completed a doctorate at Indiana University, grounding himself in the history of Western philosophy before turning back toward the Islamic intellectual tradition.

That turn brought him to the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University as a Research Associate, where his command of both Western philosophical method and Islamic thought led Wilfred Cantwell Smith, then the Institute's director, to propose an unusual placement: two years as a Research Associate inside McGill's Faculty of Divinity, living and studying within a Christian theological environment. Dean Stanley Brice Frost, who later wrote the foreword to this volume, sponsored the appointment with Rockefeller Foundation support. Al-Faruqi spent those two years attending lectures, participating in seminars, and engaging McGill's theological faculty in sustained debate. Christian Ethics is the direct product of that fellowship.

He subsequently taught at the Central Institute of Islamic Research in Karachi and held visiting professorships at the Institute of Higher Arabic Studies and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, lecturing on Arabism, Islam, and the history of religions. By the time Christian Ethics appeared, he was Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, where he was establishing a program in Islamic studies ? early groundwork for a career that would make him one of the most consequential Muslim scholars of religion working in North America in the twentieth century.

His earlier study, 'Urubah and Religion: An Analysis of the Dominant Ideas of Arabism and of Islam as Its Highest Moment of Consciousness (1962), and his analytical study of particularism in Hebrew scripture, established the comparative and historical method he brings to bear in Christian Ethics: close textual engagement with a tradition's own primary sources, read through a rigorously argued philosophical framework, in the service of dialogue rather than dismissal.