ABSTRACT
The Quran requires faith in a transcendent being who, as in Judaism and Christianity, is a supreme creator beyond the cosmos. Unlike the Bible, however, the Quran additionally seeks to transcend the empirical plurality of religions by achieving a perspective on all religion as such (Q:48:28; 61:9). I do not mean simply that Islam is a missionary faith seeking converts: proselytizing is hardly unique to Islam. Rather, it aims at the theoretical unifi cation of existing religions, seeks to prevent the birth of future universal faiths and buttresses these ambitions with a vigorous commitment to the imperial universality of historical Islam. Although students of religions would concede that Islam is the earliest attempt to encompass religion in its totality, only for Muslims does its advent also complete the evolution of religious conviction. Muslims elevate their faith into a normative meta-religion, a supervisor of faiths. It becomes the world’s only universal faith intentionally founded with a mandate to supersede existing ‘revealed’ and ‘man-made’ religions. While recent eclectic movements, such as Baha’ism,1 also seek to fi nalize miscellaneous predecessor faiths, Islam remains the earliest meta-religion and the last and latest successful universal religion.
