Articles

Islamic Rationalism

Rationalism is the attitude of appealing to reason as the fundamental justification of knowledge or beliefs. Imadaldin Al-Jubouri describes the disputes among early Islamic scholars about the limits of what can be known through science and rationality.

The early period of rationalism in Islamic thought was led by a school of thinkers known as the Mutazilites (‘isolationists’), in the second half of the first century of Islam (7th Century, CE). It is very difficult to research the Mutazilites’ early years in the Hijaz, Egypt and Iraq, except for what was mentioned by historians such as al-Tabari and al-Nobikhti, who said that “they involve themselves only with science, knowledge and worship.”

The first group of Mutazilite thinkers were Mabad al-Juhni (d.702 CE), al-Ju’d ibn Drhim (d.721), the Damascene Ghaylan (d.

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