Mutazilaism: An Introduction to Rationality in Islam

Dr. Diwan Taskheer Khan

Rationalism, in the sense of appealing to logical reason and dialectical rhetoric, has been a characteristic of Islamic theological thought since the earliest times. Beyond the discussion on the authenticity and thus the dating of a number of sources, there is a small corpus of very old texts of unquestionable authenticity, in which the doctrinal aspects concerning the opposition between free will and determinism are discussed in a dialectical manner. The use of this genre of argumentation in such early writings attests to the use of logical reason in Islamic religious rhetoric since the earliest period of Islam reaching a climax between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Without a doubt, rationalism has always come up against powerful adversaries throughout the history of Islam, but it has continued to be one of the principal currents of theological thought. Mu'tazilaism is one of the earliest philosophical traditions of rationalist Islam. This is a descriptive paper in which the author tried to give an exposition of rationalism in Islam through Mutazilites philosophy.