Dr Ibrahim Kalin - The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre

to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is not
able to answer”. 13
The Ontological Ground of Qur’anic Rationality
Long before the Greek philosophical texts were translated
into Arabic, Muslims had an encounter with the concept of
reason/intellect as outlined in the Qur’an and the Hadith.
In sharp contrast to the period of the Jahiliyyah, “ignorance”,
Islam represented the era of faith, knowledge, reason, justice
and freedom all at once. Entering Islam meant leaving the
mental and social habits of the age of ignorance, polytheism,
injustice and immorality. It meant establishing a new
socio-political order based on reason, justice, equality and
virtue. It also required a new ontology of reason to overcome
polytheistic logic and moral cynicism. And this was possible
only by introducing a new Weltanschauung and a new mode
of thinking.
In order to understand the place of reason and rationality
in the Qur’an and the later Islamic intellectual tradition, we
thus need to explore the new ontological ground of reason
and the mode of thinking which the Qur’an introduced and
did so through stories, implorations, deductions, syllogisms,
commands, warnings, praises, and promises of reward and
punishment. The rich repertoire of logical deductions and
13 Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London,
1933), p. A viii.
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