Dr Ibrahim Kalin - The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre

scribe things as facts or information; its suggestive stories,
striking metaphors and vivid descriptions of God’s creation
and interventions in history are meant to change the way we
see things and our place in the world. It seeks to transform
the human conscience so that we can live a life based on
justified faith and virtue. 14 Once this conscience is awoken
and brought up to reckon with the reality of things, everything
falls in place: our reason, thinking, sense organs, seeing,
hearing, perceiving and moral judgments begin to come
together. Reason and rationality arise within this larger context
of integrated thinking and moral discernment. Far from
being a principle and ground of truth by itself, reason functions
within the larger context of our being in the world and
the human responses we give to reality.
Owing its existence to something larger than what is
purely human, reason cannot know God in the sense of ‘encapsulating’
Him because as a finite being, it cannot encircle
that which is infinite. God cannot be known empirically because
empirical knowledge entails limit, position, relation,
relativity, etc., none of which applies to God. God can be
known through reason/intelligence to the extent to which
the Absolute and the Infinite can be intuited, grasped and
represented through formal propositions, concepts, and
metaphors. To expect reason to do more than that would be
14 Cf. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca
Islamica, 1994), p. 22.
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