Reason and its its Manifestations in Legal Texts

Feda Hussain Halimi

Abstract

Since the first centuries, the viewpoints of Islamic thinkers about determining the relation between reason and transmission (of Hadith) have diversified. Consequently, various trends have appeared in the scientific arena, from extremist textual trend, extremist rational trend to the moderate rational textual trend. Each one of them tried to determine the kind of the relation between them on the methodological foundations in which they believe. The questions being discussed here are the following: What position reason has in religious texts? How can we benefit from religious texts to enrich reason? Through the descriptive, analytical approach, we have tried to answer these questions. We have concluded that legal texts reject the extremist textual trend, and do not support the extremist rational trend, but rather, they adopt the third trend which says that fixed transmission and evidentiary reason are both divine arguments. The first is an apparent argument and the second is an esoteric argument, for religion is sometime demonstrated through reason, and other time, by transmission. However, in many questions and partial branches, reason needs religious texts.

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)