Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 1 7religious thought. With the work of the Islamic philosophers, new issues cameto the fore in debates over the relative authority of human reason and divinerevelation in human knowledge. These discussions continued to develop overthe centuries under the leadership of Muslim thinkers such as Ibn Rushd (d.1198; known in the West as Av e r r o ë s ) .Many Western histories have appreciated the medieval Muslim philosophersfor their role in developing and transmitting to late-medieval and RenaissanceEurope the thought of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers,whose intellectual heritage had largely been lost to Europe during the darkdays of the Middle Ages. However, the medieval Muslim philosophers are alsoimportant in their own right for their role in the history of Islam. Withouttheir valuable contributions to knowledge, the famed accomplishments of medievalMuslims in science, medicine, ethics, and political thought would nothave been possible. Since the 1980s, the Moroccan Muslim philosopher MohammedAbed al-Jabri has called for a radical reappraisal of this rich tradition—notas a historical legacy to be transmitted as an inert artifact but, rather,as a spirit of rationality and realism that he identifies with the work of IbnRushd. Al-Jabri sees such a reappraisal as the best way to reanimate Islamic intellectualismin order to meet the new challenges and opportunities of life inthe contemporary world (Al-Jabri 1999).Islamic TheologyIn the intellectual history of Islam, not all Muslims have been prepared to goas far in the application of human reason to religious issues as the philosophers.However, over the centuries, some Muslim thinkers became increasinglyprepared to accept certain aspects of the methodology of the philosophersin their studies of religious subjects, provided there was anunderstanding that reason would, in this vein, remain subservient to revelation.These developments contributed to the further evolution of Islamic theol o g y, which had begun in the eighth century with Muslim attempts to addressissues of Qur’anic interpretation in debates over the relationship between theCreator (that is, God) and the created world. In the medieval period, Muslimtheologians began to address not only other Muslims but also different groupsof Christian thinkers. By this time, Christian theologians had an extensively developedtheological enterprise, which was marshaled to advance sectarian argumentsagainst both “pagan” philosophers and Christians belonging to other,rival churches. Muslims, in the process of developing their arguments—bothinternal and external—evolved their own schools of theological thought. Thefield of these debates of Islamic theology is referred to in Arabic as k a l a m .Since the earliest developments of k a l a m , theological debates were often in-