Ṣaḥīḥ al-Manqūl, or What Is Revelation?

Abstract

Wehave spoken in previous chapters of an alleged conflict between reason and revelation. Yet the notion that “reason”might contradict “revelation”means little until we define each of these two entities and determine exactly how it is that each one allegedly contradicts the other.When philosophers, theologians, and others assert a contradiction between reason and revelation, this typically means that what are taken to be the unimpeachable conclusions of reason are found to be incongruent with the “literal” (ḥaqīqa) or obvious (ẓāhir) sense of the revealed texts1 (and, most important for Ibn Taymiyya, what those texts assert about thenature and attributes of God). According to IbnTaymiyya, such thinkers essentially take the rational faculty and its deliverances as primary and require that the language of the revealed texts be (re)interpreted in congruence with reason. In other words, for the philosophers and the rationalistic mutakallimūn, the meaning of revelation is ultimately determined not by anything inherent in the texts but on the basis of (allegedly) certain and universal rational conclusions that are reached independently of the texts. Such conclusions can—and, in fact, often do (to a greater or lesser extent depending on the school in question)—contradict the plain sense of revelation, which is then