A Critical Survey of Ayatollah Javadi Amoli's Theory of Religious Knowledge

Muslim scholars have put forward various expositions pertaining to religious knowledge. One of the innovative viewpoints on this matter belongs to Ayatollah Javadi Amoli. As an advocate of religious knowledge, he maintains that for knowledge to be truly knowledge (not illusion or imagination) there should be a religiosity; knowledge is nothing but religious. To ascribe religiosity to all kinds of human knowledge is to meet the requisite of exactness and methodicality for any so-called scientific propositions. Authentic knowledge is to interpret the divine creation and acts, and giving explanation for divine act is an Islamic doctrine despite the fact that the knower is not able to grasp it and considers God’s creation to be nature itself. This viewpoint does have fundamental backgrounds and presuppositions with which the authors have proceeded by referring to and analyzing the elementary principles in his authored works. In the end, some criticisms of his view will be presented. In the realm of religious knowledge, this theory, despite its systematicity, encounters such serious problems as confused reasoning on divine, religious and Islamic concepts; internal inconsistency; methodological incompetency; admissibility of using “creation” instead of “nature”; objectionability of consequences of considering all branches of knowledge as religious. What impels this theory to be inefficient lies mostly in its whole reliance on the actual state (or substance level) than the apparent state (or assertion level).