An Analysis of Salafi Arguments from the Priority of Transmitted Rulings to Rulings of the Reason with a Focus on Ibn Taymīyya’s View

A disputed issue between Muslim and non-Muslim theologians was the reliability and scope of rational understanding in discovering religious doctrines. Among Islamic sects, there has been a spectrum of views in both extremes, and some parties of the debate accused others of exit from Islam. One influential sect with a particular view of the issue is the Wahhabi branch of Salafism. Their theoreticians, such as Ibn Taymiyya, minimize the reliability of the reason in understanding and discovering religious intentions, and in some cases, they totally deny its reliability. And in cases where a judgment of the reason is in conflict or thought to be in conflict with that of the religion, the latter is preferred over the former. In this paper, I deploy an attributive-analytic method, to reply to the question of the view of this group about the reliability of the reason, and the extent of the cogency of their arguments. I conclude that they divide judgments of the reason into explicit conclusive and probabilistic non-explicit judgments, and they deny a major portion of rational judgments and doctrines, especially in the realm of the practical reason, in the domain of religion and super-natural issues. In their view, arguments propounded by theologians, philosophers, sages, and Sufis are from the probabilistic reason, and should thus be rejected.