Reconciling Religion and Modernity in the Views of Motahhari and Fazlur Rahman

The encounter between Islam and the West during the modern period gave rise to new challenges regarding the relationship between religion and modernization, leading to intellectual debates among Muslim scholars. In an effort to reconcile the conflicts between religious traditions and the intellectual advancements of modernity, two distinct intellectual movements emerged: revisionist traditionalists and religious intellectualism. The former criticized the intellectual principles of modernity while adhering to orthodox theological and jurisprudential beliefs, whereas the latter embraced the epistemic core of modernity, including relativistic autonomous rationality and its associated theories, while questioning the theological and jurisprudential foundations of the religion. Consequently, each movement presented its own interpretation of religious rationality. This article aims to conduct a comparative study of Ayatollah Motahhari's views, representing the revisionist traditionalist approach, and the ideas of Fazlur Rahman, who adopts the religious intellectualist approach, in order to explore the compatibility between tradition and modernity.