The Principle of Charity: Validity and Application

Various Islamic hadiths invite us to interpret people's actions and behaviors according to the principle of charity. Muslim scholars, specially the jurist, have understood this principle very often as a legal rule, so they used it in the jurisprudence realm. But the principle of charity, according to these hadiths, covers two other dimensions: ethical and epistemic. This article tries to explore the ethical and epistemic facets of this principle using Islamic tradition and new studies in social psychology and epistemology. The aim of this article is to defend a broader sense of this principle and to discover its conditions and to determine its limitations, emphasizing its rationality.