Summary: | After the death of the last famous senior scholar of the Mutazili school Al-Qadi Abd Al-Jabbar (d.1025) the mutazili school and the rational thought of Islamic theology slowly vanished. The sami-rational and strictly textual orthodox schools of Maturidism, Asharism and Atharism prevailed in the Islamic understanding of theology as a whole. This phenomenon lead to a decline of independent reasoning in Islamic theology whereas tradition became the emphasized way of thought. Tradition over reason. Challenges to different questions in Islamic theology rose and caused a cry out for new and original ways of meeting the demand of thought, which tradition was not fully equipped of handling. As a product, many different movements developed to meet the high demand of challenges. Many people reverted to neo-orthodoxy, others to more extreme versions of strict textualism, and fewer became more rational in their approach. I am attempting to get on this rational wave and to wake up a forgotten school of thought to meet the philosophical challenges that Islamic theology faces, both from internal and external philosophical forces. Inspired by Dr. Ramon Harveys book: "Transcendent God, Rational world", which attempts to synthesize Maturidi and Edmund Husserls philosophical works where he brings western philosophical and islamic theology together. I, myself will attempt to try to defend a rational Mutazilite theology using Dr. William Lane Craigs work on Gods attributes and abstract objects. The goal is to synthesize those together and try to answer philosophical arguments, both old and new that the school faces. In doing so I attempt to show that old theological schools can meet the challenges that they face using new tools that has been developed in contemporary philosophy and theology and to give a new alternative that could benefit muslim theists for the future. This in turn will hopefully give rise to further development in the field of contemporary islamic theology and philosophy.
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