The Sources of Knowledge and the Relation of Reason to Revelation in Al-Māturīdī’s Kitāb Al-Tawḥīd

Abstract

The article analyses the theory of knowledge set out in Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī’s Kitāb al-Tawḥīd and the account of the relation between reason and transmitted authority that follows from it. It is argued that epistemology is not an introductory section of the work but its foundation: the treatise opens with the impermissibility of accepting religion by imitation and the obligation of rational inference, and every subsequent doctrine is argued on that basis. Three sources of knowledge are distinguished - sense perception, reliable report and rational reflection - and imitation is excluded from them on the ground that it would validate mutually contradictory positions at once. On the question of the obligation to know God, al-Māturīdī takes an intermediate position between (CC the Muʿtazilīs and the Ashʿarīs: reason establishes the obligation, while the BY) license particular rulings of the law are established by revelation. The article further argues that the distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl, drawn in the introduction to Taʾwīlāt al-Qurʾān, is the methodological counterpart of this epistemology, and traces the form these doctrines assumed in the later Māturīdī literature.