Religion

Rationalist Islam is a branch of Islam that grounds Muslim identity, views and practices in a set of independently justified rational principles. It is an epistemic-led, principle-first, rational-empirical continuation of the Muhammadan project that integrates reason and evidence with the aim of maximising the wellbeing of all sentient inhabitants of the world.

On this view, “Islam” and "Muslim" are adopted as an identity only after critical assessment of historical evidence suggests that Muḥammad substantially aligned with these principles. The guiding maxim often associated with Rationalist Islam is “Religion as movement — not monument,” emphasising an ongoing, adaptive, principle-led, evidence-based, ethically purposive project rather than static veneration and dogma.

Proponents describe Rationalist Islam as a continuation — and internal reformulation — of the broader Near Eastern and Mediterranean “wisdom tradition,” drawing a conceptual lineage from classical philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus), biblical and late antique sapiential currents (including the Jesus movement’s emphasis on justice and inner transformation), through Muḥammad’s proclamations and the early Islamic sciences (Qurʾān, law, theology, falsafa, taṣawwuf/ʿirfān), and extending into modern historical-critical and scientific methods.

Epistemology

The Five Prior Rational Commitments

The only prior rational commitments Rationalist Muslims make are:

1. The Law of Identity

2. The Law of Non-Contradiction

3. The Principle of Sufficient Reason (minimal intelligibility form)

4. Recognition of Contingency

5. Denial of Vicious Circularity and Infinite Explanatory Regress

1. The Law of Identity

“whatever is, is; whatever is not, is not.”

Every entity or proposition is self-identical and distinct from its negation.

2. The Law of Non-Contradiction

“nothing can both be and not be in the same respect.”

Nothing can both be and not be in the same respect.

3. The Principle of Sufficient Reason (minimal intelligibility form)

“every real state of affairs has some reason or ground.”

Every real state of affairs is intelligible; it has some reason, ground, or explanation for why it is rather than not, even if that reason is intrinsic.

4. Recognition of Contingency

“some things exist but could, in principle, not have existed.”

There exist beings whose non-existence involves no contradiction.

5. Denial of Vicious Circularity and Infinite Explanatory Regress

Explanation cannot be self-grounding or infinitely deferred; every chain of dependence must terminate in something self-sufficient.

The Rational Entailments

From the Five Prior Rational Commitments follow a series of necessary entailments that together constitute the framework of Rationalist Islam. They are not adopted as beliefs, asserted as doctrines, or accepted by tradition, but are said to follow by necessity from the structure of reason itself.

Each entailment represents what any rational intellect must affirm once it accepts the laws of thought and the intelligibility of being: that contingent existence requires grounding, that explanation must terminate in the self-sufficient, and that the pursuit of knowledge within each domain must proceed according to the logic appropriate to that domain. What follows, therefore, are not articles of faith but the logical unfoldings of reason — the positions that reason itself necessitates concerning existence, knowledge, and ethics.

classical logical norms: non-contradiction, identity, and valid inference.

Explanatory adequacy: principle of sufficient reason, parsimony, coherence with well-established findings.

Public reason: justifications accessible to any competent inquirer; aversion to special pleading.

Domain-specific empiricism

Nature and technology: experimental method, peer critique, replication.

History: source criticism, chronology, philology, intertextuality, external controls (epigraphy, archaeology), and context.