Rationalist Islām

Rationalist Islam is an epistemic-led, principle-first, and rational-empirical branch of Islam that grounds views, practices, and identity in a set of independently justified and domain-specific rational principles.

Adherents adopt “Islam” and "Muslim" as identities only after critical assessment of historical evidence suggests that Muḥammad substantially aligned with these principles. Rationalist Islam is, therefore, a continuation of the historical Muhammadan movement with the aim of maximising the wellbeing of all sentient inhabitants of the world.

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, early and medieval Islamic philosophy (falsafa) and mysticism (taṣawwuf/ʿirfān), and extending into modern historical-critical and scientific methods.

Terminology

As an entailment of their commitment to intellectual accommodation and rationalist epistemology, adherents identify and describe themselves contextually — modulating terminology and self-designation according to the audience, subject matter, and communicative purpose.

This adaptive self-representation arises from their understanding that linguistic forms are vehicles of understanding rather than static markers of identity. Within this framework, the use of diverse religious labels functions pedagogically: to convey the essence of truth in whichever language resonates most coherently with a given community.

As a result, Rationalist Muslims assume a wide variety of seemingly conflicting names and employ them contextually, including:

Epistemology

The Five Prior Rational Commitments ('Usūl al-Dīn)

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.

Rationalist Islam proceeds on the principle that no claim is exempt from reason’s jurisdiction. Every position is derived — not asserted — by applying the Five Prior Rational Commitments. What follows is a continuous sequence of conclusions that any rational agent should grant once those priors are accepted.

First Principles of Reality

1) Primacy of Existence

Reason first encounters that something is. Existence is therefore metaphysically prior to the conceptual profiles (essences) by which we sort and compare things. Essences mark the ways existence can be instantiated; they do not outrank existence itself. This primacy blocks nihilism (that nothing ultimately is) and prevents treating essences as free-floating items that would themselves demand an unexplained ontological status.

“Existence” is not a genus with species under it. It is the act of being by which anything is actual rather than merely possible. Because things exist in many ways and to different degrees, the unity of existence is analogical (or graded) rather than univocal. This explains how diverse realities can still be comparable as “more or less actual” without collapsing them into sameness.

2) Necessary Existence

Given (i) the Principle of Sufficient Reason (no brute facts), (ii) the contingency of many things (they could have failed to be), and (iii) the rejection of vicious circularity and infinite regress in explanation, reason requires at least one reality that exists by itself—not by participation or derivation. This reality’s non-existence is impossible; its existence is necessary. This terminates explanatory dependence without remainder.

3) Necessary Simplicity

To terminate explanation non-arbitrarily, the Necessary Existent cannot be composed of parts, properties, or principles that would themselves require a further ground. Composition implies dependence. Therefore, the foundation is simple: its essence is not really distinct from its existence; what it is does not stand apart from that it is.

4) Absolute Necessary Simplicity

Simplicity is comprehensive: no composition of form/matter, essence/existence, act/potency, universal/particular, subject/accident. Any real internal plurality would reinstate explanatory demands and forfeit ultimacy. Absolute simplicity ensures the foundation is explanatorily final.

5) Oneness of Being (Unity with Multiplicity)

From absolute simplicity follows unqualified unity. There cannot be two necessary beings: any differentiating feature would either be ungrounded (violating PSR) or would introduce composition (violating simplicity). Unity is not an optional attribute; it is entailed by necessary existence under PSR.

The unity at the source does not deny plurality below. There is one existence diversely received in finite modes. Multiplicity reflects limits in receivers, not a plurality in the source. This avoids both monistic collapse (erasing real difference) and dualistic rupture (splitting being).

6) The Rule of One

At the summit, being and oneness are convertible: the more actual a thing, the more internally one it is (less division, less unrealised potency). This rule explains why derived realities exhibit fragmentation and limitation while the foundation does not.

7) Gradation of Reality

Finite things differ by degree of actuality and perfection. “More being” means more power, intelligibility, and independence; “less being” means more limitation and dependence. A graded ontology reconciles unity at the source with diversity in the effects and provides an objective scale for value and excellence.

Being presents modes and orders: necessary/contingent; possible/actual/necessary; intelligible/mental/physical; formal/energetic/informational. Recognising these dimensions prevents category mistakes (e.g., treating mental time as if it were foundational becoming) and sets the stage for precise accounts of time, mind, and matter.

8) Necessitarianism

Illusion of Libertarian Free Will (and Rational Agency)

Libertarian “could-have-done-otherwise” at the moment of action, ungrounded by reasons, is incoherent under PSR. Yet rational agency remains: we act from reasons that express our form, character, and understanding. This reasons-responsive (compatibilist) agency preserves responsibility while avoiding metaphysical indeterminacy that would reintroduce brute facts.

9) B-Theory of Time (Change as Ordered Difference)

The dependence structure described above favours time as an order of states rather than an ontological “flow” in the foundation. On the B-theory, events are tenselessly ordered (earlier-than/later-than). Change is real as difference across the order, not as a metaphysical becoming at the ultimate level. This preserves causality and explanation while avoiding reifying “passage” as a primitive.

10) Consciousness

Consciousness is the indubitable datum: all inquiry is conducted within it. Within a graded ontology, consciousness is not an inert by-product but an intensity of actuality through which being is self-revealing in finite centres. Denying consciousness to make room for a purely extrinsic materialism undermines the very conditions of knowing.

11) Analytic Idealism (Meta-Consciousness, Dissociation, Reassociation)

Unity and gradation motivate a model in which a meta-conscious field grounds many finite streams. Individual minds are dissociations—bounded, rule-governed perspectives within the field. Exceptional states (deep sleep, near-death, mystical union) exemplify reassociation, i.e., loosening or widening of the bounds. This is not a licence for speculation; it is a way to render mind-world relations intelligible under the prior ontology.

12) Prelife

If finite minds are dissociations within a wider field, there is no a priori reason to assert that the onset of one’s conscious stream coincides with biological birth. “Prelife” names the rational openness—consistent with the priors—to pre-embodied conditions of perspective without committing to any particular folklore.

13) Afterlife

By the same token, the cessation of bodily function need not entail annihilation of perspective. “Afterlife” denotes reassociation of the informational/intentional structure that constituted a person’s perspective with a wider scope. This is a metaphysical possibility that naturally follows from the mind-model; its specific contours require evidential inquiry.

14) Human Perception of Time

Given the B-series, the felt flow of time is a feature of consciousness—our way of accessing successive states—rather than a fundamental becoming. This clarifies memory, anticipation, and temporal phenomenology without elevating them to ontological primitives.

15) Empiricism

Natural World / Material Dimension

The material order is a stable, mathematically tractable layer within graded being. Its regularities are intelligible and publicly checkable; they instantiate the very demand of PSR in the contingent domain. Treating it as illusory in the pejorative sense would make empirical knowledge impossible; treating it as ultimate would contradict the explanatory ascent already established.

Scientific Method

Because contingent facts can only be discriminated by observation, test, and replication, science is reason’s mandated method for the natural world: model, predict, measure, attempt to falsify, update. This is not an optional cultural choice; it is the epistemic application of PSR and contingency to nature. Where controlled experiment is impossible (e.g., cosmology), methodological surrogates (consilience, retrodiction, robustness checks) carry the same rational aim.

16) Maximisation of Sentient Wellbeing (Constrained)

Ethics and Value

Human Wellbeing Metrics

If value is not to be brute, it must answer to intelligible reasons. The minimal cross-cultural denominator is sentient wellbeing: gradients of suffering and flourishing, plus the capabilities that realise rational goods (knowledge, friendship, beauty, virtue). Metrics must be public, evidence-based, and revisable.

Reason universalises: like cases deserve like consideration. Moral concern extends to all sentient beings, with degrees of obligation modulated by relational ties, reciprocity, and social roles. Species membership alone is not a rationally basic boundary.

Given universal concern and PSR, ethics aims at maximising net wellbeing over appropriate horizons, constrained by justice, rights, trust, and long-run stability. Deontic rules function as structural safeguards that, justified by experience and game-theoretic insight, protect aggregate flourishing from short-sighted optimising.

17) Gradation of Intellect

Pedagogy, Society, and Rule

As being is graded, intellectual capacities vary across attention, abstraction, integration, and moral prudence. This variance is descriptive, not pejorative, and it predicts differential receptivity to demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric.

Inevitability of Intellectual Hierarchy

Because capacities and responsibilities differ, functions stratify in any complex society: research, judgment, instruction, execution. Properly construed, hierarchy is ordered service to the common good, not domination.

18) Noocracy

Philosopher-King / Technocracy / Imām / Perfect Man

The ideal governor unites wisdom (ends) and techne (means), is accountable to demonstrable truth, and orders institutions to the common good. Historical forms vary (council, imamate, constitutional technocracy), but the rational principle is stable: competence guided by virtue under intelligible law.

19) Intellectual Accommodation

Teaching must fit the receiver’s form. The same truth can (and should) be delivered as proof for the few, argument for the many, and symbol for beginners. This is responsible communication, not dilution.

20) Intellectual Dissimulation (Strict Sense)

“Dissimulation” here means strategic reserve: withholding advanced material where foreseeable misinterpretation would harm. It is stewardship of truth under PSR (avoid predictable epistemic damage), not licence for deceit.

21) Need to Encourage and Control Behaviour

Where demonstration alone will not move median behaviour, law, institutions, incentives, and norms are rational instruments to align action with the good. This is an application of PSR to collective life: effects follow causes; therefore, design the causes.

22) Need for Dogma

“Dogma” means publicly fixed minima of right belief and practice that coordinate a civilisation. It protects the many from costly error while leaving upper tiers open to demonstration and qualified debate. Dogma is not a substitute for truth; it is a civic guardrail toward it.

23) Metanarratives

Human agents reason within stories. A metanarrative integrates metaphysics, ethics, and destiny into an intelligible arc that motivates virtue and sacrifice. Without a shared narrative, social coordination and long-range projects degrade.

24) Mythos for Most

Symbol and story teach where proof cannot yet reach. Properly used, mythos is not falsehood but imaginal pedagogy—true content rendered in forms accessible to typical abstraction bandwidths. It is accommodation at scale.

25) Motifs and Imagery

Motifs—light, ascent, circle, garden, path—translate abstract truths into memorable forms that shape imagination and action. Repetition builds identity; symbol stabilises norms.

26) Repurposing Myths and Legends

Existing cultural materials can be redeemed: stripped of false metaphysics, rekeyed to the Necessary Existent and rational ethics, and redeployed for formation. Continuity with correction preserves social capital while elevating understanding.

Rationalist Muslims argue the sequence above is not a miscellany. It is a chain: from the Five Priors to necessary existence; from necessity to simplicity and unity; from unity to graded multiplicity; from there to time, mind, world, method; then to value, pedagogy, and governance. Each conclusion answers a demand issued by the commitments at the start, leaving no step as a brute assertion. In this sense, Rationalist Islam is not a set of optional beliefs but a worked-out map of what reason itself necessitates about being, knowing, living, and ordering a common life.

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.

Essentialist Affirmation of Doctrinal Schemas

While Rationalist Islam constructs its metaphysical and ethical framework independently on rational and evidentiary grounds, it recognises within the major Islamic doctrinal formulations—Sunni arkān al-īmān and arkān al-islām, Shi‘i uṣūl al-dīn and furūʿ al-dīn—essential correspondences to its own rationally derived principles.

Owing to its doctrines of intellectual accommodation, semantic polyvalence, and essentialist hermeneutics, Rationalist Islam affirms these traditional formulations analogically: not by uncritical adoption of their forms, but by recognising within them the same underlying truths apprehended in different linguistic, cultural, and historical idioms.

Rationalist Islam constructs its metaphysical and ethical system independently through reason, ontology, and empirical coherence, yet it acknowledges deep structural resonances with the traditional doctrinal frameworks of Islam. These correspondences are not nominal but analogical—arising from the recognition that truths apprehended through revelation and those derived by reason share a common referent in reality (al-ḥaqīqah al-wāḥidah).

Accordingly, Rationalist Islam affirms the uṣūl al-dīn (principles of religion) and furūʿ al-dīn (branches of religion) articulated within Twelver Shi‘ism, and the arkān al-islām (pillars of practice) formulated within Sunnism, interpreting each in light of its own rational metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology.

Twelver Uṣūl al-Dīn (Principles of Religion)

Tawḥīd (Divine Unity)

God is affirmed as the Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd), absolutely simple, uncomposed, and ontologically prior to all multiplicity. Tawḥīd thus signifies the unity of existence itself (waḥdat al-wujūd), not merely the numerical oneness of a deity among others. Multiplicity belongs only to the realm of contingent manifestation.

ʿAdl (Divine Justice)

Justice, in rationalist metaphysics, is the invariance of the divine order—every existent occupies precisely its necessary degree within the ontological hierarchy. Apparent injustice arises only from partial perspectives. Theodicy is therefore resolved through the principle of necessitarian harmony: all that exists unfolds necessarily from the divine simplicity in the best and only possible way.

Nubuwwa (Prophethood)

Prophets are higher modes of consciousness through which divine intellect becomes articulated in human history. Their distinction lies not in supernatural interruption but in perfected receptivity to truth. Prophetic communication is the linguistic and cultural crystallisation of universal wisdom within a particular civilisational horizon.

Imāma (Leadership / Continuity of Guidance)

Imamate signifies the perpetuation of divine guidance through intellectual continuity rather than genealogical descent. The imām is the bearer of ʿaql mustafād—the fully actualised intellect that mediates between transcendent truth and communal life. In rationalist terms, the Imamate represents the principle of intellectual succession: the necessity that wisdom, once disclosed, be continuously embodied in minds capable of sustaining and interpreting it.

Maʿād (Return / Eschaton)

Eschatology is interpreted ontologically: the Return is the re-integration of individuated consciousness into higher degrees of unity. The “resurrection” is the unveiling of one’s existential reality; paradise and hell denote modes of consciousness corresponding to nearness or alienation from the Source.

Twelver Furūʿ al-Dīn (Branches of Religion)

The furūʿ are ethical-ritual expressions of metaphysical truths. Each act symbolises and cultivates an inner disposition aligned with the ontological order.

Ṣalāt (Prayer)

The rhythmic realignment of the self with the Ground of Being; a phenomenological exercise in returning to presence (ḥuḍūr).

Ṣawm (Fasting)

The voluntary suspension of lower appetites to reassert primacy of the intellective over the corporeal.

Zakāt (Almsgiving)

The recognition that material differentiation is accidental; redistribution manifests the unity of the collective soul.

Ḥajj (Pilgrimage)

An enacted cosmology: the circumambulation of the One by the many, signifying the soul’s return to its origin.

Jihād (Striving)

Primarily the inner struggle against ignorance and delusion; outward struggle is justifiable only as the defence of conditions for intellectual and moral flourishing.

Khums (One-Fifth Levy)

The rational expression of distributive justice: a mechanism for the cyclical purification of surplus wealth, preventing the concentration of material power that distorts moral and intellectual equilibrium. In its essence, khums signifies the return of excess to the collective whole from which all sustenance arises.

Amr bi’l-Maʿrūf & Nahy ʿan al-Munkar

The rational imperative to promote virtue and restrain vice; not coercion, but moral pedagogy rooted in intellectual hierarchy.

Tawallā & Tabarrā

Symbolic of epistemic allegiance and disassociation: attachment to truth and detachment from falsehood, understood ontologically rather than tribally.

Thus, the furūʿ become modes of ethical cultivation, each a symbolic pedagogy for the soul’s ascent through the gradations of being.

Sunni Arkān al-Islām (Pillars of Practice)

Shahāda (Testimony of Faith)

The declaration lā ilāha illā Allāh, Muḥammad rasūl Allāh signifies not mere confessional identity but ontological recognition: “No reality exists but the Real, and the human intellect (exemplified in Muḥammad) is its messenger.” The Shahāda thus encapsulates the metaphysical and epistemic unity of existence and intellect.

Ṣalāt (Prayer)

Interpreted as the rhythmic unification of consciousness with the Real; its temporal structure symbolises the cyclical return of multiplicity to unity.

Zakāt (Almsgiving)

Represents the ontological interdependence of all beings; to give is to acknowledge that possession is a contingent differentiation within a unified field of existence.

Ṣawm (Fasting during Ramaḍān)

An exercise in epistemic purification: by abstaining from sensory indulgence, the intellect re-centres itself on the essential.

Ḥajj (Pilgrimage to Mecca)

The paradigmatic enactment of the soul’s journey from dispersion to unity: Mecca as the ontological axis (quṭb), the Kaʿba as symbol of divine simplicity, and circumambulation as the orbit of contingent being around the Necessary Existent.

Summary

Through essentialist hermeneutics and analogical affirmation, Rationalist Islam re-grounds these frameworks as expressions of universal metaphysical and ethical principles. Each doctrine and practice, when read beyond its literal form, articulates a facet of the same reality: the necessity, unity, and gradation of existence and the ascent of consciousness toward its source.

🧭 1. Doctrinal Correspondence and Analogical Affirmation

Most academic and precise. It signals that your system corresponds conceptually to others while affirming them analogically (i.e., at the level of essence, not literal formulation).

This section outlines the Rationalist Muslim framework’s doctrinal correspondence and analogical affirmation of the traditional Islamic creedal structures (e.g., Sunni and Shi‘i formulations of faith and practice).

🧩 2. Hermeneutic Concordance

Elegant, concise, and philosophical. Suggests a deliberate, interpretive reconciliation — not by subservience but through deep understanding of shared essences.

Under Hermeneutic Concordance, Rationalist Islam situates its independently derived metaphysical and ethical principles in essential alignment with the established doctrinal schemas of Islam.

🔍 3. Doctrinal Integration through Essential Concordance

A bit longer but very clear. Highlights that your system integrates prior doctrines by recognising their essential (not formal) concordance with rational truths.

This approach integrates traditional Islamic frameworks through essential concordance rather than formal identity.

🪞 4. Analogical Affirmation of Classical Frameworks

Very transparent, reads well in encyclopaedic style.

Rationalist Islam analogically affirms the classical theological frameworks of Islam—recognising their essential content while rearticulating them on independent rational foundations.

🧠 5. Philosophical Re-grounding of Classical Doctrines

More academic and technical, suited if the article uses philosophical language throughout.

A philosophical re-grounding of classical doctrines within a rationalist metaphysics of existence.

🕊️ 6. Essentialist Affirmation of Doctrinal Schemas

If you want to foreground your doctrine of essentialism (as in Sadrian–ʿirfānī ontology).

An essentialist affirmation of Islamic doctrinal schemas—recognising the unity of essence beneath multiplicity of expression.

Recommendation:

For encyclopaedic clarity and philosophical accuracy, the best single heading would be:

Doctrinal Correspondence and Analogical Affirmation

Sunnism's Six Pillars of Faith (Arkān al-Īmān)

Rationalist Islam affirms the six classical pillars of faith recognised within Sunni orthodoxy, but interprets each through a philosophical-rationalist ontology grounded in the primacy of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd), divine simplicity, and necessitarian metaphysics. These reinterpretations aim not to reject the inherited schema but to explicate its rational entailments in light of contemporary philosophical coherence.

1. Belief in the Existence and Oneness of God (Tawḥīd)

For Rationalist Muslims, belief in God corresponds to the recognition of the Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd), whose being is simple, non-composite, and devoid of parts, potentiality, or contingency. God is not an entity among entities but the absolute ground of all existence — pure actuality (faʿl maḥḍ). The divine unity is ontological, not merely numerical: multiplicity belongs to the contingent realm of emanations, while God is utterly simple and self-identical. This view parallels the doctrines of divine simplicity in Avicenna, Aquinas, and Mulla Ṣadrā, as well as the monism of analytic idealism. God, therefore, is not a being who causes things to exist but Being Itself — the necessary substrate upon which all possible realities depend.

2. Belief in Angels

Angels (malāʾika) are understood not as anthropomorphic entities but as intelligible forces or modalities of divine action within the order of necessity. In metaphysical terms, they correspond to immaterial intelligences — forms or causal principles mediating between the Necessary and the contingent realms. Their obedience is the metaphysical inevitability of their nature: to exist as pure forms of divine causation is to act according to divine necessity.

Their nomenclature — Gabriel (Jibrīl), Michael (Mīkāʾīl), Israfil, and others — denotes culturally contextual personifications of these cosmic functions. “Gabriel,” for instance, signifies the intellective principle through which revelation (noetic illumination) is transmitted to the human mind; “Michael” may represent the principle of sustenance and order in the natural world, and so forth. Hence, angelology is understood symbolically yet ontologically — as the taxonomy of necessary causal intelligences.

3. Belief in the Divine Scriptures

The “Books of God” (kutub Allāh) are interpreted as moments of revelation — epistemic apprehensions of divine truth by human consciousness. Revelation, in this view, is not linguistic dictation but intellectual illumination: the human mind’s reception of eternal truths refracted through its historical, linguistic, and psychological contingencies. Each scripture — Torah, Psalms, Gospel, and Qur’an — represents a theophany (tajallī) of the same divine logos expressed in the idiom of a particular community and epoch. Universal revelations express perennial metaphysical truths; particular ones address contextual, socio-moral arrangements. Thus, the diversity of scriptures is the necessary pluralisation of the One Truth within time and language.

4. Belief in the Prophets

Prophethood (nubuwwa) denotes the emergence of consciousnesses capable of receiving and articulating revelatory truths. Prophets are loci of intensified noetic awareness through whom divine wisdom becomes existentially and socially operative.

Muhammad is affirmed as the Seal of Prophethood (khātam al-nabiyyīn) with respect to the specific historical-cultural dispensation of late antiquity — i.e., the terminal synthesis of the Abrahamic prophetic cycle within the Arabian milieu. However, the rationalist view recognises the logical possibility of analogous prophetic functions in other spatio-temporal contexts; Mani, the Buddha, or Socrates, for instance, may be regarded as prior or parallel manifestations of the same revelatory continuum. Prophethood thus designates not an exclusive office but a metaphysical function within the evolution of consciousness — each prophet serving as a node through which universal wisdom (ḥikma) becomes historically embodied.

5. Belief in the Day of Judgment

The Day of Judgment (yawm al-qiyāmah) is interpreted phenomenologically as the moment of ontological reassociation: when individuated consciousnesses, having undergone temporal disassociation from their source, re-integrate into higher, more unified levels of awareness. This eschatological event is continuous and gradational rather than merely episodic or spatial. The traditional dichotomy of paradise and hell symbolises the polar extremes of conscious experience — beatific proximity to the Source versus alienated distance from it. Between these poles lies a continuum of existential states proportional to one’s degree of ontological realisation. Thus, “resurrection” (baʿth) signifies the re-awakening of consciousness to its prior unity, and “judgment” the unveiling (kashf) of the ontological truth already inscribed within each being’s nature.

6. Belief in Divine Decree (Qadar)

Divine predestination (qadar) is understood through the principle of necessitarianism: all events unfold according to the immutable nexus of causation grounded in divine omniscience. God’s knowledge is not temporal foreknowledge but the eternal self-knowledge of Being — every event, possibility, and contingency already contained within the necessary structure of existence. Human freedom, within this view, is not libertarian but compatibilist: freedom is the self-expression of necessity at the human level, as articulated by Spinoza and echoed by Sadra’s doctrine of substantial motion (ḥaraka jawhariyya). To affirm qadar is to recognise that reality could not have been otherwise — its totality is the rational unfolding of divine simplicity through graded manifestation.