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Rationalist Muslims identify themselves as Khomeinists because they regard Rūḥollāh Khomeini as the figure who inaugurated the Revival Era through revolution, resistance, and the reanimation of the Muhammadan movement under modern conditions. This designation is strengthened by the fact that many adherents are near-contemporaries of that era and therefore understand it not merely as distant history, but as a living civilisational turning point. They venerate Khomeini for his emphasis on Muslim unity, his refusal to allow minor jurisprudential, and even certain doctrinal, differences to eclipse larger geopolitical and moral struggles, and his attempt to restore religion to the plane of historical agency. They also esteem his philosophy, mysticism, poetry, politics, geopolitical vision, anti-imperialism, his opposition to ethnosupremacy including Zionism, his unwavering dedication to the oppressed including Palestinians, Black people, and victims of Western hegemony, as well as his charisma, bidomainal genius, willingness to override rigid jurisprudential dogmatism, and for his commitment to the many modern challenges of anti-imperialist resistance economy. Rationalist Muslims often repeat a maxim when discussing the idea of the Philosopher King: Plato conceived it, Jesus tried it, Muḥammad achieved it, Khomeini revived it.

The cognitive dispositions are the minimal rational commitments presupposed by coherent thought, intelligible discourse, and principled inquiry. They are not treated here as sectarian dogmas or inherited articles of faith, but as the most basic conditions under which anything can be meaningfully asserted, denied, distinguished, explained, or investigated at all. In that sense, they function as prior commitments of reason: not conclusions reached at the end of inquiry, but the logical preconditions that make inquiry possible.

Explanation cannot be self-grounding in a viciously circular sense, nor can it be deferred without end through an infinite chain of merely derivative dependence. A circle explains nothing if each member depends for its intelligibility on the others while none possesses self-sufficiency; likewise, an endless regress of dependent explanations never arrives at an actual ground. For explanation to succeed, a chain of dependence must terminate in that which is not merely borrowed, conditioned, or derivative, but self-sufficient. Without such termination, explanation is only postponed, not achieved.

If the cognitive dispositions are the minimal conditions of coherent thought, the conative dispositions are the minimal orientations of will required for coherent thought to become a lived and ethically serious project. Reason alone does not guarantee sincerity, courage, discipline, or action. One may recognise a truth and yet refuse it; one may understand the good and yet remain indifferent to it. The conative dispositions therefore concern the direction of desire, aspiration, and practical commitment. They are the volitional conditions under which rational insight can issue in self-cultivation, moral seriousness, and civilisational purpose.

Where truth, justice, and the protection or elevation of others demand a cost, the rational agent must possess some willingness to bear that cost. This disposition names the tendency to accept loss, discomfort, risk, labour, or personal disadvantage in service of a higher good. It does not glorify self-destruction, nor does it sanctify suffering for its own sake. Rather, it rejects the assumption that self-preservation, comfort, and advantage are the highest principles of action. Self-sacrifice is the test of seriousness: the point at which proclaimed values prove whether they are genuine commitments or merely aesthetic preferences.

From the cognitive and conative dispositions follows a series of 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.