In the latter part of the sixth century of Islam, an Iranian Scholar by the name of Fakhr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī (rahimahullah) produced a hundred page treatise on the theological discourse of the Names of Attributes of Allāh (subḥānahu wa ta'āla). His treatise was presented to a Sultan who was related to Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn al-Ayyūbi (rahimahullah). In it, he propounded something he called 'The Universal Rule', which stated that if reason conflicted with revelation, precedence must be given to reason over revelation.

Some two centuries later, one of the greatest thinkers of Islamic history, hailing from the city of Damascus, produced a ten-volume magnum opus refuting this alleged 'Universal Rule'. The name of this man was Shaykh al-Islām Taqī'l-Dīn Ahmad b. Abd al-Haleem Ibn Taymiyyah (rahimahullah), a genius whose intellectual brilliance is hardly seen during or after his era.

Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi, who regards Shaykh'l-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah (rahimahullah) as an intellectual mentor, spent eight years examining the above-mentioned work, and presented it as his PhD dissertation at Yale University. In his work, Ibn Taymiyya argues that there can never be an actual conflict between true reason and explicit revelation.

Join Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi in this very interesting and academic talk on a summary of his dissertation at Yale University.

Recorded on 22nd March 2013