Özet:

In classical Kalāmic texts, Kalām is defined as the demonstration of religious doctrines. Fakḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who evaluated the kalāmic tradition before him in terms of methodology, analyzed the nature of this demonstration. In the last section of his Kitāb al-Arbaʿīn, he enumerates three basic premises which are used in the rational discussions in Kalām. These premises are negation-demonstration, perfection-imperfection, and necessity-possibility. Fakḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī first sees it necessary that one needs to explain the terms taṣawwur and taṣdiq before going into the dicsussion of affirmation and negation. The second one is the premise of perfection and imperfection. The last one is the premise of necessity and possibility. According to the definition of al-Razi, this premise is the ultimate point reached by the intelligent beings. In this article, I will attempt to sketch and analyze al-Rāzī’s description of these premises in consideration of the relevant explanations in his other kalāmic texts and try to situate what kalāmic discussions include these premises. Since al-Rāzī’s kalāmic works include many works, I will specifically focus on his last-written works, initially Mafātiḥ al-Ghayb, a text which was written at the last period of his life time and shows al-Rāzī’s ultimate and final consideration in the given contexts. The study can be viewed as a contribution to the field of the methdology of Islamic sciences; since it represents a concrete example of how al-Rāzī criticized the classical kalam. The study comes with the conclusion that al-Rāzī did not only apply his criticism of the kalamic tradition to his understanding of the history of kalam, but he also presented the way of doing this criticism by analyzing the classical kalamic principles. Al-Rāzī completes this step by relating these rational explanations to the light of the divine revelation, the wahy, as is seen in his major commentary of the Quran, the Mafātiḥ al-Ghayb.

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