muhammad taghi sobhani

The Muslim thinkers based faith and guidance on the knowledge of belief fundamental teachings; but, in the history of Islamic knowledge, the knowledge's characteristics, its domain and how it is gained, had been always a challenging issue. In this regard, to answer the above-mentioned questions, the Imami thinkers of the Kufan School put forward the theory of "Constraint Knowledge" on the basis of the Qur'an and the Shi'i Hadith heritage. The belief of the early Imamis was that the complete knowledge purport had been given to human beings in the previous worlds and the human being has the purport actually in his conscious. Thus, knowledge is created by God and man can't acquire it, but only must remember the purport of that knowledge. Of course, from amongst the early Imami thinkers, Hesham b. Hakam which was pioneer in the ImamiKalami discussions of that time, was trying to offer a more reasonable reading of the Imami beliefs. In order to avoid the criticisms and to open an acceptable place for "rational reason", he maintains that the actuality of the constraint knowledge depends on reasoning.

As the most important human knowledge source, reason is suffering some limitations in the theology realm. The religious texts explicitly show these limitations in knowing Gods Nature, attributes as well as some actions (creatures) and furthermore explains the causes for these limitations. In explaining the causes for the reason's limitations in various aspects of theology, the hadiths analyzed the ways of reason for attaining knowledge, that are encompass, record, division, measuring and imagination, and regarded them as inefficient; because the knowledge gained in these ways would be limited and the Divine Nature and attributes are absolutely infinite and cannot be comprehended by reason.