The Theory of Knowledge: An Islamic Perspective

The Theory of Knowledge: An Islamic Perspective is a translation of the Persian book Mas’aleh-ye Shinakht by the great Muslim thinker and reformer, Ayatollah Murtada Muttahari. Mutahhari authored this book as a rebuttal to a manifesto issued in the seventies by young Muslim activists who were deeply influenced by Marxist theories. With ample citations from the Qur’an and other traditional Islamic texts, Mutahhari discusses the concept of knowing from an Islamic perspective. Mutahhari does not limit himself to the Islamic source texts and continuously engages with the views of a wide range of philosophers including Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Kant, and Hegel. Mutahhari’s epistemological discussion covers a range of issues, including whether it is possible to know, the nature of knowledge, stages of knowing, the unconscious mind, and truth. He also examines materialism and provides a spiritual approach to some of these questions about knowledge which are vital to the human experience.

Murtada Mutahhari was a leading theoretician of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. As an accomplished scholar of Islamic sciences, he played a pivotal role in forming the modern Islamic discourse which served as the foundation of the revolution. With close to ninety works to his credit, he is considered as one of the leading thinkers of the global Islamic movement in the twentieth century.