ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the variegated facets of the manifestation of the phenomenon of relativism in Islam. This line of inquiry is mediated via reflections on the Islamic intellectual traditions, whether in terms of their pluralistic theoretical and conceptual frameworks, within the domains of scriptural exegesis (tafsīr) and allegorical hermeneutics (taʾwīl), in the Sunnī and Shīʿī legacies, or in how these are also accounted for through the practical and lived socio-cultural circumstances of religious sectarianism and political factionalism. These investigations are furthermore focused on tracing the occurrence of instances of relativist thinking in the diverse strands of the Islamic history of ideas. This is particularly addressed by way of considering premodern theological and mystical outlooks, as mainly embodied in the views of al-Ghazālī, Ibn Ṭufayl, and al-Suhrawardī, or by probing selected philosophical and logical concepts that were developed by polymaths such as al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīna (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), or in analyzing the scientific method as exemplified by the optician and geometer Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) and his school of thought. These historical aspects are moreover accounted for in this context by tangentially evoking some of the contemporary attitudes within Islam concerning the epistemic and ontological horizons of the religious conceptions of truth (al-ḥaqq) and their relativized conditioning within our epoch of modern techno-science.
