Amira Nowaira has a wonderful article on the long and vibrant intellectual tradition of dissidence and freethinking in the Islamic world which goes back to the Middle Ages but which has, tragically, all but disappeared. If there is still any doubt about the breadth of Islamic intellectual diversity during its golden age, Postmodernists and moral relativists could do worse than to compare the ideas propagated by enlightened thinkers such as the 10th century philosopher and scientist Abu Bakr al-Razi and compare him with what passes for religious scholarship in the Islamic world (or indeed, any world) in these dark, ignorant times.
Most prominent among those scholars was Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-925 CE) who believed in the supreme importance of reason. He argued that the mind had an innate capacity to distinguish between good and evil, and between what was useful and what was harmful. According to him, the mind did not need any guidance from outside it, and for this reason the presence of prophets was redundant and superfluous.
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