The period in which rationalism was tangled with orthodox thought lasted for about four to five hundred years. In spite of its stresses and strains, this was a very productive period of intellectualism in the Muslim world. Some of the top-notch philosophers who belonged to this period were al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Razi, ibn Sina, and ibn Rushd among many others. Likewise, some of the contemporary excellent theologians such as al-Ghazali, and eminent jurists like the four Imams, the founders of the four schools of jurisprudence, namely Abu Hanifa, Shafi’i, Malik, and Hanbal lived in this glorious period of Islamic ascendancy. Two of the excellent philosophical works, which are still extant and widely read and used as reference source material are al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, and ibn Rushd’s Incoherence of the Incoherence of the Philosophers. Al-Ghazali’s kalam argument has recently been used by the Christian theists for the existence of God in their debates with the Humanist atheists. Al-Razi’s al-Hawi and ibn Sina’s al-Qanun-fi-al-Tibb (popularly known as Canon in the west) were encyclopedic works on medicine which were used as text books in the European universities almost into the seventeenth century.
Then the curtain fell and intellectual darkness started creeping into the Muslim world until in due time it was completely engulfed by it.
