The forth is to understand and present moral and legal principles...

The forth is to understand and present moral and legal principles, such as the wrongness of oppression and the rightness of justice. Details are, of course, provided by religious sources, although the process of understanding the Scriptures and the implications of religious judgements again is governed by reason.

For example, if God says that you must perform hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), it rationally implies that we must make all necessary preparations, such as buying tickets or obtaining a visa. If there is a conflict between two obligations such as saving an innocent life and performing our prayers, what should we do?

In this case, even if there is no explicit or specific religious instruction we still rationally understand that we must act according to the certain and clear judgement of our reason, which is to save the person's life. All the above roles of reason are recognised and, indeed, encouraged and urged in Islam.

In contrast, the role of revelation or the scripture in religious sciences can be summed up as follows: confirming truths that are already known by reason; teaching truths that are not known by reason, such as the details of the resurrection and detailed injunctions of moral and legal systems;10 establishing due recompense sanctions through the religiously determined system of reward and punishment. Here I should make two points: a.

One has to distinguish between the decisive and certain rational judgements and things such as guessing or personal opinions or weak arguments. There have always been some people who introduced their ideas, or even they themselves thought so, as enjoying rational grounds, while after consideration it becomes clear that there is no basis for such a claim. Similarly, there are people who represent their ideas as Islamic ideas, while religious sources do not support them in any known way. b.

Although reason is recognised as an independent source of knowledge, it has its own limits. There are many things on which reason has no judgement and is silent, because they are beyond its scope. Therefore, there might be many things that we can understand by other ways of understanding such as perception, intuition or revelation that do not fall in the scope of reason. You can not really understand through rational arguments how a rose smells or what a mother feels when her child is dead.

In respect to religious issues, there are many facts that are not knowable by reason, such as many details of the resurrection.