Fakhr al-Din al-Razi grew up in Rayy, traveled through Central Asia and Khorasan teaching and debating, and became the most formidable critic of Avicenna's philosophical system from within the Islamic tradition. His method was relentless: take a claim, list every objection he could find, then answer what could be answered and mark honestly what could not. His encyclopedic Quranic commentary, the Mafatih al-Ghayb, became one of the most read in Islamic history — sixty volumes that interpreted the Quran through the full apparatus of philosophy, theology, and natural science. Where al-Ghazali had attacked the philosophers for violating religion, Fakhr al-Din absorbed their methods and used those same methods to shore up Ash'ari theology. The synthesis was unstable, as he occasionally admitted, but the questions it raises still run through Islamic intellectual life.
Born in Rayy, the son of a preacher who was also his first teacher. The city that had produced the physician al-Razi two centuries earlier now produced the theologian who would share his name.
Words
“The utmost reach of the intellects is a shackle; most of the striving of the learned is going astray.”