The Sources of Knowledge in Islamic Thought as the Tools of Human Relationship in the Context of Religious Education

Abstract

Religious education, which requires an epistemological/philosophical background with the necessity of thinking about oneself, has the opportunity to meet this need from the Islamic thought of our geographical tradition. It is possible to follow the epistemological attitudes of kalam, Islamic philosophy and tasawwuf, which constitute Islamic thought, in areas such as the nature, source, types and process of knowledge. It is possible to state that in all of these sciences which represent Islamic thought, knowledge is ultimately accepted as an element that establishes the relationship of man with the Sacred. In this case, it is possible for religious education, as a discipline that deals with the relationship of man with the Sacred, to meet at the point of relationality with the Transcendent Being, which expresses the main characteristic of the knowledge in our thought heritage. With this point in mind, this article aims to question the elements considered as sources of knowledge in Islamic thought as tools that have the function of establishing the relationship of man with the Sacred in terms of religious education. First of all, we will try to determine how religious education will meet with our ancient heritage, as mentioned above, and then the sources of knowledge in theology, Islamic philosophy and tasawwuf, which form the tradition of Islamic thought. In our study, it will be argued that these sources of knowledge can be envisioned as the faculty that establish the relationship of man with the Sacred from the perspective of our discipline.