Shaykh Yasir Qadhi gives an amazing summary of his dissertation relating Ibn Taymiyyah at the Yale University and it makes for an interesting listen as we try to decipher the concepts of Aqal and Naqal in the light of Islam.
During the sixth century of Islam, an Iranian scholar named Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi Rah generated a treatise on the theology of the names of Attributes of Allāh SWT which was presented by some way to Ṣalaḥ ad-Din al-Ayyubi Rah. Here we stumble upon a term - The Universal Rule, which implied that if reason (aql) warred with revelation( Naqal), then emphasis should be laid upon reason and not revelation.
A few centuries later, a man by the name of Shaykh al-Islam Taqi'l-Din Ahmad b. Abd al-Haleem Ibn Taymiyyah (rah), who represented the Athari school of thought, refuted the above rule completely and gave enough proof for this. This is has been explicitly stated in a book published relating to this very aspect. Do listen intently to unravel the details and have a clear chain of thought in this regard.
Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi considers Shaykh-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah as a mentor and using the theory supported by Ibn Taymiyyah goes on to extrapolate from the text that there can never be a confrontation of sorts between true reason and explicit revelation.
