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in category Abbasids

Was there a high degree of intellectual freedom in the medieval Islamic world?

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From my reading philosophical debate in the  medieval Islamic world seems to have been quite robust
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I would say most certainly yes. There were some examples of religious and intellectual persecution in the medieval Islamic world, the 1300 or so centuries of the Islamic Caliphates ending with the Ottomans. These however were never the norm and the medieval period of Islam, saw philosophical thought far less constrained than in its contemporary Latin Christendom.

This isn't surprising as Islam has no hierarchical institution like the Western Church that is permitted to enforce some given orthodoxy. Rather, there were classes of scholars across the continents under Islamic rule that had religious authority through their learning, but for the most part these people weren't ever in a position to, nor ever tried to, enforce whatever they deemed a correct belief.


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