"Does this complex

and sometimes apparently polarised picture help us to answer our question about rationality as ‘balance’? Clearly, thinkers such as Ghazali, who are normative in Sunnism, will speak of kalam as a valid discipline within its own, essentially apologetic and even therapeutic space, as a useful tool against formalistic error, notably that of the falsafa practitioners and the Mu'tazilites. As though to refute those who characterise Muslim theology as denying the rationality of God, he insists that the formal rules of logic have an objective validity which must characterise God’s power and acts. [23] As his own career implies, however, he regards experience, or what he calls ‘tasting’ (dhawq) as superior; although it can never challenge the truths known in theology; rather, it supplies a more authentic proof for them.

-from pgs. 7-8 of Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad's "Reason as Balance: the evolution of 'aql" (a paper for the Cambridge Muslim College)