Claiming that Islam can be rational or have a blossoming intellectual culture because of its so-called Golden Age is like claiming that Christians believe in the literal cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus because the Arian Logos strongly resembles the Demiurge.
Most the philosophers of their so-called Golden Age belonged to the Mu’tazila sect which is universally condemned as heretical by all Islamic sects. As such, modern Muslims have no claim to them, so much so that one could even argue that “the Golden Age” itself would be considered un-Islamic by today’s standards.
This is impressively and comprehensively wrong.
Claiming that Islam can be rational or have a blossoming intellectual culture because of its so-called Golden Age is like claiming that Christians believe in the literal cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus because the Arian Logos strongly resembles the Demiurge.
That doesn’t seem like a very close parallel at all.
A more reasonable analogy would be something like “Greece can be rational, or have a blossoming intellectual culture, because of the Golden Age of classical philosophy [despite the many differences between classical Athens and modern Greek society].” Or – if you want to paint with an even finer brush – “Christianity can be rational, or have a blossoming intellectual culture, because of the Italian Renaissance [despite all the differences between Renaissance-era Italian Catholicism and any form of modern Christianity].”
These are much more reasonable claims! So reasonable, even, that people actually make them all the time!
(In the cases of the religions, you can have meaningful and productive debates about the extent to which the intellectual-flowering stuff existed in tension with the cultural religiosity versus being an outgrowth of it. The Cliffs’ Notes answer in both cases, unsurprisingly, is “a little from Column A and a little from Column B.” But it’s not like the two cases are particularly different.)
Most the philosophers of their so-called Golden Age
This is already a dodge. Why are we suddenly talking only about philosophers all of a sudden? There were certainly notable philosophers who came out of the Islamic Golden Age…but there were also a ton of, e.g., mathematicians and medical pioneers and explorers and poets etc. etc., for whom all this stuff was a lot less relevant to their work.
belonged to the Mu’tazila sect
The Mu’tazila are not, and never were, a “sect.” The Mu’tazila were a school of theology. This is like saying “the Thomist sect.”
Which is important, because it’s not actually meaningful to say that your average Muslim philosopher of the era “belonged” (or for that matter “didn’t belong”) to the Mu’tazila. Guys like Avicenna and Averroes engaged with Mu’tazilite ideas to varying extents and with varying levels of acceptance / skepticism / hostility – Avicenna, the Grand Old Man of Golden Age Muslim philosophy, certainly argued plenty against mainline Mu’tazilite doctrine – but taken at face value this claim falls into the “not even coherent enough to be false” bucket.
It is also worth noting that, for a while, Mu’tazilism was a caliph-enforced orthodoxy, which means that everyone writing in those periods was in some very notional sense a “Mu’tazilite” (and was likely to be friendly to Mu’tazilite doctrine unless he had particularly reason to be otherwise).
which is universally condemned as heretical by all Islamic sects
As has been pointed out earlier, this is untrue of the Shi’ites. Who do make up a sect, and a very important and powerful one at that.
As such, modern Muslims have no claim to them, so much so that one could even argue that “the Golden Age” itself would be considered un-Islamic by today’s standards.
To pretty much the same extent that crazy heretics like Newton and even CS Lewis are “un-Christian.”