Not a truce between two rivals — a claim that they were never rivals to begin with.
Two intellectual traditions that both value truth can end up in an old, recurring standoff: does truth come through observation and inference, or through revealed authority — and when they seem to disagree, which one yields? Most treatments of this question stop at describing the standoff. Fewer offer an actual mechanism for resolving it.
Where a concept like divine revelation names a source of knowledge, reason and revelation names the working relationship between two sources — the analytical mechanism by which their outputs get reconciled when they appear to disagree, rather than either source considered on its own.
The most fully developed classical Islamic argument for reconciliation comes from Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198) in his Fasl al-Maqal (“The Decisive Treatise”). His case rests on a specific claim: that authentic scripture cannot, once properly interpreted, contradict what has been demonstratively proven true — so any apparent conflict signals a failure of interpretation on one side, not a genuine contradiction between the two sources. He builds this on a three-level distinction in how truth gets communicated — demonstrative proof, dialectical argument, and rhetorical persuasion — each suited to a different audience’s capacity, with philosophy (demonstrative reasoning) treated as a religious duty for those capable of it, grounded in the Qur’an’s own repeated commands to contemplate creation.
This is a stronger and more specific claim than “faith and reason shouldn’t fight” — it’s an actual method: treat the conflict as evidence of a misreading, on either the philosophical or the scriptural side, and resolve it through better interpretation rather than by picking a winner. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Ibn Rushd [Averroes]” entry.