Origins of Kalām Origins of Kalām (original) (raw)
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During the early Abbasid era, a historical movement of translation of antiquity literature from Syrian and Greek into Arabic reached its peak and created an intellectual and cultural ‘Renaissance’, the reverberations of which reached the Latin Medieval Europe. We have ultimately a historical era wherein Aristotelian-Neoplatonic philosophy is translated into Arabic and is playing the major role in creating not just an Islamic-Arabic Falsafa, but also, if not primarily and firstly, Arabic Christian and Muslim particular genre of theological reasoning called Kalām. In this essay, I endeavor to demonstrate that, despite the basic discrepancies in the understanding of God between Islam (monistic monotheism) and Christianity (Trinitarian monotheism), Abbasid Christian and Muslim mutakallimun of the 8th-10th centuries relied evenly and similarly in developing their Kalām on God on a common philosophical tradition they were exposed to vis-à-vis the translation movement. The essay proposes that this common source is no other than the ontology of ‘the One’ of Proclus and the Proclean Neoplatonic-Aristotelian tradition. It demonstrates that, far from being merely an apologetic discourse to defend religious belief’s superiority and truth by nullifying others, the use of a common philosophical denominator suggests that Kalām was also an expression of affiliation and identification by means of one, common, trans-religious cultural and intellectual identity that became characteristic of the early Abbasid milieu. In such a context, it is probably not invalid to speak about a cultural change and identity that are created from philosophy.
One of the most learned and talented Ismaili theologians of the entire Fatimid period, Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (d. after 411/1020) rose to prominence during the reign of the Imam-caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (r. 386/996-411/1021). It is well-known Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī attempted to create a complex system of thought blending together Ismaili traditions - including gnostic cosmological elements - and philosophical strands mainly drawn from Fārābian Neoplatonism. Through logical and philosophically charged sophisticated proofs, al-Kirmānī’s writings seem often to reflect a distinctive Kalamic – mainly Muʿtazilite approach - towards composite doctrinal issues. Indeed, some of the arguments adopted in treatises such as his al-Maṣābīḥ fī ithbāt al-imāma and his magnum opus, the Rāḥat al-ʿaql might induce to regard him as an enthusiast supporter of that theological school, as were numerous Shiʿi theologians of his time. Upon reflection however, a much more stratified outlook surfaces: Asw we shall see in this paper, in his work titled Tanbīh al-hādī wa’l-mustahdī, focusing on the religious rites and the blessings derived from their practice, al-Kirmānī is often openly critical of the Muʿtazilites, whom in his view, included the Zaydīs, whilst comparing Muʿtazilite doctrines to the positions of the Magians in his Risālat Mabāsim al-bishārāt bi’l-imam al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh. Moreover, in his al-Aqwāl al-dhahabiyyah, designed to criticise the philosophical views of Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī (d. 925) on the salvific role of reason, al-Kirmānī binds intellectual reasoning and the necessity of imamate/prophecy as a tools on the path to salvation thus implicitly denouncing some Muʿtazilite stances. In addition, al-Kirmāni’s original taʾwīl (esoteric hermeneutical interpretation) of the story of the prophets Moses and Shuʿayb (Qurʾān 7:143) presented in his Kitāb al-riyāḍ, reveals the philosopher’s attempts to justify – by proposing a reconciliation between the Mutakallimūns views on human free agency and divine sovereignty - the legitimacy of the Fatimid imam-caliphs’ role.