The Correction of a False Conceptualization: The Authenticity of the Kalām Imputation (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Origins of Kalām Origins of Kalām
and Keywords This article investigates the origins of Kalām in the debate culture of Late Antiquity. Following Michael Cook and Jack Tannous, it argues that kalām-style argumentation has its origin in Christological debates and was then absorbed into Muslim practice through the mediation of the Arab Christian milieu in Syria and Iraq. The second part of the article considers the origins of the Qadar debate (human free will versus divine predestination). Finally, the third part discusses three Muslim texts on Qadar, falsely attributed to Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'Azīz, and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī. It offers a critical appraisal of Josef van Ess's reconstruction of the 'beginnings' of Kalām.
Shihab al-Din Marjani on the Divine Attributes: A Study in Kalam in the 19th Century
Arabica, 2015
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, very vibrant debates regarding the question of the divine attributes (ṣifāt), one of the central issues in the history of Islamic theology, arose among the Muslims of the Russian Empire. A continuation of pre-existing debates taking place at the time in Central Asia, the controversy over the attributes revolved around the question of their ontological relationship to the divine essence (ḏāt), and whether the predominant view, that of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī, rendered the attributes too distinct from the essence, thus violating God’s oneness. One very prominent participant was the Tatar scholar Šihāb al-Dīn al-Marǧānī (d. 1889), who crafted a sophisticated critique of Taftāzānī and articulated a novel view of the attributes, based on the work of another Tatar scholar, Abū Naṣr Qūrṣāwī (d. 1812). This paper argues that not only do these debates show the continuation of the kalām tradition into the modern era, but they also represent important developments of that tradition in their own right, against the view that post-classical theology had become repetitive and derivative.