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Kalām

Kalām, “speech”, was the theologians’ own reasoned discipline, that of the mutakallimūn, and those who wrote on it defined it by what it defends. For al-Ījī, “kalām is a science by which one is enabled to establish religious beliefs by bringing proofs and repelling doubts” (al-Mawāqif). For Ibn Khaldūn it “is a science that involves arguing with logical proofs in defense of the articles of faith and refuting innovators who deviate in their dogmas from the early Muslims and Muslim orthodoxy” (Muqaddimah VI, tr. Rosenthal). al-Taftāzānī called the science by its subject: the science of beliefs is “the science of the unity (al-tawhid) and attributes (al-sifat) of the Deity … entitled al-Kalam”, and gave it the highest rank: it is “the most noble of the sciences … because its aim is the attaining of the happiness of this life and the next” (tr. Elder).

al-Ashʿarī defended it against those who would have the faithful keep to the texts. In The Encouragement to Inquiry (al-Ḥathth ʿalā l-baḥth, also known as Istiḥsān al-khawḍ fī ʿilm al-kalām) he described his opponents: “a group of people made ignorance their capital; reflection and inquiry into religion weighed on them; they inclined to taqlīd”, the acceptance of authority. They called talk of “body and accident, motion and rest … the atom and the leap, and the attributes of God” innovation, since the Prophet had not spoken of them. He answered that the Prophet had never said that whoever inquires into these is an innovator, so by their own rule they were innovators; and that the principles of these things are “found in the Qurʾān and the Sunna in general form, not in detail”, as in Abraham’s argument from the setting star, moon and sun that what moves from place to place is no god.

The philosophers placed kalām below their own work. al-Fārābī defined it as “a positive disposition that enables man to argue in the defense of the specific opinions and actions stated explicitly by the founder of the religion, and against everything that opposes these opinions and actions”; the jurist “takes the opinions and the actions … as axioms” and draws inferences, while the theologian “defends the things that the jurist uses as axioms” (Enumeration of the Sciences V, tr. Najjar). He then sorted the theologians by their methods, from those who argue that religion is above reason to those who will use “falsehood, sophistry, confounding, and contentiousness”. In the order of time, he wrote, “the arts of kalām and fiqh are later in time than religion and follow it”, and kalām “knows only persuasive things” (Book of Letters 108–111). Maimonides found the fault in its method: the mutakallimūn “did not investigate the real properties of things: first of all they considered what must be the properties of the things which should yield proof for or against a certain creed” (Guide I.71, tr. Friedländer).

al-Ghazālī judged it “a science, I found, which, though attaining its own aim, did not attain mine. Its aim was merely to preserve the creed of orthodoxy and to defend it against the deviations of heretics … So God brought into being the class of theologians, and moved them to support traditional orthodoxy with the weapon of systematic argument”. When theologians took up “substances and accidents”, “since that was not the aim of their science, they did not deal with the question thoroughly” (Deliverance from Error, tr. Watt).

The later theologians described how kalām and philosophy grew together. al-Taftāzānī: after the translations, theologians “mixed up with kalam much of philosophy in order to understand thoroughly the goals of philosophy … until they included in kalam most of physics and metaphysics and plunged into mathematics until theology was hardly to be distinguished from philosophy had it not been that it included ‘things to be believed on authority’ (al-sam’iyat). This is the kalam of the Later Theologians.” Ibn Khaldūn dated the change to the spread of logic and to “the school of recent scholars” begun by al-Ghazālī and followed by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī: “The later scholars were very intent upon meddling with philosophical works … the two approaches have been mixed up … This has gone so far that the one discipline is no longer distinguishable from the other.” The difference that remained lay in the purpose: the philosophers study bodies “in so far as they move or are stationary”, the theologians “in so far as they serve as an argument for the Maker”. In his own day, he added, “This science … is not something that is necessary to the contemporary student.” He also recorded where the intellectual sciences still lived: “in the non-Arab ‘Iraq and, farther east, in Transoxania”, among scholars such as al-Taftāzānī.

Ibn Khaldūn gave a chapter to “A refutation of philosophy”. Of its instrument he wrote that “the science (of logic) is not adequate to achieve the avowed intentions” of the philosophers, and that it “has only a single fruit … it sharpens the mind” (Muqaddimah VI, tr. Rosenthal).