Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

The developed kalam tradition 81
theology and ‘‘rationality’’
What was the Arabic for ‘‘theology’’? The obvious answer is kalam,
or speech, which represents well the scope of early theology, which was
to confront the arguments of non-Muslims in the vastly expanding
Islamic empire, and to deal with the early polemics between the
Ash‘arites, the Mu‘tazilites and the Qadarites over the nature of the
basic concepts of Islam itself. This was taken in two directions, the first
allowing the use of reason, as in the case of the followers of Shafi‘ı and
Abu H _
anıfa, and the second based on a literal reading of hadith, as with
the supporters of Ibn H _
anbal. It is worth pointing out that both
approaches were rational, in that they both relied on the rational resolution
of theoretical issues, but they applied reason to different sets of
issues. For the H _
anbalıs it is primarily to be applied to the issue of
hadith verification and the precise relationship between the Traditions
as bequeathed by the Prophet, his Companions and their Successors.
In Western accounts these two groups of thinkers are sometimes
called Rationalists and Traditionalists (terms commended by Abrahamov
and Makdisi, among others), but these labels are not always helpful. It
is not that some scholars known as Traditionalists favoured irrationality,
or that ‘‘Rationalists’’ did not use the hadith; it was more a matter
of emphasis than a difference in kind. The way in which these two
approaches developed came to be subsumed under us _
ul al-dın, the ‘‘roots
of religion’’, which until the eleventh century tended to be rather thin
philosophically but placed the emphasis on understanding the structure
of religion and how its different areas of discourse were related.
As theology evolved, the early years of kalam came to be seen as a
very free period of thought indeed, as evidenced by the popular slogan
man t _
alaba al-dın bi’l kalam tazandaqa (whoever seeks religion through
kalam becomes a heretic). What this referred to was not the whole project
of theology itself as represented by us _
ul al-dın, but the investigation of
basic features of the nature of God which some early Muslim thinkers
engaged in, something which later generations often felt to be presuming
too much about the accessibility of the divine nature. Despite the
increasing incorporation of falsafa topics and methods into later kalam,
the institutionalisation of forms of Ash‘arism and even more ‘‘traditionalist’’
approaches such as that of Ibn H _
anbal has led some recent
commentators on Islamic theology like Muhammad Iqbal to contrast the
relative freedom of discussion of the early years with a kalam equivalent
of the ‘‘closure of the door of ijtihad’’, or interpretation, a move which
allegedly ended juridical innovation approximately a thousand years ago. 8
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