KALAM

in Islam, speculative theology. The term is derived from the phrase kalam Allah (Arabic: word of God), which refers to the Qur'an, the sacred scripture of Islam. Those who practice kalam are known as mutakallimun. In its early stage, kalam was merely a defense of Islam against Christians, Manichaeans, and believers in other religions. As interest in philosophy grew among Muslim thinkers, kalam adopted the dialectic (methodology) of the Greek skeptics and the stoics and directed these against the Islamic philosophers who attempted to fit Aristotle and Plato into a Muslim context. Several schools of kalam developed. The most significant was the Mu'tazilah, often described as the rationalists of Islam, who appeared in the 8th century. They believed in the autonomy of reason with regard to revelation and in the supremacy of reasoned ('aqli) faith against traditional (naqli) faith. The Mu'tazilah championed the freedom of the human will, holding that it was against divine justice either to punish a good man or pardon an unrighteous one. The Ash'ariyah, a 10th-century school of kalam, was a mediation between the rationalization of the Mu'tazilah and the anthropomorphism of the traditionalists and represented the successful adaptation of Hellenistic philosophical reasoning to Muslim orthodox theology. They too affirmed the freedom of the human will but denied its efficacy. Closely resembling but more liberal than the Ash'ariyah was the al-Maturidiyah (also 10th-century).