Kalām

What it asks

Kalām means speech, and the discipline is named for its method: positions defended in argument against opponents, including opponents outside the tradition.

Its questions are theological in subject and philosophical in form. Is the world eternal or created? If God is one, what are the divine attributes and how do they relate to the essence? If God is just, how can there be suffering, and if God is omnipotent, what are humans doing when they act?

It is distinct from falsafa, the tradition of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy in Arabic, and the two argued sharply with each other. The distinction matters and is frequently lost outside the field.

The recurring problems

The divine attributes. God is described as knowing, powerful and living. If those are distinct from the essence, divine unity is compromised; if identical with it, the descriptions say nothing distinct. The Muʿtazila took the second horn; the Ashʿarīs held that the attributes are real and neither identical with the essence nor other than it - a formula meant to hold both requirements at once.

Human action. If God creates everything, God creates human acts, and holding people responsible for what God created is hard to square with justice. The Muʿtazila made humans genuine creators of their acts; the Ashʿarīs developed acquisition, on which God creates the act and the human acquires it - a position criticised from its first statement as a name for the problem.

Causation. Occasionalism holds that no created thing causes anything: fire does not burn cotton, God creates the burning on the occasion of contact. It follows from taking omnipotence seriously and it is a genuine metaphysical position, argued for on grounds independent of piety.

Whether the world had a beginning. The argument that an actual infinite series of past events is impossible, so the universe began and requires a cause, was developed here in detail and has been revived in current philosophy of religion.

How it developed

The discipline emerged in the eighth century, partly in debate with Christian theologians and Manichaeans, which shaped its dialectical form from the start.

The Muʿtazila were the first developed school, insisting on divine unity and justice, holding the Qur'an to be created rather than eternal, and defending human freedom. Their position was briefly imposed by the state, which discredited it lastingly.

Al-Ashʿarī, trained among them, broke away and founded the school that became dominant in Sunni Islam, defending the attributes and divine omnipotence while keeping rational argument as the method. Al-Māturīdī developed a parallel position independently.

Al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers around 1095 is the pivotal work: a systematic attack on the falsafa tradition, arguing that its claims about eternity, causation and God's knowledge of particulars were unproven. Its argument against necessary causal connection is a serious piece of philosophy and precedes Hume's on the same point by six centuries. Averroes replied at length, and the exchange is one of the great disputes in the history of philosophy.

The positions within it

Muʿtazila, Ashʿariyya, Māturīdiyya, and the Ẓāhirī and traditionist positions that rejected kalām's method entirely. Falsafa is its rival and interlocutor. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Taught continuously in Islamic institutions and studied increasingly by philosophers of religion outside them.

The cosmological argument developed here is a live topic in current analytic philosophy of religion, generally under a name that acknowledges its origin. The occasionalist treatment of causation is read alongside Malebranche and Hume, and the attribute problem alongside work on divine simplicity - in each case a tradition that worked the problem first is finally being read as a source of argument rather than as background.