- Al-Māturīdī’s Kitāb al-Tawḥīd and the Proof of God’s Existence(edited)
- Al-Māturīdī’s theological thought came to play an important role in the intellectual history of Islam. He is considered the founder of one of Islam’s major schools of kalām, which followed a middle path between the camp of the proponents of reason-based argumentation and speculation and the camp of the traditionalists who rejected kalām (Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 85; David Thomas, Christian Doctrines in Islamic Theology, 79). The Māturīdiyya would later, after the death of its eponym and its subsequent consolidation, become the predominant school of thought in Transoxania and other regions (Philipp Bruckmayr, “The Spread and Persistence of Māturīdī Kalām and Underlying Dynamics,” Iran & the Caucasus 13/1 (2009): 59–92). Only two of al-Māturīdī’s works have survived. One of them is his Qur’anic commentary, entitled Taʾwīlāt al-Qurʾān, the other one his theological summa with the title Kitāb al-Tawḥīd. David Thomas has suggested that, in the Kitāb al-Tawḥīd, “the discussion about the existence of the world […] is effectively a demonstration of its contingent nature and is thus prefatory to the long discussion about the existence and characteristics of God” (Thomas, Christian Doctrines, 80–81).
