- This article investigates the origins of Kalām in the debate culture of Late Antiquity. Following Michael Cook and Jack Tannous, it argues that kalām-style argumentation has its origin in Christological debates and was then absorbed into Muslim practice through the mediation of the Arab Christian milieu in Syria and Iraq. The second part of the article considers the origins of the Qadar debate (human free will versus divine predestination). Finally, the third part discusses three Muslim texts on Qadar, falsely attributed to Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-’Azīz, and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī. It offers a critical appraisal of Josef van Ess’s reconstruction of the ‘beginnings’ of Kalām.
- ]ISLAMIC theology emerged in a multi-religious environment in which a Muslim ruling minority was struggling to assert itself, politically as well as religiously, amidst the indigenous populations of the Middle East. These populations spoke a variety of languages—Aramaic/Syriac, Greek, Middle Persian, Coptic, Armenian, and Arabic, among others—and followed a variety of religions. It was only natural that Muslim settlers came in close contact with these populations and that their nascent religious beliefs were being articulated and took shape in an atmosphere of debate and polemic with them.
- The present account of the origins of Islamic theology must begin with its foremost researcher Josef van Ess, who stated his view, back in the 1970s, succinctly as follows: Theology in Islam did not start as polemics against unbelievers. Even the kalām style was not developed or taken over in order to refute non-Muslims, especially the Manicheans, as one tended to believe when one saw the origin of kalām in the missionary activities of the Muʿtazila. Theology started as an inner-Islamic discussion when, mainly through political development, the self-confident naïvité of the early days was gradually eroded. (van Ess 1975a: 101)
- As part of his search, he unravelled and published two anti-Qadarite texts (directed against the doctrine of qadar, human free will) that he considered to be documents of pre-Muʿtazilite Kalām (van Ess 1977). These texts are attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib’s grandson Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (d. between 99/718 and 101/720) and the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99/717–101/720). In addition, van Ess drew on another supposedly very early source, the Qadarite Epistle to Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān attributed to the famous early Muslim traditionist al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728) and written in support of human free will. The term kalām (literally, ‘speech’), mentioned several times above, has two distinct meanings which ought to be clearly differentiated. First, it is a particular style of theological argumentation which, to quote van Ess once again, ‘talks (kallama) with the opponent by asking questions and reducing his position to meaningless alternatives’ (van Ess 1975a: 89; cf. van Ess 1976; van Ess 1982: 109; Frank 1992). Second (capitalized as (p. 29) ‘Kalām’ in what follows), it is the kind of Islamic theology—in Arabic: ʿilm alKalām—that habitually employs this style of argumentation, or at least is within the tradition that does so.
- It is undeniable that kalām-style argumentation has its deep roots in the religious debate culture of the Middle East in the period prior to and shortly after the Muslim conquests. Fomented debate as a primary means of gaining ideological influence, vindicating one’s own beliefs, and refuting those of one’s rivals. Cook pointed out that characteristic features of kalām argumentation are present in seventh-century Syriac Christological disputations, notably in a Monothelete (‘Maronite’) document (MS British Library, Add. 7192), containing two sets of Christological queries, addressed to Dyothelete (‘Melkite’) opponents and dating to the second half of the seventh century, thus excluding the possibility that these Syriac texts were themselves influenced by Muslim Kalām.
- In view of these striking structural parallels, Cook concluded that ‘[the kalām] genre has the look of a product of the period of Christological schism.… [I]t presupposes in general a situation in which almost everything is agreed and schism turns on the energetic exploitation of doctrinal diacritics [as in Christological controversies]. … What is more, the genre could well be a rather late and specialized product of the continuing process of Christological schism that characterizes sixth- and seventh-century Syria’ (Cook 1980: 40). Cook further suggested that these patterns could have been adopted by the (p. 31) Muslim community either as a result of Muslims participating in debates with Christians and learning these disputation techniques from them or as a result of Christians, skilled in these disputation techniques, converting to Islam—the two options being, in fact, compatible rather than mutually exclusive (Cook 1980: 40–1). Tannous therefore puts forward what may be termed an ‘Arab Christian hypothesis’. He argues that the Arab Christian (more specifically, it seems, Jacobite) milieu in Syria and Iraq is the most plausible conduit for the transmission of the kalām-style (p. 32) disputation technique to the Muslim community, and more generally ‘for the assimilation of Christian traditions, such as they were, into early Islam’ (Tannous 2008: 715).
- Summary of origin of kalam: It seems plausible that the simplification of terminology and the resulting conflation of dialexis and theologia could have initially occurred in first/seventh-century Christian Arabic discourse. Indeed, from the perspective of Arab Christian onlookers—the ʿAqōlāyē, Ṭūʿāyē, and Tanūḵāyē, attending inter-religious debates with Muslims such as the mamllā (disputation) between the Jacobite Patriarch and the Hagarene emir—theology was done primarily by ‘spokesmen’ (to put it in Arabic, mutakallimūn; cf. van Ess 1991–7: i. 50) of the disputing parties. These spokesmen (Christian bishops and monks on the one hand and Muslim officials on the other) acted as both disputants and theologians, these two functions being inextricably linked. Here, for the first time, we have a plausible milieu where the Arabic term kalām could have been used simultaneously for disputation and theology, i.e. as a calque for the Syriac mamllā both with and without the qualifier alāhāyā. This terminology would presumably have been used during the debates themselves by all Arabic-speakers in attendance, both Christians and Muslims. Such debates therefore provide the perfect environment where the term kalām, with its newly acquired dual meaning, could have been assimilated into Muslim discourse—ultimately to stay there for good. It’s inconclusive though
