[p 175]

The kalam of the madrasahs: triumph and inanition

During the formative generations of the Earlier Middle Period, kalam, as a speculative method, only gradually won through to independent maturity, and still more gradually won the respect of many Shari'ah-minded 'ulama'. As it matured, its relation to Falsafah metaphysics became its great problem. The original Mu'tazili school of kalam continued to be represented both among Jama'i-Sunnis and especially among Twelver Shi'is, and made progress even outside Islam: many Jewish scholars professed a kalam that was Mu'tazili in substance. But the more creative labour was done in the schools of al-Ash'ari (associated with the Shafi'i legal madhhab) and al­Maturidi (associated with the Hanafi). The Hanbali and Zahiri and (at first) Maliki scholars tended to stay aloof. [see note: 11]

It was a Maliki qadi, however, al-Baqillani (d. 1013), who did the most to popularize the Ash'ari system in the Fertile Crescent. He set forth with

[note 10 continued from p 174] extensively debated whether the term means 'eastern', in the sense of Khurasan or else Jundaysabur against Baghdad, or 'illuminative'. In the former case, it would refer merely to certain practices and logical teachings on which Peripatetic schools differed; in the latter case, it could refer to the mystical implications of certain ontological points which were undeniably included in its scope anyway. Cf. Carlo Nallino, 'Filosofia "orientate" od "illuminativa" d'Avicenna, Rivista di Studi Orientali, ro (1923-25). 433-67; Louis Gardet, La pensie religieuse d'Avicenne (Paris, 1951), P. 23; A. M. Goichon, Le récit de Hayy ibn Yaq?an, cited above; and Henry Corbin Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques de Shihabaddin Yahya Sohrawardi, r (Tehran and Paris, 1952), Prolegomenes. Possibly Ibn-Sina intended a pun. Ibn-Sina's disciples certainly took it in the sense of 'illuminative', and supposed that he intended a mystical implication; but this may not have been in his mind.          `

The rendering with 'orient', which Henry Corbin likes, is legitimate only if 'orient' is remembered clearly to refer to the sunrise, taken metaphorically-not to any geo­graphical sector of mankind. If, later, Subravardi took over the same notion and linked it especially to Iran, this resulted simply from the chance that he felt that the Iranian tradition-not some generalized 'East'-happened to expound the nature of illumination.

[note: ] 11 George Makdisi, 'Ash'ari and the Ash'arites in Islamic Religious History', Studia Islamica, 18 (t962), and subsequent issues notes that the usual notion that Ash'arism became 'orthodox' (whatever that may mean) at an early date is based on a small num­ber of Syrian and Egyptian Ash'ari writers of the Later Middle Period, who- were in fact trying to maintain a thesis rather than simply presenting a well-known fact. His excellent and important article helps clarify the way in which scholars have been misled by relying on a particular local Sunni Arab tradition for scholarly understanding of what Islam was and was not. (It also makes it less necessary to rely on such amateur efforts as Asad Talas, L'enseignement chez les Arabes: la madrasa nizamiyya et son histoire [Paris, 1939], filled with errors.)

Unfortunately, Makdisi does not himself altogether escape the effects of the scholarly pattern which he has helped to show the pitfalls in. He seems still to accept the con­ventional image of Islam as being from the start Jama'l-Sunni and Shari'ah-minded, its tradition being essentially the tradition of the Hadith; only introducing the new point that Ash'ari kalam was long not accepted among most of the hadith-minded 'ulama'-at least in Syria and Egypt (he does not go much further afield) well into the Later Middle Period. His larger misconception is reflected in, and perhaps was reinforced by, his use of the term 'Tradition' for a hadith report. The inconveniences of such a notion of 'traditionalism' are analyzed in the section on usage in Islamics studies in the Introduc­tion in volume I.

[p 176] comprehensive clarity such doctrines as atomic creation as conceived by the school. Perhaps his popularity resulted in part from his bold application of reasoning to the revelatory events as unique events. The Ash'aris were developing a close analysis of just what sorts of reports of such events could be relied on: how widespread a report must be, for instance, for it to be accepted without a detailed authentication of each of the alleged witnesses. The revelatory quality of the events themselves, once properly evidenced, also needed study. Al-Bagillani is especially associated with the doctrine of evidentiary miracles, which he saw as a practical indication of prophethood even though they had no metaphysical standing.

In particular, he stressed the special importance of the inimitable Qur'an­whose literary style, Muslims believed, was such that no one else could produce a work that could properly compare with it-as the chief evidentiary miracle of Muhammad. As a revelatory fact it had the unique status not only of being the undeniable residuum of what had happened in the Hijaz, but of being perpetually accessible. By way of a detailed analysis of its style, he tried to show what it is makes the Qur'an humanly compelling as a concrete phenomenon.

But al-Baqillani s work was oriented to polemic within the tradition of kalam, without serious care to challenge minds outside the tradition. It some­times seems naive: he seems even to have insisted, countering the Ash'aris' opponents' intolerance with its equivalent, that he who believed for no good reason was no sound believer; that therefore those who did not accept (Ash'ari) kalam were not even true Muslims. This point some Ash'aris tried to show by arguing that just as correct proofs of a thesis showed that the thesis itself was correct, so false proofs of a thesis entailed the falseness of the thesis itself; hence the correct proofs of orthodox positions, which the Ash'aris thought they had found, were as important to admit as the original positions. This specious argument seems to have been set aside by the time of Imam-al-Haramayn Juvayni (1028-io85), who used subtler methods than his earlier predecessors. His purpose was still polemic within the tradition, and he continued to present the atomistic doctrine and all that was associated with it; but he did so in a more rationalistically philosophic spirit. There is nothing naive about his work. Inevitably, it dominated the Ash'ari school of his time. Yet possibly it fulfilled its task less appropriately than did the work of some earlier kalam scholars.

Juvayni inherited the religious questions he occupied himself with and even the basic viewpoints that he publicly represented. His father, originally from Juvayn, had become head of the Shafi'i legal madhhab in Nishapur in Khurasan; when he died, the son succeeded him in his teaching post at the madrasah, though he was only eighteen at the time clearly, his unusual gifts were already apparent. He had also studied with an Ash'ari teacher. A recognized scholar from the beginning, Juvayni did his chief work in clarifying the basic principles of his two traditions-Shafi'i fiqh (which he [p 177] defended against other madhhabs) and Ash'ari kalam. But at least in kalam, his outstanding gifts allowed him to carry forward the inherited tasks to what could seem a point of completion.

At the same time, he witnessed the last major effort of the Hadith folk to suppress kalam disputation altogether. The Seljukid Toghril-beg's vizier, al-Kunduri, ordered that all Mu'tazili teaching (in which he included other kalam as well) cease, and Juvayni had to leave home; but in Mecca and Medina, where he took refuge, he gained such a name-though still in his twenties-that his followers subsequently called him 'imam of the two holy cities', Imam-al-Haramayn. When Nizamulmulk came to power as Alp­Arslan's vizier, however, Juvayni and the other scholars of kalam were without difficulty restored to favour; only in a few places, notably Baghdad, did Hadithi resistance against them remain effective.

In Juvayni s work in kalam, two traits stand out. If one contrasts Juvay­nt s work with earlier work-with the writings ascribed to al-Ash'arI himself, for instance, or even with later pieces-one is struck with the degree of sophisticated detail to which the disputation on every controverted point had been refined. But this refinement and precision express, in turn, a second trait: an awareness of the intellectual standards in logic and metaphysics maintained by the Faylasufs. Though he was not arguing expressly with them, yet their categories were everywhere present.

Juvayni recognized, for instance, that the old Ash'ari attempt to maintain God's omnipotence was less than satisfactory by rationalistic standards. It could be objected to their doctrine of kasb (that humans morally 'acquired' their good and bad works even though God was the sole cause of them), that it was unintelligible; and once it was no longer acceptable just to state what­ever could be deduced from revealing facts, whether it could be seen to fit into a harmonious system or not, then that a point was unintelligible meant that it could not be regarded as proven. This Juvayni acknowledged. His solution was to try to define what he could call a middle position between sheer determinacy and indeterminate free will, in which the words answered to the demands of the ?adithi insistence that only God could really make or do anything, while the conditions appended to them virtually satisfied the Mu'tazili insistence that people could not be responsible for what they could not choose to avoid.

Often what seems to be happening in his work (as his doctrine of kasb) is a return in substance to the early, more common-sense positions of kalam, those of the Mu'tazilis before the rise of ?adithi piety forced a modification. For instance, in asserting the divine attributes (such as God's eternity), Juvayni insisted that God does have them (as the ?adithis said)-they are not merely modes of his being, as for the Mu'tazilis; yet they are not based on anything added to his being: which comes to the same. (He acknowledged rather apologetically that he had deviated here from earlier Ash'aris.) And Juvayni even allowed for metaphorical understanding of some attributes, [p 178] when linguistic usage could be found in support, though far' ass readily than did the Mu'tazilis. [see note:] 12

But actually Juvayni had added something to the Mu'tazilis' stance. If one compares Juvayni s doctrine with Ibn-Sina's on the same point, one finds a rather similar concern with finding formulations that will define an effectively worshipable God without sacrificing what seemed necessary-for a rationalist-to define His transcendence. One can suppose a sequence of intellectual needs: that for the earlier Mu'tazills, still consciously carriers of the Qur'anic mission to a conquered world, the God of worship needed no closer definition, and what was called for was simply a defence of the essen­tials of Islamic monotheism; and then for the Hadith folk, for whom certain traits of that monotheism were more nuanced, God's transcendence was sufficiently guaranteed by insisting on His incomprehensibility; whereas for the more rationalistically inclined, once the issues had been well posed, the transcendence which a monotheistic sense of the numinous called for had to be reconciled with the ultimate rational harmonies a rationalist tried to see in the cosmos. In such a task, the Faylasufs inevitably posed the most sophisticated standards then available. Juvayni's concern with them is illustrated by his interest in the three-term Aristotelian logical syllogism, though in practice he usually used the more convenient two-term form of argument that had been customary in kalam, in which some of the logic was left implicit." He established the subsequent form of an Ash'ari treatise by introducing serious prolegomena on the nature of abstract reasoning.

I have the impression that in the very moment of its triumph, in the act of perfecting its own tradition, the Ash‘ari kalam was near losing sight of its very purpose: the rational defence of a non-rationalistic kerygmatic position, in which key individual events are held to have revealed more about what life and its commitments mean than can any universal uniformities of nature. Juvayni could no longer understand, for instance, why the doctrine of 'commanding the right and forbidding the wrong' should ever have been given the special treatment the Mu'tazilis and earlier Ash'aris had given it as a primary doctrine alongside the unity of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. For them, it had dealt with the historical commitment of the

[note: ] 12 The new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam omits mention of a modest and not very perceptive, but useful, opuscule on Juvayni, Helmut Klopper, Das Dogma des Iman al-?aramain al-Djuwaini and sein Werk al-'Aqidat an-Ni?amiya (Wiesbaden, 1958), including a translation of the latter.

[note: ] 13 He rarely used the syllogism form itself; it was left to Ghazali to take advantage of its logical efficiency (see W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual: The Struggle and Achievement of al-Ghazali [Edinburgh University Press, 1963]). Ibn-Khaldun con­trasted the kalam of the earlier period as the 'old way' to the kalam of the flowering of the Earlier Middle Period as the 'new way' (for he disliked seeing Falsafah diluted with kalam, and preferred the kalam left relatively naive if there must be kalam at all) and he has been followed by modern scholars. For an analysis of what is involved, so far as we know it (for the work of the older kalam is largely lost), see Louis Gardet and M.-M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane (Paris, 1948), pp. 72-76.

[p 179] faithful; but for Juvayni, typically of his time, it seemed to deserve no more than a minor place among the other rules of fiqh, covering the ways one Muslim should admonish another on an everyday basis. A viewpoint was beginning to be adopted-and not only by Juvayni-that could receive its fullest and freest expression only in Falsafah or its equivalent. To be sure, the revelatory value of events that can only be 'heard about', not reasoned out from recurrent experience, was still given exclusive credit. But even the proofs offered for prophethood were touched with a rationalistic spirit.

We may say that from the time of the Hadith folk on, with their cautious view of Muslim political responsibilities, the kerygmatic force of Shari'ah­minded piety had been being reduced in favour of a greater degree of ritualistic 'paradigm-tracing' piety: that is, Muslims were more inclined to articulate the patterns of proper Shar'i life into an enduring, almost natural cosmos, in which the Qur'Anic message was an eternal datum almost as much as it was a chal­lenging event. Such a mood could call for a timelessly rationalistic outlook. But there may have been also a more directly intellectual reason for the shift.

Without a more general doctrine of history as such-that is, without a general form for reasoning effectively about events as morally committing rather than as merely exemplifying natural possibilities-any more satisfac­tory method of reasoning expressly appropriate to the problems of prophet­hood was presumably out of the question. If such methods can ever be found, one may speculate that they could not have been expected in an agrarianate­level society anyway. There, the strong kerygmatic tone of Islamic thinking, in which certain historical events were explicitly vested with ultimate values, had issued in communalism, in which the Shari'ah was reinforced by way of exclusive group loyalties-so that the Qur'anic event became intellectually more isolated even than in the Qur'an itself, where it appeared as one in a long chain of revelatory events. No general doctrine of meaningful historical events could arise in such a context. That is, there could be no pattern of rational analysis to rival the refined Philosophic doctrine of nature. Hence the more the kalam was rationally elaborated, the more it came into com­petition with Falsafah, and the more it could seem threatened with futility in such a competition. Henceforth in all the great figures in kalam disputation one can see clearly what was only implicit in Juvayni: to the extent that they took kalam seriously at all, it was in the form of modifying the conclusions of Falsafah so as to bring its analyses into accord with Islamic community loyalties. 14

[note: ] 14 For those who cast the history of Islamicate civilization into the form 'what went wrong with Islam?', there have been two answers on the level of intellectual history: that Muslims failed to give full effect to the Greek heritage, or that they allowed the Greek heritage to inhibit unduly their own more concrete and historically-minded (kerygmatic) heritage. I am not, here, siding with those few who take the second view, of course; I am not clear that anything more did go wrong with Islam than with any other tradition. I am only trying to state one problem that arose. As we shall see, the resolution of this crisis represented by Ghazali, though it produced its own problems as all resolutions do, cannot be regarded as marking an intellectual failure of Islamicate civilization.

Source: The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Volume 2: The Expansion of lslam in the Middle Periods. Marshall G. S. Hodgson. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago 1974. pp.175-179.

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