The beginnings of the science of kalam, which translates as ‘‘speech’’ and which thus may correspond to logos with all the allusions that word carries, are still partly under a shroud (For studies see van Ess 1991-1995; Frank 2005-2008.) Doubtless the growing intellectual needs of the rapidly expanding Muslim community explain much: the explication of the fundamentals of religion (usul al-dln) without recourse either to the ‘Uthmanic codex, the contested Prophetic traditions (hadlth), or the divergent paths of Islamic law will have been desirable both in the face of increasing doctrinal controversy and in terms of interfaith dialogue and polemic. Kalam provided a tool for explicating the Muslim worldview in more refined terms than mere Scriptural exegesis would allow: it provided the basis for an Islamic metaphysics, which in turn served as the foundation for speculation in domains such as natural philosophy and ethics.
It is difficult to imagine this happening without some influence from the overall Levantine intellectual milieu which the Muslims came to inhabit. Still, attempts to trace the origins of this or that kalam doctrine or approach to some specific ancient philosophical school (or indeed Christian theology) have all floundered, to the point that in this stage of the research it seems safer to assume that Islamic theology developed largely along independent lines. It is, for instance, highly doubtful that the atomism developed by the Mu'tazilite theologians, and later the other schools, would have had much to do with either Epicurus or Empedocles, seeing as how no primary sources in translation have been identified and the influence of second-hand reports must be considered negligible; and at any rate the atomism of the mutakallimUn was very much its own creature. The same goes for the theologians’ metaphysics, which appropriated the vocabulary of substance and accident (jawhar, ‘arad), but interpreted these terms in a way so far removed from the Greek mainstream that it cannot have arisen out of a corruption or a misunderstanding of Aristotelian ontology (contrary to what some Muslim Peripatetics, and later historians of philosophy, may have liked to think). A third example comes from the supposed influence of the Stoic school, which once was a favorite source of speculation among historians, but has now been widely discredited as a hypothesis, for simple lack of evidence (see Gutas 1994). With Richard Frank, it seems better to affirm the possibility of kalam theology being philosophical in approach and method without thereby having to reduce it to Greek philosophy, either by way of influence or through an unflattering comparison.
At least in two areas the influence of the late antique school tradition on early Muslim speculation is nonetheless plain to see. In the first place, the method for theological disputation itself appears to have been an adaptation of Aristotelian dialectic, more or less consciously taken up in early encounters with Christian theologians long since accustomed to its application in theological disputes (see Rissanen 1993). In the second, certain cosmological problems and puzzles, having to do with how the world relates to its transcendent cause, were taken over from late antique debates. Going back to pre-Plotinian Platonism, philosophers and theologians (Jew and Christian) had argued over whether the world was eternal, created out of nothing, or formed out of a preexistent matter: Muslims discussed these problems not only with great vigor, but with obvious recourse to ancient materials. Notably, the Muslim theologians drew on the works of John Philoponus (d. 574) when developing their proofs for the world necessarily having a limited past, a move that would later set them in opposition to the Arabic Aristotelians. These two early examples of an early, ‘‘native,’’ and theological use of Aristotle are reflected in the fact that the two Aristotelian treatises first picked up for translation into the Arabic were the Topics and the Physics (We also have a report of a late-eighth-century refutation of Aristotelian theology. Given that this predates the translation both of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and of the so-called Theology of Aristotle, the refutation is likely to have had the Physics proof for a Prime Mover as its target).
World History
