Kalam

—Kalamist, n.

/keuh lahm"/, n. Islam.

1. (sometimes l.c.) a school of philosophical theology originating in the 9th century A.D., asserting the existence of God as a prime mover and the freedom of the will.

2. the word of Allah.

[ < Ar kalam lit., talk]

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Islamic speculative theology.

It arose during the Umayyad dynasty over varying interpretations of the Qurān and over questions the Qurʾān provoked, including those on predestination, free will, and the nature of God. The most prominent early school was the 8th-century Mutazilah, which asserted the supremacy of reason, championed free will, and rejected an anthropomorphic characterization of God. The 10th-century school of Ashariyyah moved kalām back toward traditional faith, accepting, for example, the eternal, uncreated nature of the Qurʾān and its literal truth. The school also represented the successful adaptation of Hellenistic philosophical reasoning to Muslim orthodox theology.

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▪ Islam

      in Islām, speculative theology. The term is derived from the phrase kalām Allāh (Arabic: “word of God”), which refers to the Qurʾān, the sacred scripture of Islām. Those who practice kalām are known as mutakallimūn.

      In its early stage, kalām was merely a defense of Islām against Christians, Manichaeans, and believers in other religions. As interest in philosophy grew among Muslim thinkers, kalām adopted the dialectic (methodology) of the Greek skeptics and the stoics and directed these against the Islāmic philosophers who attempted to fit Aristotle and Plato into a Muslim context.

      Several schools of kalām developed. The most significant was the Muʿtazilah, often described as the rationalists of Islām, who appeared in the 8th century. They believed in the autonomy of reason with regard to revelation and in the supremacy of reasoned (ʿaqlī) faith against traditional (naqlī) faith. The Muʿtazilah championed the freedom of the human will, holding that it was against divine justice either to punish a good man or pardon an unrighteous one. The Ashʿarīyah, a 10th-century school of kalām, was a mediation between the rationalization of the Muʿtazilah and the anthropomorphism of the traditionalists and represented the successful adaptation of Hellenistic philosophical reasoning to Muslim orthodox theology. They too affirmed the freedom of the human will but denied its efficacy. Closely resembling but more liberal than the Ashʿarīyah was the al-Māturīdīyah (also 10th-century).

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