THEOLOGY (KALAM)

Distinguished by philosophy (falsafa) in its main intentions, although contaminated by Greek thought (which it sought to oppose) was the science of kalam (a term that in its primary meaning means 'word', 'discourse'). The kalam is the science of God's word or discourse, and in essence for kalam it is to be understood defensive apology or, more generally, a sort of speculative and dialectical theology.
The historian, philosopher and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (m.1406) in his famous Muqaddima ('Introduction [to universal history]') defines it as the "science which, by using rational evidence, defends articles of faith and refutes any deviant beliefs with respect to doctrine professed by the ancients and followers of the Sunna. "The science of kalam, which can be called the scholasticism of Islam, is therefore based on the absolute priority attributed to divine revelation with respect to merely human reason, and therefore firmly rooted in Scripture. and on tradition in order to safeguard and consolidate it. It "has the character of a pure dialectic, which operates on theological concepts."
Theology began among the Muslims as the result of an attempt to defend the principles of their faith against attacks by followers of other religions, and especially by Christians, who were armed with the instruments of Greek logic. At first it was dominated by the mutazilites. Gradually, following an initial period of intense debate on issues such as determinism and free will, the nature of divine attributes, etc., a theological tradition was consolidated which, after the fourth / tenth century, fell under the dominion of the Asharites. The school of scholastic theology - Kalām, as it became known in Islamic history - did not deal, as the schools of philosophy, with every question that presented itself to the human mind, but limited itself above all to specifically religious subjects. It did not try, however, to follow the teachings of any particular Greek school, so that theologians could expound some quite original theses. They used the logic developed by Aristotle and his school, but for different ends; their "philosophy of Nature" - their speculations concerning the nature of light and heat, the significance of causality and the "explanation" of natural events - is quite distinct from the peripatetic visions.

mu`tazila

The first organized school of the kalam was that mutazilita, founded, or at least inspired by Wasil ibn 'Ata (m.748 or 749).
The Mutazilites (from itazala, or 'separate') are considered the first theological school of Islam formed in the first half of the eighth century in Basra (although it will be Baghdad, under different kingdoms, the center of their school), although in reality it is considered to be more an intellectual movement in which thinkers and theologians of various backgrounds converged, all converging towards the sharing of five fundamental theses:
1) the uniqueness of God, in which everything would be radically and only one;
2) the guilty Muslim is neither unbeliever nor believer, but possesses a peculiar intermediate status;
3) the moral imperative of 'ordering good and banning evil';
4) God is necessarily right (he can not therefore do evil), so creation is the best possible;
5) God fulfills his promises of reward and punishment (from which descends the corollary of the human act that is to be considered free, so that the origin of the evil are the men themselves).
First of all, the Divine Uniqueness, which is the fundamental principle of Islam: the Mutazilites give a divine conception of the divine Being and its uniqueness, limited ontologically to the plane of unconditional being. Conception, this, which leads to the substantial denial of divine attributes. Some scholars have seen the influence of various factors on such elaboration, for example the comparison with non-Muslim groups established within the Islamic world (Mazdei in Iraq, Christians and Jews in Syria), in addition to the fight against the dualism of some sects shutters.
Regarding the second thesis, the Mutazilites define the 'sin' (which can be 'mild' or 'serious') in relation to faith and infidelity, placing the sinner, both from the theological and juridical point of view, in an intermediate position , distinguished both by the pious Muslim and the non-Muslim.
The thesis then of the moral imperative of 'to order the good and to forbid the evil' regards the life of community, that is to say, the implementation of the principles of justice and freedom in society. For the Mutazilites justice does not consist solely in avoiding evil and injustice individually; it is also an action of the whole community in order to create an atmosphere of equality and social harmony, thanks to which every individual can realize his possibilities. So freedom and human responsibility extend to the whole community.
This vision of man's freedom and responsibility (for better or for worse) is closely linked to the thesis of divine justice. Better, from our divine justice derive our freedom and our responsibility, since the reward or chastisement otherworldly would have no sense. God is just, therefore, and judges man, who is free, according to his actions. Hence the last thesis, namely that God will reward and punish according to justice, as he has promised.
The mutazilites therefore sought to make Islam not only a religion founded on the law, but also a religion with a philosophical and theological depth that could rationally defend its theses through an apologetic dialogue-confrontation with the representatives of other religions: 'islâm in rejecting the opponent's thesis on the ground of his own rational arguments. From here grew the desire for the study of the works of the Greeks, which led to the translations that were made under the caliph al-Mamûn (d. 218 H./833), with the precise aim of learning and taking the dialectical method to be used during philosophical and theological controversies. According to the scholar R. Caspar, more than paladins of liberal thought within the Islam, the mu'tazilites became the champions of Islamic reform: knights of faith as true knights of reason, driven by the curiosity of knowledge, they launched in experimental research and in the study of metaphysics.
Many theses of mutazilism were then taken up and made by Shiism.

Asharism

In response to the mutazilite movement there arose asharism, from the name of its founder al-Ashari (874-935), first mutazilita but later en route with his stepfather and master al-Gubbai (890-933). He feels to criticize the Mutazilites both for the absolute value that they sometimes seem to attribute to reason, risking to replace it by faith, thus suppressing religion, and because faith in what is beyond rational demonstration is an essential principle of religious life. on which the Koran itself insists. It is therefore for al-Ashari to reconcile two extremes, an attempt that in a broader sense meant trying to reconcile the various Sunni schools.
While for the Mutazilites God is devoid of any positive attribute, and the literalists came to represent the almost anthropomorphic divinity, the solution of al-Ashari (who distinguished the attribute as a concept and found that the duality between essence and attribute itself must be placed on the qualitative plan) foresaw that the divine Being really possesses the Attributes and Names that are mentioned in the Qur'an, which have a positive reality distinct from the essence even if they have no existence or reality outside the same.
Regarding the question of the created or uncreated Koran, while the Mutazilites opt for the first solution (as the contrary could affect the absolute Oneness of God, speech similar to that concerning the Attributes), and the literalists for the second, al-Ashari still once he chooses the middle way: the Koran understood as 'the soul's speech', independent of the verbal manifestation, is uncreated (meaning to indicate the divine attribute of the kalam subsisting eternally in God), but understood as composed of written words becomes a fact created time (contrary to what is claimed by the literalists).
Also with regard to the freedom of the man al-Ashari he chooses the intermediate way between the literal fatalists and the Mutazilites, who instead tend to introduce a kind of dualism with respect to the divine activity, since man is not only free and responsible, but would possess also the creative power, that is the faculty of creating one's own works. Al-Ashari leaves man the freedom that makes him responsible for his actions, but attributes to him only the acquisition of his works, not their creation (which is to be attributed to God).
Asharism, formed in the mid-tenth century by the direct disciples of al-Ashari, thus ultimately became the majority Sunni theological school, and can be considered a voluntarist reaction to mutazilite rationalism, as it claims the primacy of divine omnipotence and in particular of the free, pure, unlimited and indeterminate Will of God. Asharita thought can be considered the point of arrival of the science of kalam, a thought which, while on the one hand aimed at defending the fundamental harmony between revelation and reason, from another tended to put the former above everything, even at the cost of contradicting the latter in some cases.
The Mutazilites to explain the creation and the relationships between God and the world, resorted to the idea of ​​universal causality, in which the Asharites see a kind of determinism incompatible with the absolute freedom of God. Wisdom, power and will divine are absolutely above any condition and determination. In order to explain the creation of the world and its relationship with God, they resort to the theory of the indivisibility ad infinitum of matter, that is to atomism, a theory certainly already present in Greek thinkers and also Indians, but reworked by the Asharites in order to safeguard the omnipotence and creation of God as understood by them. From the indivisibility ad infinitum of matter comes the recourse to a continuous creation, to a condition for which matter and accident are created instant by instant by God. The interest in atoms and accidents was therefore motivated mainly by the desire to to claim the absolute power of God and to explain with his direct intervention the coming into being of things and their persistence in being from one moment to another.
The school developed and expanded becoming a spokesman, until today, of Sunnism.