We need to ask: what is Islamic about Islamic theology? Most evidently, it is Islamic to the extent that it may be traced back in some way to the Prophet Muhammad and his distinctive vision of the One God. According to his scripture, he was sent ''as a mercy to the worlds'' (Qur'an 21:107), and one aspect of that mercy, as Muhammad Abdel Haleem suggests in chapter 1, was that he mapped out a religious path of great simplicity. This was to be the simplicity of an Abrahamic and ''primordial'' monotheism (milla ibrahimiyya hanifiyya), marked by an iconoclastic rejection of idolatry, a call to repentance, and an unshake-able trust in the justice and mercy of God. Emerging, as Muslims believed, to restore unity and a holy simplicity to a confessional world complicated by Christian disputes over the Trinity and the Incar-nation,10 the qur'anic intervention seemed to its hearers to promise a new age for the human relationship with God, one so straightforward that in the eyes of a small but persistent margin, there would be no need for a ''theology'' (kalam) at all. Voices are therefore raised against the kalam enterprise through the Islamic centuries;the angry Censure of Speculative Theology by Ibn Qudama (d. 1223) assumes that scripture alone suffices; al-Harawi (d. 1089) agrees, suggesting that kalam is an unreliable substitute for the true gift of mystical illumination. Both men had their passionate supporters.11

Monotheism, however, is never as simple as most of its advocates would wish. Its inbuilt paradoxes, which had already exercised and divided Jews and Christians, ensured that most Muslim thinkers came to recognise the need for a formal discipline of argument and proof which could establish the proper sense of a scripture which turned out to be open to many different interpretations. The trigger, in almost every case, was the need to defeat the whims (ahwa') of heretics and innovators. Khalid Blankinship's chapter provides a survey and assessment of the first such debates. God was indeed One, and Muhammad was His final Prophet: this much was never contested. But were God's names, so abundant in the Qur'an, in existence before the world? If so, was it right to say that they were identical with His essence, or were they in some way distinct? Did the Qur'an pre-date its bearer? Why did God insist on human accountability, when He, as Omnipotent and All-Knowing Creator, is surely not ignorant of what human beings will do? Are good and evil intrinsic, or are they utterly subject to the divine volition? Is faith enough for salvation? In what sense will the Prophet intercede for sinners? What did he envision when he said that God would be seen by the blessed in Paradise?

Many disturbing questions of this kind in turn seemed to be generated by a tension implicit in the Qur'an itself. Some verses spoke of a God who seemed utterly transcendent, so that ''nothing is like him'' (Qur'an 42:11). Such a deity ''is not asked about what he does'' (21:23), and appears to expect only the unquestioning submission (islam) which seemed implicit in the very name of the new religion. But there were many other passages which implied a God who is indeed, in some sense that urgently needed definition, analogous to ourselves: a God who is ethically coherent, and whose qualities are immanent in his creation, so that ''Where-sover you turn, there is God's face'' (2:115). This fundamental tension between transcendence and immanence, or, as Muslims put it, between ''affirming difference'' (tanzih) and ''affirming resemblance'' (tashbih), became intrinsic to the structuring of knowledge in the new civilisation. As one aspect of this it could be said, at the risk of very crude generalisation, that the Qur'an's theology of transcendence was explored by the kalam folk, and its theology of immanence by the Sufis, which is why, perhaps, we should seek for Islam's greatest theologians among those who emphasised the symbiosis of the two disciplines. It may be thus, rather than for any unique originality, that Ghazali came to be called the ''proof of Islam'', and Ibn 'Arabi the ''greatest shaykh''. Their apparent eclecticism was in fact a programmatic attempt to retrieve an original unity, which is why scripture is so central to their respective manifestos.

t:e construction of orthodoxy







Was this article helpful?

+3 -1


  • Risto Mukka
    What are the characteristics of islamic philosophy?
    8 years ago
  • JANA
    What are the characteristics of muslim philosophers?
    12 months ago
  • Anthony
    What are the characteristic of Islamic philosophy?
    6 months ago

Post a comment