Kalam | June 23, 2004

There are two tendencies which were particularly significant in laying the foundation of Kalam: the Qadariyya, “free-willers,” who held that man as well as God possesses qadar, the “capacity to act”; and the jabriyya, “predestinarians,” who insisted that God controls everything through his jabr, “compulsion.” Both these ways of thinking were indigenous to Islam. Other theological and philosophical models, while not without influence, were never determinative in the development of Kalam. Legend has it that the greatest school of early Kalam grew out of this dispute. This was the Mu’tazilla, those who “stand aloof” in a neutral position. They became the dominant school of Kalam in the Abbasid court of al-Ma’mun (AD 813-33) and for some time after. Calling themselves “the people of {the Divine} Justice and Unity,” they embraced reason as well as revelation, emphasized human free will for the sake of divine justice, insisted that the Qur’an was created in time (otherwise it would compromise God’s unity), and utterly rejected literal anthropomorphic characterizations of God.