What Were They Condemning?

Then there is ʿilm al-kalām. There are a lot of slogans out there, and a lot of debate out there: ʿilm al-kalām is haram. So some people may want to call a study such as this one a discussion of ʿilm al-kalām, and thus condemnable. Kalām needs to be clarified.

At one point in history, during the time of the Muʿtazilah and beyond that as well, there was a lot of serious debate going on in ʿilm al-kalām: hair-splitting issues, beyond the basics and fundamentals, going into the deeper issues. For example, Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī, in his commentary on Abū Ḥanīfah's al-Fiqh al-Akbar, which runs to about 350 pages, spends about forty-something pages just on the issue of kalām. Because it was debated so much, and so intricately on small issues, these became mere debates. Anyone who reads some of these debates finds them just so complex, and they seem so useless: a passing of time; an intellectual exercise, basically, just to prove one person over the other, in some cases.

That is why Abū Yūsuf, Imam al-Shāfiʿī and all the great scholars are found condemning ʿilm al-kalām. What were they condemning? They were condemning these hair-splitting debates that were going on, not the study of what is required of us to believe. That is not what was condemned. What was condemned was the extreme debates that were taking place. That needs to be clarified.

Al-Ghazālī speaks about ʿilm al-kalām, and says there is good in it and there is bad in it. He speaks about that, as do Imam al-Ḥaramayn and all of these other scholars. That could be called polemical theology: polemics, dealing with mere argumentation and disputing. That is what was problematic. But pure theology is where things need to be discussed based on the challenges of the time, as to what is required of us to believe. When somebody creates a confusion in the Ummah, one has to be able to make things easier to understand. An example of this would be evolution: it is a fairly recent concept that was thrown into the masses. People are confused, so there is now a need to respond to that. That kind of kalām is fine, because what is being done is taking the Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah, their ideas, and simply answering these problems based on those circumstances and the needs of the time.